Bolivar: American Liberator (72 page)

Bolívar was dead, Greater Colombia was gone, and the dream he had held so dear slipped imperceptibly into the vast hereafter. But there was no question about the triumph: Six new nations—Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Bolivia, and Peru—would emerge one by one to confirm it.

Epilogue

O
nly after Bolívar was dead and gone did his legend take root and grow. Few heroes have been so exalted by history, so venerated around the world, so memorialized in marble. In time, the rancor that dogged his last days became rampant adulation.

But that reversal—perhaps unique in the annals of history—was slow to come. As life ebbed and the corpse grew cold, only the loyal were there to mourn him. Bolívar died reviled, misunderstood, slandered in every republic he had liberated. For all the wealth into which he had been born, he died a pauper. For all the treasuries he had commanded, he had eschewed financial reward. He departed this life penniless, powerless, dispossessed. Driven from Bogotá, loathed by Peru, yearning to return to his beloved Caracas, he soon found that even his native land had barred his homecoming. He died mourned by only a few: his manservant, his stalwart lieutenants, his sisters, his brother’s son, a scattering of friends. There was scant sympathy otherwise.
“Goodbye to the spirit of evil!” the governor of Maracaibo crowed—“the author of all misfortune, the tyrant of the fatherland!” Twelve years passed before Bolívar’s bones were carried home to Caracas in triumph.

As three rounds of cannon fire sounded from a nearby fort, marking the Liberator’s passing, his doctor, the town pharmacist Révérend, undertook to perform an autopsy. From the cadaver’s discoloration, the choked lungs, pronounced tubercles, advanced atrophy, he could draw but one conclusion: Bolívar had died of acute pulmonary failure, most
likely tuberculosis. After working all night to embalm him, the doctor met light of day with one more responsibility. There was no one else to dress the dead man; no garment available but the shabby tunic in which he had died. A clean shirt had to be borrowed from a kind neighbor, after which some semblance of a funeral was arranged and paid for by a volunteer.

On December 20, 1830, the Liberator’s corpse was transported from public view at the customhouse to the cathedral, some blocks away. A modest procession wended its way through the sleepy streets of Santa Marta. Bells tolled, a requiem was sung, but no important officials were there to hear them. The bishop of Santa Marta, who had fallen ill days before, did not preside over the Mass. Bolívar’s remains were deposited in a tomb within the cathedral walls, and there they lay as Greater Colombia fell to pieces, the continent spun into petty wars, and Bolívar’s generals scrambled to advance self-important visions. Within months, Bolívar’s nemesis José Antonio Páez was elected president in Venezuela. General Urdaneta, who had lobbied to make Bolívar king, was toppled ignominiously in Bogotá. General Santander, in exile for the attempted assassination, was brought back to rule independent Colombia. General Flores, wanting more elbow room for Ecuador, prepared a flank attack on the parent republic. Panama, trying to declare itself a republic,
looked around anxiously for a leader. Bolivia, under Andrés Santa Cruz, struggled to surmount the chaos. And Peru—the anxious heart of a lapsed empire—proceeded to have twenty presidents in the next twenty years. But, for all that, the Liberator’s paramount achievement was irreversible: the Spaniards never returned.

The news of Bolívar’s death—like all news in those distant days—was slow to spread through the Americas. Manuela had been making her way upriver toward him, confident that rumors of his decline were exaggerations, when she was stopped cold by a letter from Perú de Lacroix:
“Allow me, esteemed madam, to weep with you over the immense loss you have suffered along with the rest of the nation. Prepare yourself for a final death notice.” She was taken aback, momentarily unhinged.
Somehow, she got hold of a venomous snake and put it to her throat, but it sank its fangs into her arm instead. When she recovered, she regained her rock-hard determination.
“I loved the Liberator
when he was alive,” she wrote General Flores. “Now that he is dead, I
worship
him.” Less than two years later, Santander—back in power—packed her off to foreign shores.

She sailed to Jamaica, then Guayaquil, but her passport was revoked along the way and so
she landed in Paita, a tiny fishing village on the coast of Peru, where the only wayfarers were Yankee whalers. Undaunted, striving to make the best of a bad situation, she took over an abandoned house not far from the wharf and hung a sign over her door: “Tobacco. English Spoken. Manuela Sáenz.” For a modest fee, she offered to write letters on behalf of illiterate sailors. She prepared and sold sweets, embroidered linens, and, one way or another, managed to eke out a meager living. But she lived in virtual poverty for the rest of her days, visited from time to time by such eminences as the Italian military hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, or the celebrated Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma. As years went by, she learned that her husband, James Thorne, had been murdered along with his mistress as they strolled through the sugar fields, not far from Lima. There were perhaps many reasons why. Thorne had had numerous mistresses and illegitimate children since Manuela had left him. At the very end of her life, Sáenz was joined by Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar’s teacher, who arrived in Paita when he was eighty, destitute, and more than a little touched by madness. He limped off a boat in 1853 and died the following year. Manuela died two years later. We can only imagine the conversations between those feisty old revolutionaries who loved Bolívar above all men.

Dead, Bolívar became less man than symbol. As the years went by—as chaos continued to plague the region—South Americans recalled the extraordinary feat of freeing so many nations in so dire a time. His failures as a politician receded. His successes as a liberator took center stage. Indeed, the accomplishments were irrefutable. It was he who had disseminated the spirit of the Enlightenment, brought the promise of democracy to the hinterlands, opened the minds and hearts of Latin Americans to what they might become. It was he who, with a higher moral instinct than even Washington or Jefferson, saw the absurdity of embarking on a war for liberty without first emancipating his own slaves. It was he who had led the armies, slept on the ground with his soldiers, fretted about their horses, their bullets, their maps,
their blankets—inspired men to unimaginable heroism. Revolutionaries called for him in Mexico, Chile, Cuba, Argentina.
He rode, “fighting all the way,” as Thomas Carlyle put it, “more miles than Ulysses ever sailed. Let the coming Homers take note of it!” Never before in the history of the Americas had one man’s will transformed so much territory, united so many races.
Never had Latin America dreamed so large.

But in the course of forging a new world, compromises had been made. More than once, Bolívar found himself tossing ideals by the wayside. As he rode through the roiling hell of a brutal war, through the abattoirs of improvised military justice, he didn’t always have the luxury of employing the principles he so eloquently espoused. From time to time he made questionable decisions. Bolívar’s critics are quick to cite them: The decree of a war to the death, for instance, with which he meant to shock and awe the colonizer. The execution of General Piar, a young, ambitious patriot who, Bolívar suspected, was trying to incite a race war under his very nose. The massacre of eight hundred Spanish prisoners at Puerto Cabello, which seemed expeditious at the time, as a prison uprising was feared and there were insufficient guards to contain them. The betrayal of his aging fellow liberator, Francisco Miranda, who, according to Bolívar, had lacked courage, capitulated too easily, and sold out the revolution to Spain. Last, and certainly not least, was Bolívar’s exercise of dictatorial powers.

He had good arguments for all of it. There was, to begin, a continent’s staggering ignorance, the result of conditions under which it had labored for hundreds of years. In his darkest hours, Bolívar wondered whether his America was truly ready for democracy. There was, too, the swift, draconian response Spain let loose on revolutionaries. After the Napoleonic Wars, the
madre patria
emerged fiercer, more terrible—more sharpened by combat—than the patriots could have anticipated. Violence was met by ever more violence, and soon escalation became the only rule of war. The result was a bloody conflict that wiped whole cities from the map,
reduced civilian populations by a third, and virtually obliterated Spain’s expeditionary forces.

Bolívar was a master of improvisation, a military commander who could outwit, outride, and outfight a vastly more powerful enemy. But that very talent, that genius for moving swiftly from strategy to
strategy—for rebounding quickly, for making decisions on the fly—had its liabilities in times of peace. It is difficult to build a democracy on a wartime model. It was why he made hasty decisions, last-ditch promises, political blunders. It was why he pardoned Páez. It was why he mishandled Santander. It was why he tried to patch his way through the labyrinths of political process, saying different things to different men.

But, for all his flaws, there was never any doubt about his power to convince, his splendid rhetoric, his impulse to generosity, his deeply held principles of liberty and justice. As the years went by and South Americans remembered that greatness, they understood that their Liberator had been ahead of his time. Leaders who followed seemed wanting in comparison, dwarfed by the shadow of a colossus. Venezuelans were appalled that they had allowed their most distinguished citizen to die in penury, in another country, forbidden even to come home. Colombians recalled that it was on their soil that he had begun his march to freedom. Ecuadorians, Bolivians, Panamanians, Peruvians began to revive the legend. Cities and provinces took his name. Public plazas raised monuments to his victories.
In marble or bronze, Bolívar’s flesh took on a serenity it never had in life. The restless, fevered Liberator was now the benevolent father, devoted teacher, good shepherd striving to build a better flock. Astride a horse, galloping into an eternal void, the enduring image was complete: here was a vigorous life, lived in a single trajectory, aiming to forge a people, a continent. America.

No one knew more than Páez the power of that Bolívarian image. Struggling to maintain his grip on the Venezuelan presidency, Páez reached once again for Bolívar to help him shore up an unstable nation. Never mind that Bolívar was dead. Never mind that Páez’s vision for Venezuela was in stark counterpoint to that of Bolívar. In November of 1842, almost twelve years after the Liberator’s death, Páez had the hero’s remains exhumed from their serene resting place in the Cathedral of Santa Marta and brought by a naval fleet to the port of La Guaira. To pacify Colombia, Páez granted it permission to keep the Liberator’s heart, and so that part of him remained behind,
preserved in a small urn interred at Santa Marta. When Bolívar’s eviscerated corpse arrived in La Guaira, it was welcomed home by an enormous delegation of military men, diplomats, clerics, and government dignitaries. As the
funeral procession made its way over the mountain to Caracas, an adoring public poured into the streets to greet it. So began the posthumous glorification of a hero, the birth of the cult of Bolívar.

As years passed—not only in nations he had liberated, but throughout the world—Bolívar became the personification of Latin American greatness: a man with a resolute love of liberty and an unwavering sense of justice; a hero willing to risk everything for a dream. But as the legend grew, each version building on the last, the man took on a protean quality. Politicians, whether they were left or right, used him to defend their positions. Priests quoted him in righteous sermons. Poets lauded him in ecstatic verse. History texts swooned over his exploits. Teachers pointed to his brilliance. Fathers urged sons to emulate him. Schoolchildren memorized his speeches: “Soldiers!” they all learned to roar, just as Bolívar had done after the Battle of Ayacucho, “You have given South America its freedom and now a quarter of this world is a living monument to your glory!”