Bolivar: American Liberator (24 page)

After an exultant arrival in Trujillo, Bolívar sat down to think through a strategy he had had in mind for some time. In Mérida, he had complained about the enemy’s disdain for rules of war, railing vociferously against their summary execution of eight republican prisoners of war, including Briceño.
“We’ve run out of goodness,” he had announced, vowing to avenge those murders. “Now that the enemy has forced us to a deadly war, we will eradicate them from America, and this land will finally be purged of the monsters that infest it. Our hatred will be implacable, and our war will be to the death.” It had been just another bit of battlefield rhetoric, a timely flourish, but now, on the occasion of his victory in Trujillo, he considered writing it into law.
All night he pondered it, and by dawn, he had made a decision: Miranda’s revolution and the first republic had failed because of a sloppy tolerance—a lack of mettle. He would not let it happen again. Before daybreak on the 15th, he called a council of war to announce his new edict. In it, all Spaniards in Venezuela would be targets in a war of extermination, unless they renounced King Ferdinand and fought on the American side. Americans who had once fought for the royals, on the other hand, would face no punishment. The language was brutally clear:

S
PANIARDS AND
C
ANARY
I
SLANDERS:

C
OUNT ON DEATH, EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN INDIFFERENT
.

A
MERICANS
: C
OUNT ON LIFE, EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN GUILTY
.

Not one member on his war council opposed the decree. Indeed, they all roundly approved it. Persuaded that he had found a way to unite mavericks like Briceño and harness their rage, Bolívar signed the document that very day. For all the clarity he thought it would give the war, the ultimate consequence of the decree was a storm of violence.

History has not been kind to Bolívar’s decision to proclaim war to the death. Some historians have called it
an outright abomination. Others have said it was a rash act, impetuous in the extreme, and unnecessary. United States politicians would later use it to decry the bloody, Jacobin nature of Bolívar’s revolution, and the inherent barbarity of the Spanish American people. Still others have rushed to Bolívar’s defense, claiming that his was the logical response to three hundred years of inhuman oppression and
the deadly Royal Order against the patriots that Spain had just decreed. Perhaps more persuasive is the argument that Bolívar’s edict tried to make clear that what was being fought was not a civil struggle but an uncompromising war against an outside invader; with it, the ejection of Spain became a manifest goal and Americans—regardless of race or ideology—were the heroes.
“Either Americans allow themselves to be exterminated gradually,” Bolívar argued, “or they undertake to destroy an evil race that, while it breathes, works tirelessly toward our annihilation.”

The response was immediate. After Bolívar’s proclamation,
hundreds of royalist troops defected to the republican side; wherever the liberating army marched, it found soldiers willing to join it. Under the slack leadership of Miranda, as Bolívar knew very well, republican troops had deserted in droves, betting on the likelihood that
if they defected and fought for Spain, they would be spared Spanish cruelties, and, if they were captured by lax, softhearted patriots, they would likely be pardoned. Now there was no doubt about it: Bolívar’s patriots were forgiving no one. It may have been a horrifying declaration, but, for the short run, it worked: it worried the royalists and fortified the republican will. In the long run, however—as history would show all too vividly—it engulfed Venezuela in a sea of blood.

WITH HIS VICTORIES IN MÉRIDA
and Trujillo, Bolívar’s campaign was technically over. His bosses in New Granada had given him explicit
orders to stop; he was not to proceed to Caracas. But when Bolívar learned that his fellow republican in the east Santiago Mariño was marching toward the capital with a force of five thousand, he could not restrain his impulse to best him. In a letter to Camilo Torres, he wrote with extraordinary frankness,
“I worry that our illustrious brothers-in-arms will liberate our capital before we can share the glory. But we will fly, and I hope no liberator will tread the ruins of Caracas before me.”

By the end of June, Bolívar and his army were on the march again, headed over a perilous mountain route toward the plains of Barinas. When Monteverde heard of it, he went south to meet them. Although the Spanish were greater in numbers and better disciplined, the republicans proved more nimble. Colonel Ribas won a decisive victory against a Spanish division on the outskirts of Niquitao, descending from glacial peaks to engage them in hand-to-hand combat. He
took more than four hundred prisoners and succeeded in drafting them all to the republican cause. Only eighty miles south, Bolívar rode across the dusty plains of Barinas in a sweltering heat. He made
a rapid, preemptive strike on the city of Barinas and took it on July 6, forcing the Spanish into a frenzied northern retreat. Without delay, he chased after them and, as he went, joined forces with Ribas and Girardot. The speed and audacity of republican movements confounded the enemy completely. In skirmish after skirmish, the patriots emerged victorious, so that in the course of a hundred miles, they were able to scatter two divisions and send the Spaniards flying for their lives. Within ten days, they had destroyed, imprisoned, or disbanded five thousand enemy troops.

Bolívar celebrated his thirtieth birthday in Araure, stopping briefly to raise a celebratory glass before he set out to face Monteverde. Even as he prepared to go, he learned that a fearless
fourteen-year-old soldier, Gabriel Picón, had flung himself on a Spanish cannon and was in the battle hospital, fatally wounded. In a gesture Bolívar would repeat countless times as such sacrifices mounted, he paused to write to the boy’s father.
“The glorious hero who spilled his blood on the battlefield today is not dead, nor is it feared he will die; but if he has ceased to exist, he will live forever in the hearts of fellow patriots.” Tucked into that letter was a short poem—the only verse Bolívar is known to have written.
Its closing line:
“Pause now your weeping to remember/Your love of country is the primary thing.”

Joined now by Urdaneta and Girardot, Bolívar’s improvised legion of fifteen hundred finally met Monteverde in the grasslands outside Valencia. In every move,
Monteverde had found himself doing too little too late, and this encounter would be no exception. Twelve hundred of his men lined up to defend the road to Valencia but, although they were superbly trained, they were too few—rapidly outnumbered and easily outflanked. Bolívar’s infantry leapt onto his cavalry’s horses and—
two or more men to an animal—charged deep into enemy lines. Once inside, they sprang from the horses and attacked the regiment from within. The tactic worked. It was a long and bloody battle, but the lunge at the enemy heart inflicted punishing losses. When Bolívar’s triumphant army finally entered Valencia, Monteverde had already fled, cutting a desperate path to the fortress at Puerto Cabello.

Caracas was next to fall. Four days later, the Marquis de Casa Léon—who had gone from serving Miranda to serving Monteverde when winds of war required it—now met with Bolívar to finalize the Spanish surrender. With him was Bolívar’s old family friend Francisco Iturbe, the man who had negotiated Bolívar’s safe passage only a year before. The ironies were rich. The marquis had harbored the once fugitive Bolívar in his house; Iturbe had saved his life. For all the blood that had been shed between republicans and royalists, certain family friendships still held. The meeting was cordial. And so, in the very halls where Miranda had submitted to the royalists, the royalists now submitted to Bolívar.

In return for the peaceful surrender of Caracas, Bolívar
offered the Spaniards amnesty, repealing the harsh words of the past. He assured them their safety; granted passports to those who requested them, including soldiers; and gave them permission to emigrate with their families and possessions, even their sidearms. His motive in this, he relayed in a letter to the municipality of Caracas, was
“to show the world that even in victory the noble Americans reject rancor and offer mercy.” To President Camilo Torres in New Granada he wrote,
“Here, your Excellency, is the fulfillment of my promise to liberate my country. We undertook no battle we could not win.”

But in Caracas, there was no one to receive Casa León and Iturbe when they returned with Bolívar’s promises in hand. Monteverde, who had holed up in Puerto Cabello, had delegated all power to the governor Manuel del Fierro; and Fierro, in turn, in a breathtaking act of cowardice, had abandoned the city without so much as ratifying the treaty he had personally called for.
He rushed to La Guaira in a panic, as did a thundering
horde of six thousand royalists. Slipping out under cover of night, Fierro embarked secretly and
set sail for Curaçao. The scene at La Guaira as he departed was raucous, tumultuous: the Spanish so desperate to board ships that they
elbowed their way onto canoes only to be capsized in a rough black sea. Eventually fifty ships ferried them to safety. In Caracas, where an unforgiving heat choked the city, the royalists left behind had no recourse but to abandon their possessions,
cast off the clothes they had heaped on their backs, and try to make a swift passage overland to the fortress of Puerto Cabello.

Bolívar
entered Caracas on August 6, 1813. An assiduous student of Julius Caesar, he knew how a conqueror should make his appearance.
He arranged to be met at the gates of Caracas as Caesar’s chariot had been met in Rome—by radiant girls in the flower of adolescence, dressed in white, bearing laurels, and casting garlands. In Caesar’s case, the chariot had been drawn by white horses; in Bolívar’s, it was drawn by the daughters of the most prominent families of Caracas. A good number of the city’s thirty thousand residents were there, lining the roads in a noisy throng. The Admirable Campaign, as the past six months of war came to be called, was celebrated as heartily as a beleaguered population could manage.
There were rounds of artillery, a din of cathedral bells, Te Deums to liberty, and, at the end, the title of Dictator and Liberator was bestowed on the returning hero.

No one could doubt that Bolívar’s victories were astounding. He had started eight months before with fewer than five hundred men and bested Spain’s formidable war machine. In contrast, Napoleon, with a colossal army of 500,000, was limping out of Spain at about the same time, on his way to losing the war in Europe. As Bolívar rode in with his exuberant mustache and dazzling smile,
stepping off his cart to embrace residents of his native city, he was as loved as he ever would be.
Colorful silks hung from balconies, horns blared a joyful noise, roses rained
from windows, people clamored to get a glimpse of the great man and his liberating army: the roar of jubilation was heard for miles around. So glorious was the reception—so realized the dream—that Bolívar
could not restrain tears of joy. An observant witness might have seen the bright-eyed dog trotting at Bolívar’s side,
the faithful mastiff Nevado, who had been given to him during the campaign and would accompany him for eight more years. That bystander might have noticed, too, that one of the girls in white, a nubile nineteen-year-old with lustrous hair and black eyes, was in palpable thrall to the hero she was ferrying. Bolívar himself had noted the animation in her face.

She was Josefina “Pepita” Machado,
daughter of a prosperous bourgeois family in Caracas. She was not a Mantuana or a titled Spaniard—not endowed by birth to expect society’s favors. She was a young woman who had come of age in a time of bewildering upheaval, who very well may have understood that, in revolution, the world was fluid, easily altered, and that the illustrious warrior in the rig behind her might offer a rare chance. We cannot know who was more avid in the pursuit, but as fireworks illuminated the summer evening—
as dungeons emptied of rebel prisoners and Caracans celebrated into the night—Pepita became Bolívar’s lover. She would continue to have a hold on him for six more years.

History does not call her a beauty.
She had full lips, a hearty, infectious laugh, and an undeniably appealing figure; she could dance. But apart from her kittenish ways, she was ordinary of face. She was also obdurate, outspoken, feisty, and Bolívar’s officers would come to detest her. With her mother and sister in tow, she followed Bolívar everywhere, even onto the battlefield when it proved necessary.

There is scant evidence of Bolívar’s romantic life between his time in Paris and that August day when Caracas welcomed him as its savior, but the legend is rich and well known. He was an openly flirtatious bachelor—an enthusiastic if fickle suitor—and, in every city he liberated, there were lovely maidens to greet him and ambitious parents to spur them on. After all, not only was he a hero, he was a very rich man. We can be sure that, during those footloose years, Pepita Machado was not the only “nymph in white” to win his attentions. But in Pepita, he found a woman who was at once a revolutionary and a striver. Comfortable
in his ambit of war, she was also acutely aware of the social luster that her romance with the Liberator offered. Bolívar, on the other hand, was a soldier in the flush of victory, a prodigal returned home after many a hardship, and he plunged into the affair spiritedly. Eventually, Pepita gained his trust and even participated in matters of state, to her detractors’ dismay.
“The most important business,” one grumbled, “would end up in the hands of those who fawned over him, especially in the hands of Señorita Josefina, his infamous mistress, a conniving and vengeful woman if ever there was one. I’ve been in the company of that siren more than a hundred times and I have to confess I can’t imagine what he saw in her.”

CHAPTER
7