Bolivar: American Liberator (49 page)

ALTHOUGH BOLÍVAR COULD HAVE LEARNED
much from San Martín’s swift fall from grace, he had no time to dwell on it. With San Martín gone, Lima spun into a political vortex. A newly formed congress appointed a ruling junta and drafted a constitution, but was soon mired in disarray. Blaming San Martín for its troubles and wanting no further help from outsiders, the junta rejected the Colombian battalions Bolívar sent to Peru, and these now withdrew in bafflement and exasperation. The Spanish general José de Canterac, who lurked close to Lima’s gates, found himself poised to take advantage of the vacuum. In January of 1823, he sought out what was left of San Martín’s army in Moquegua and routed it completely. By the end of that battle, the Chileans and Argentines who had liberated Lima—
1,700 of them—were either dead or in shackles.

In desperation now, the congress in Lima turned to Peru’s most respected soldier, Andrés de Santa Cruz, who had just returned from fighting alongside Sucre in Quito. Santa Cruz virtually forced congress to appoint Colonel José de la Riva Agüero to rule over the foundering city-state. Riva Agüero was nothing if not Machiavellian in his quest to wrest all the power and squelch his personal enemies. He proclaimed himself president. But his power began to wane as soon as he assumed the post, and he wrote to San Martín,
pleading for him to return and help manage a civil war. Riva Agüero had long been San Martín’s supporter, but he had also been pivotal in ousting Bernardo Monteagudo while San Martín had been in Guayaquil, and San Martín had come to despise him.
“Impossible!” San Martín lashed back in a scathing letter, “Knave! . . . scoundrel! . . . black soul!” With the Spaniards circling
the city and the patriots in angry discord, President Riva Agüero now begged Bolívar for that assistance.
No fewer than four delegations of Peruvians traveled from Lima to Guayaquil over the course of the next few months, imploring Bolívar to come to Peru’s rescue.

But just as Bolívar had anticipated, Colombia’s troubles had begun to flare. The royalists in Pasto had arisen once more—this time under Benito Boves, the nephew of the infamous Boves—and a virulent rebellion threatened to undo all that Bolívar and Sucre had accomplished in that difficult, volcanic terrain. Between the royalists of Peru and the royalists of Pasto, the free districts of Quito and Guayaquil hung in precarious balance. He could hardly leave Colombia now.

There were other worries. Federalists in Caracas, lobbying for more autonomy, had begun to question the Colombian constitution. They proposed reverting to the old constitution established in Venezuela a decade before so that they could establish more independence from Bogotá. Bolívar was furious.
To him, the Colombian constitution was sacred, inviolable, and the concept of a strong, centralized government essential. He contemplated going to Bogotá to ensure that Santander stamp out this new threat, but his fulminations alone seemed to persuade the malcontents to back down for the time being. In this brief apogee of glory, Bolívar’s moral authority was the strongest it would ever be; there was little the Venezuelan people wouldn’t do for him.

The uprising in Pasto, on the other hand, was another story. Young Boves’s rebellion had erupted at the end of 1822 in a breathtaking show of violence. Opting for cruelty in the face of cruelty, Bolívar ordered all royalist property in Pasto seized and parceled out to his officers; anyone suspected of supporting the crown was arrested and forced to serve in the patriot army;
guns, weapons—all metal objects—were forcibly removed from houses. The populace
responded with renewed violence: Bolívar’s veteran general Bartolomé Salom reported that Colombia had two choices now: grant absolute pardon for all residents of Pasto or embark on total destruction of the region.
“You cannot imagine the obstinacy,” Salom wrote to Bolívar. “We have captured prisoner boys who are no more than nine and ten.” Finally, with the help of General Sucre, the republican army was able to overtake young Boves in a bloody encounter at Yacuanquer, in which soldiers and civilians,
women and children were indiscriminately slaughtered. The carnage did honor to no one; nor was the battle at all decisive. Pasto would need to be tamed again and again. Like an indefatigable Hydra, its royalists would rebound from apparent annihilation to fight again for the king.

Somehow, in this ongoing crucible of history, Bolívar found time for Manuela Sáenz. Their trysts were few and far between, and she complained bitterly about their infrequency. She had stayed on in Quito to be closer to him, refusing to go back to her husband in Lima, but she was learning that life as the Liberator’s mistress was one of short, ardent assignations and long, excruciating months of want. As he crisscrossed the Ecuadorean terrain, trying to secure it for Colombia, she was inconsolable.
“The victory at Yacuanquer has cost me dearly,” she protested. “You’ll tell me I’m not a good patriot for what I’m about to say, but I would have preferred my own triumph to ten in Pasto. I can imagine how bored you must be in that little town, but as desperate as you may be, you can’t possibly be as desperate as your best of friends—Manuela.”

It was probably in the course of his incessant peregrinations to subdue Pasto that Sáenz understood that the only way she was going to be able to see him as much as passion demanded was to travel with him. During the year or more that she stayed on in Quito waiting for him, he had passed through the city
only four times.
She was lovesick, obsessed. She was also unafraid of danger. A declared patriot before she had ever met him, she was
a fanatical partisan of his cause, an excellent horsewoman, comfortable around men, known to savor a good cigar. Moreover, she wanted nothing left to chance. Some have described Manuelita as fierce in her jealousies,
capable of mauling his face with her fingernails when she suspected he had been unfaithful. She knew as well as anyone that her lover was a lothario. In any case, sometime during 1823,
she likely offered to serve as an informant, secretary, or—as his attentions turned south—a liaison in the republican circles of Lima. He would find Manuelita impossible to resist.
“She has a singular configuration,” a French physician later said of her, leaving all future historians to contemplate whether the attribute he had in mind was corporeal, psychological, or sexual; whatever it was, it would captivate Bolívar for the rest of his days. He did not object to having her follow.

Her familiarity with Lima was further glue between them. His eye
was firmly on Peru’s liberation now. He had been coy in committing troops to San Martín, but the moment his rival had fled Callao,
Bolívar made it known to Peruvians that he would take up their cause. He now asked the congress in Bogotá for approval to do so. But Santander dawdled, insisting that
a man should mind his own house before setting out to salvage another’s. By March, with San Martín gone and the original liberation army thoroughly routed, the situation in Lima had deteriorated seriously. Soon, the city began preparing for the worst; people sensed it was only a matter of time before the Spaniards retook Lima.
Santander finally took Bolívar’s request to congress.

With every return to Guayaquil from the firestorm of Pasto, Bolívar anxiously awaited Bogotá’s response. But Colombia’s congress, like its vice president, was hesitant to release the president to a foreign war. Bolívar knew Peru could not wait. Lima, the only liberated part of the colony, was about to be overrun by the King’s army.
He sent it six thousand troops under the command of General Sucre. By the time those reinforcements arrived, however, Lima was already in extremis. On June 18, nine thousand royalist soldiers overwhelmed the capital. Somehow, Sucre was able to whisk congress and his army safely to Callao. But within twenty-four hours, the chaos and intrigue were such that Riva Agüero’s government collapsed, he was driven out of Callao unceremoniously, and the Peruvian congress pressed Sucre to accept the presidency of the republic.
“The anarchy here is beyond description!” Sucre wrote to Bolívar. “I curse the day I came to Lima. What a task you foisted on me!” He was appalled by the vicious nature of Peruvian politics. Within weeks he had had enough of it, and he handed off the presidency to the Marquis of Torre Tagle, a former mayor of Lima and a republican who had spent most of his life in service to the crown. But Peru hadn’t seen the last of Riva Agüero. The former president removed himself to the old, venerable city of Trujillo, where he raised his own army, set up a government, and
insisted that he was still in charge.

The fourth and last delegation from Peru to Bolívar arrived in Guayaquil at the end of July. As fate would have it, the mission was led by Olmedo, the erstwhile poet-president of Guayaquil who had gone off in San Martín’s ship and become a member of Lima’s congress. Now representing the new president, the Marquis of Torre Tagle, Olmedo
showed Bolívar a very different face from the one he had worn in Guayaquil. He beseeched him to come, make haste: Peru, he said, was teetering on the verge of a double abyss. If civil war didn’t devour it, the Spanish crown would.
“Peru awaits the voice that bonds, the hand that leads, the genius that opens the way to victory,” the official letter pleaded. “All eyes, all hopes, are naturally on you.”

Bolívar composed a careful response to Torre Tagle:
“For a long time now, my heart has drawn me to Peru . . . I have begged permission from [Colombia’s] congress to allow me to serve my brothers of the South; I have yet to receive an answer. This inaction has brought me to the brink of despair: my troops are already there with you, hovering between hazard and glory; and I linger here, so very far away.”

He wrote those words on the evening of August 6. But early the next day, just as he was about to sign and seal the missive, he received news that the congress in Bogotá had finally given him permission to go. He tore up the letter, called for his officers, and—
before the hour was out—boarded a ship for Lima.

CHAPTER
13

All the power of the supreme being is not enough to liberate Peru, that accursed country; only Bolívar, backed by true might, can hope to accomplish it.

—José de San Martín

“P
eru,” Bolívar wrote, “contains two elements that are the bane of every just and free society: gold and slaves. The first corrupts all it touches; the second is corrupt in and of itself.” He had written it eight years before, while he languished in Jamaica, his revolution undone. But
he was reminded of it now as he stood on the deck of the
Chimborazo
, watching the bare, desolate flank of Peru scroll past on his approach to Lima.
It was the 1st of September, and
the morning air was still pricked by the raw and damp of a Peruvian winter. By noon, a long, gray spit of land, the port of Callao, came into view, lancing the sea like a mortal wound. Gold. Slaves.
Any visitor to the bustling center of Lima could see why Peru was loyal to the crown, why it hadn’t been easy to raise an independence army: it was an altogether Spanish city, the richest viceroyalty in the empire. With its palaces, bejeweled aristocrats, and spirited commerce—its streets clattering with
six thousand gilded carriages—Lima possessed a magnificence known to few capitals in the
Old World, much less the New. Gold and silver coursed through that harsh landscape; and a vast population of indigenous had been shackled to answer the demands of a brisk world trade.

The schooner
dropped anchor at one o’clock. A full-cannon salute announced its arrival and what was left of Lima’s patriot army—largely made up of Argentines, Chileans, and Colombians—spilled down the road to Callao, forming a
procession for the Liberator’s long-awaited entrance into the city. The Spaniards were no longer there: General Canterac had occupied Lima only long enough to wring money, guns, and uniforms from the people, threatening to reduce the capital to ashes if they didn’t comply. After a month, Canterac had gone off to rejoin Viceroy La Serna in the highlands, leaving the city to its own chaotic devices. Now Lima was rendering up a cautious welcome for the Colombian Liberator. The streets were festooned with ribbons and flags; church bells pealed; the hum of celebration filled the air. People clamored to get a glimpse of the man who would replace San Martín. Members of Congress, with President Torre Tagle at their head, came down to the port to escort him into the city. He was carried in triumph to the ancient urban heart, where a palatial house had been readied for his stay.