Bolivar: American Liberator (25 page)

All murderers shall be punished, unless of course they kill in large numbers, to the sound of trumpets.

—Voltaire

F
or all the happy distractions Pepita provided, there was a nation to found, order to wrest from chaos. It would not be easy. Fifteen hundred Spaniards had remained in the capital and, in the course of a full-scale evacuation, homes had been sacked, shops and warehouses looted. Bolívar secured the streets, promised a peaceful transition, installed former president Cristóbal Mendoza as governor, and invited foreigners to immigrate and help rebuild the country. But he made no effort to restore congress or hold an election. He arrogated all power to himself. He had his reasons. He would not tolerate, he said, the fractious government that had scuttled the 1810 republic in the first place.
When the governor of Barinas called for the restoration of the old federalist constitution—the very document Bolívar blamed for the demise of the first republic—Bolívar balked, saying that henceforward Barinas would be ruled out of Caracas. He insisted that the new republic, later known as the “second republic,” be conceived as a united whole. He argued that there were strong, unified governments in France and England; and as
federalist as the United States had become, it had a centralized treasury and War Department.

It didn’t stop there.
Even as Santiago Mariño—liberator and supreme chief of Venezuela’s eastern provinces—insisted on separate states in Barcelona and Cumaná, each with its own commander, Bolívar responded that Venezuela should be one polity with one head of state. That head, by implication, would be Simón Bolívar. Two independent authorities, he told Mariño,
“will look ridiculous.” He went on to say that Venezuela not only should remain one, but should unite with New Granada, thereby “forming a nation that inspires respect. How can we think of dividing anything in two?” Mariño refused to hear of it. He was not alone. As prominent republicans gathered around the country, they began to grouse about Bolívar’s arbitrary authoritarianism. Home had turned out to be a devilishly unruly place.

But Bolívar was not home for long. Despite his eagerness to get on with the business of government, it soon became clear that Spain would not go so gently. Perched a little more than a hundred miles away in the fort of Puerto Cabello, General Monteverde now flatly refused to acknowledge independence.
“Spain does not treat with insurgents,” he responded when the treaty was delivered to him under a flag of truce, and then promptly
imprisoned the priest who brought it. He rejected Bolívar’s offer to exchange prisoners of war, no matter how advantageous the trade. Boosted by an infusion of twelve hundred fresh troops, Monteverde’s army attacked the republicans on the plains of Valencia in late September of 1813, and was roundly pounded back. That rebel victory came at some cost. One of Bolívar’s ablest officers, the valiant and much loved Granadan Atanasio Girardot, was killed by a musket ball to the forehead as he tried to plant the republican flag on high ground.

When Bolívar heard of the young colonel’s valorous death, he mourned deeply. But in it he saw an opportunity to inspire men to a higher zeal;
he decided to stage a funeral worthy of a great hero. He ordered Girardot’s remains returned to his birthplace in Antioquia and his heart carried in an elaborate procession to Caracas. So it was that Girardot’s heart was cut from his chest, placed in a gilded urn, and borne to the capital by an army chaplain. A corps of drummers led the cortège,
and they rolled a slow, mournful dirge as Bolívar and three companies of mounted dragoons in full regalia rode somberly in the rear.

The theater had its effect. Patriot generals made bold by grief wasted no time in attacking the Spaniards; they succeeded in wounding Monteverde before capturing and killing his fearsome adjutant Colonel Zuazola, the butcher of human ears. But these advances only quickened the fears of blacks, who continued to be apprehensive of a white-led revolution. A counter-insurrection of slaves ripped through the countryside, surprising the patriots with its rage. On the prairies of Calabozo, rough-riding plainsmen, eager to raid the rich, declared their loyalty to Monteverde and swept into republican strongholds, plundering haciendas and massacring their residents. By November, a galvanized Bolívar was back on the battlefield, leading the troops. By then, too, his war to the death had resumed with vehemence. As a result, the entire population was swept into the business of combat: wives, children, cooks, servants, surgeons, musicians—even traveling brothels—followed soldiers to battle. Like a mighty river, the mass of humanity moved overland, pots clanging, babies screeching, laundry fluttering in the wind. Among Bolívar’s retinue were Pepita, possibly her mother and sister (without whom Pepita seldom traveled), as well as his old black nursemaid, Hipólita, who cooked, tended the wounded, and ironed his clothes.

A British traveler in the service of Spain now noted a marked change in Caracas. Spaniards were being dragged to the dungeons, made to surrender their wealth to patriot coffers. The unwilling were taken to the marketplace and shot. Not outright, but limb by limb, so that onlookers could watch them wriggle as musicians struck up lively airs. These spectacles caused such merriment that the multitude, provoked to an obscene frenzy, would finally cry,
“Kill him!” and the executioner would end the victim’s suffering with a final bullet to the brain. A Spaniard in agony had become a source of amusement, a ready carousel of laughs.

Outside Caracas patriots hardly fared better. The “Legions of Hell”—hordes of wild and truculent plainsmen—rode out of the barren llanos to punish anyone who dared call himself a rebel. Leading these colored troops was the fearsome José Tomás Boves. A Spanish sailor from Asturias, Boves had been arested at sea for smuggling, sent to
the dungeons of Puerto Cabello, then exiled to the Venezuelan prairie, where he fell in with marauding cowboys. He was fair-haired, strong-shouldered, with
an enormous head, piercing blue eyes, and a pronounced sadistic streak. Loved by his feral cohort with a passion verging on worship, he led them to unimaginable violence. As Bolívar’s aide Daniel O’Leary later wrote,
“Of all the monsters produced by the revolution . . . Boves was the worst.” He was a barbarian of epic proportions, an Attila for the Americas. Recruited by Monteverde but beholden to no one, Boves raised a formidable army of black, pardo, and mestizo llaneros by promising them open plunder, rich booty, and a chance to exterminate the Creole class.

The llaneros were accomplished horsemen, well trained in the art of warfare. They
needed few worldly goods, rode bareback, covered their nakedness with loincloths. They consumed only meat, which they strapped to their horses’ flanks and cured by the sweat of the racing animals. They made tents from hides, slept on earth, reveled in hardship. They lived on the open prairie, which was parched by heat, impassable in the rains. Their weapon of choice was a long lance of alvarico palm, hardened to a sharp point in the campfire. They were accustomed to making rapid raids, swimming on horseback through rampant floods, the sum of their earthly possessions in leather pouches balanced on their heads or clenched between their teeth. They could ride at a gallop, like the armies of Genghis Khan, dangling from the side of a horse, so that their bodies were rendered invisible, untouchable, their killing lances straight and sure against a baffled enemy. In war, they had little to lose or gain, no allegiance to politics. They were rustlers and hated the ruling class, which to them meant the Creoles; they fought for the abolition of laws against their kind, which the Spaniards had promised; and they believed in the principles of harsh justice, in which a calculus of bloodshed prevailed.

At first, Bolívar easily routed Boves’s undisciplined troops. On October 14, he sent his fiercest colonel, Campo Elías, and an army of twenty-five hundred men against the llaneros in Calabozo and
nearly eradicated them, along with their horses. After the battle, Campo Elías took hundreds of prisoners and
slaughtered them all. But Boves got away. In time, Boves formed alliances with similarly enterprising Spaniards—Juan
Yañez and Francisco Tomás Morales, a
former haberdasher and a former butcher, respectively—who had scrapped their way up the royalist ranks and created marauding armies of their own. By the start of the following year, Boves and Morales had raised a formidable horde of seven thousand roughriders with machetes; Yañez, in turn, had leveled Barinas,
killing every last inhabitant, branding corpses’ foreheads with R for “republican,” and burning the city to the ground. In the Spanish bastion of Puerto Cabello, the wounded Monteverde had been deposed, deported, and replaced by the equally ruthless Colonel Salomón. In the stronghold of Coró, Field Marshal Juan Manuel Cajigal—who would eventually be made captain-general—sent out the city’s governor, José de Cevallos, to join Yañez in a full-frontal attack on Bolívar. The republicans and royalists traded one victory after another, massacring each other’s ranks at every turn. Atrocities became so common on either side that no army could say it had a moral advantage.

It soon became clear to Bolívar, especially after the first pitched battle of his career at Araure on December 4, 1813, that although he might triumph—as he did, and brilliantly—his army simply couldn’t recruit soldiers as quickly and effectively as the enemy. For every thrashing the republicans could deliver, the Legions of Hell would come hurtling back like the mythical Hydra, with ever more heads and a greater fury. The reason for this was obvious, although republicans were slow to see its significance: the Spanish had race on their side. The vast majority of the nation’s people—black, Indian, mixed-blood—were acting on age-old democratic impulse. They were joining an effort to squelch the people of privilege, level the classes. But it was a narrow interpretation of democracy, promoted by Spanish generals, and blind to the revolutionary struggle at hand. The colored masses understood that the world was unjust, that the Creoles who lorded over them were rich and white, but they hadn’t understood the true pyramid of oppression. They hadn’t factored that the roots of misery were in empire, that Spain had constructed that unjust world carefully, that tyranny was rooted in the colonial, and that its system had been in place for over three hundred years.

EVEN AS DECEMBER CAME AND
went—even as Spain crept out from under Napoleon and Ferdinand resumed his teetering throne—the
butchery in Venezuela continued. It is altogether possible that the Spanish nation, emerging from its long night of terror, had little idea of the carnage that consumed its colonies. For Bolívar, a war to the death was a retaliatory measure; he had believed it would unite Americans against foreigners. The result was quite the opposite: Americans turned against Americans—Venezuelans took up weapons against their neighbors—and the revolution became a racial conflict, a full-fledged civil war.

On January 2, 1814, Bolívar convoked a public assembly in the ancient church of San Francisco—the church of his ancestors—so that he could address the people. He was aware of the concerns about his authoritarian ways, and could sense a need to bolster his position.
“Citizens!” he began, “I am not your sovereign.”

To save you from anarchy . . . I exercised supreme power. I gave you laws; I gave you government. . . . You honor me with the illustrious title of Liberator. The officers, the soldiers of your army—
those
are your liberators, they are the ones who deserve the nation’s gratitude. You know very well that they are the authors of your rebirth. . . . I beg you now to release me from a charge that is far greater than my capabilities. Elect your representatives, your magistrates, a just government, and rest secure that the forces that rescued the Republic will protect your liberty. . . . A country in which one lone person exercises all power is a country of slaves!

At the end of the address, Governor Mendoza begged him to continue as supreme commander, and the audience responded with deafening support. Bolívar argued,
“There are more illustrious citizens than I!” And then, after a pause, added, “General Mariño! Liberator of the East! Now
there
is a leader worthy of directing your destinies!” But the assembly wouldn’t hear of it. They insisted he retain the title of dictator. Bolívar had surrendered his power only to have it bestowed again. It was a strategy he would employ again and again during his long career as Liberator: resign a position, be implored to take it back, and, in the process, impel everyone to share in the responsibility.

Indeed, Bolívar needed all the help he could get. He had barely been able to equip his soldiers. No arms were manufactured in Venezuela
and, although Bolívar was seizing lead, sulfur, and coal
in order to forge bullets and make gunpowder, all guns and munitions had to be purchased from elsewhere. This was no easy venture in a world reeling from Napoleon’s wars. Britain had outlawed the arms trade, and the United States—aspiring to purchase Florida from Spain—
categorically refused to sell arms to Spanish American rebels. Bolívar was forced to buy illegally from merchant ships, and he welcomed Caribbean captains and businessmen to help him do it. This shortage of guns would have dire effects on the war for independence;
some historians claim it was a decisive factor in the second republic’s demise.

Guns alone wouldn’t have fixed the problem. Boves’s Legions of Hell did not depend on guns and, in any event, against an onslaught of horsemen with lances and machetes, a man with a musket didn’t have a chance: rifles of the time required six complicated motions to load and, although a well-placed first round might have picked off the enemy’s vanguard, by the time the patriots reloaded, the next wave of cavalry would have mowed them down.

More than horses or arms, Bolívar needed powerful partners who could help tame an unruly population. He was well aware that he could not continue to govern without a better hold on the patriot forces. Managing both a revolution and a civil war was more than he had bargained for. By the start of 1814, he was trying everything he could think of to save the effort. He offered Spanish deserters unquestioned amnesty if they would join him. He sent a diplomat to the United States to lobby for support. He wrote an impassioned
letter to Lord Wellesley, congratulating him for Wellington’s victory over Napoleon and beseeching him to intervene in the South American effort. He had written a number of gracious, even pleading messages to Mariño, liberator of eastern Venezuela, in a last-ditch effort to consolidate the country. Mariño, by nature, was
haughty, ambitious—the privileged son of a Spanish nobleman and an Irish mother—with strong visions of his own. Daring and charismatic, he had learned soldiering in the heat of battle and, despite his twenty-six years, had risen through the command quickly. At first, he had sent one of his officers, the audacious pardo captain Manuel Piar, with
a brig and five schooners, to help Bolívar mount a naval blockade at Puerto Cabello; then petulantly, and without explanation,
he had ordered
Piar to withdraw. By mid-January of 1814, Mariño had relented; the Liberator of the East sent the Liberator of the West a more encouraging response. He would contribute soldiers.