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Bolívar was not an entirely noble freedom fighter taking the high
road during the war. He could be as cruel and vindictive as the royalists,
whose lust for violence was legendary. They regularly executed captive
patriot soldiers with no trial. One psychopathic commander known as
the
Butcher, General José Tomas Boves, personally supervised the massacre
of entire villages. He often wandered through the ruins with a sinister
smile. Once, after capturing the city of Valencia, his troops found
a girl in the house of a former patriot commander, tied her to her hammock,
gang-raped her, tore her tongue out, cut her breasts off, and then
lit a fire under her so she would cook in her bed. It was a common practice
of the Spaniards.

Bolívar responded to the Spanish mayhem with
retaliatory violence of
his own. During
La Campana Admirable
(the admirable campaign) after
the earthquake, he declared a "war to the death." He ordered that any
Spanish-born prisoner be shot and warned royalists in general that they
would be killed. At one point in 1814 he ordered the execution of thirteen
hundred prisoners, who were decapitated. His actions contributed to an
atmosphere of rabid violence, drawing even more of the population into
the conflict and leaving vast swaths of the country devastated. By the end
of the war, one-third of the population had perished. Livestock numbers
plummeted from 4.5 million to about 250,000. The treasury was bankrupt.
Venezuela was the scene of some four hundred battles. Nowhere on
the continent was the fighting more cruel and destructive.

As his military campaign continued to suffer setbacks, Bolívar was
exiled once in Jamaica and twice in Haiti — countries from which he
launched several failed attacks. But in 1817 his struggle reached a turning
point. Returning again from Haiti, he sailed around the eastern coast of
Venezuela and up the Orinoco delta, where he established a headquarters
at Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar). From there, he made contact
with republican leaders in the llanos, most notably
José Antonio Páez,
a Herculean, illiterate cavalryman. At one point Bolívar was described
as something of a wild, even half-crazed figure with huge sideburns
and shoulder-length hair. His cast-off uniform included the helmet of a
Russian dragoon. On a bamboo lance he carried a skull-and-crossbones
flag with the slogan LIBERTY OR DEATH.

The
llaneros
had been fighting on the side of the Spanish, but now
Bolívar convinced many of them to join the independence cause. They
were a devastating, irregular cavalry force, and became the backbone
of Bolívar's new army.

His forces spent part of the next two years doing battle in the
llanos and other spots. Then, in 1819, he shifted strategy, giving up on
Venezuela and turning his attention to neighboring Colombia. In one
of the most audacious and desperate strokes of Latin America's independence
struggle, Bolívar marched twenty-four hundred men through
the Orinoco jungles during the rainy season and up into the frozen passages
of the Andes. Passing the tree line at ten thousand feet, the troops
hiked over narrow, treacherous, slippery trails, often shrouded in fog.
Many of the
llaneros
, ill clothed, shoeless, and unaccustomed to the
bitter cold, died of exposure. Pack and saddle animals succumbed, too.
Bolívar, wrapped in a great scarlet cloak, was indomitable, but others
wanted to give up. Still, the survivors made it over the towering peaks,
descended the other side, and caught the Spanish off guard. Bolívar
quickly won a series of battles that culminated with a major victory at
Boyaca, where he defeated five thousand Spanish troops. Three days
later he entered Bogotá triumphantly.

The thousand-mile march over a thirteen-thousand-foot-high
mountain barrier nearly as impregnable as the Himalayas is considered
one of the greatest military exploits in history. It left Bolívar in control
of Colombia. He retraced his steps, climbing back down the slopes of
the Andes and sailing down the Apure to the Orinoco and his base
at Angostura. His victories came more quickly after that. By June 1921
he and his men had advanced north and defeated the Spanish at the
bloody
battle of Carabobo, opening the way to
Caracas, where Bolívar
arrived at night in triumph.

He did not linger long. He had wider ambitions. He soon set
off to lead the
liberation of
Ecuador,
Peru, and Bolivia. He and his
troops did battle among the volcanoes near Quito, Ecuador, the Inca
ruins of Cuzco, Peru, and the bleak altiplano beyond Lake Titicaca
in Bolivia. His epic campaign ended in 1824. He "could now claim
to rule one of the greatest empires of any military leader in history,
some three million square miles in extent, the size of eastern and
western Europe combined . . . In ten years, he personally had covered
at least twenty thousand miles on horseback . . . and fought in some
three hundred battles and skirmishes." His public appearances were
greeted with wild applause and huge crowds. "Bolívar was just forty-two
years of age, yet, the world, or at least the Americas, appeared to
be at his feet."

It wouldn't last for long.

Barely two years later Gran Colombia was in danger of breaking up,
racked by feuds among competing
caudillos
and by Bolívar's "inept, vacillating
and autocratic style." José Antonio Páez, the
llanero
left behind
by Bolívar to run Venezuela, was planning to lead the country to secede.
Bolívar rushed back to Caracas to patch up the federation, but it was too
late. After six months of trying to reorganize the government, authorities
passed a resolution asking that he never return to his native land.
He left for Bogotá, where he was equally reviled.

A final ignominy came in 1828 when he was nearly assassinated. In
Bogotá he reunited with
Manuela Sáenz, his beautiful and feisty longtime
mistress. The two had met during Bolívar's triumphant entrance
into Quito, Ecuador, on June 16, 1822. When she tossed him a laurel
wreath from a balcony, so the story goes, Bolívar looked up to see who
threw it — and their eyes met. She became the woman with whom he
maintained the longest romantic relationship of his life.

Well read in the classics herself, Sáenz rose to the rank of colonel
in Bolívar's revolutionary army. She accompanied him on long marches
with his troops and was even present during the
battle of Ayacucho in
Peru — a battle the Liberator himself missed. She was awarded the
Order of the Sun, the highest decoration conferred by the new Peruvian
government. As one of Bolívar's most intimate and loyal confidantes, she
earned a place as one of the most influential women in Latin American
history.

Now, after reveling in Bolívar's most glorious days and suffering
through some of his worst, Sáenz was still the faithful servant as he
arrived in Bogotá seeking refuge. Rumors of plans to assassinate him
were rampant. At about midnight on September 25, 1828, two or three
dozen of Bolívar's enemies quietly entered his country estate, stabbed
three sentinels, and broke down two doors as they made their way to the
Liberator's bedroom.

Manuela was in bed with him. Hearing the commotion, she awakened
Bolívar, lent him her boots, and helped him escape out a bedroom
window. Bolívar hid under a bridge for three hours with one of his servants,
whom he had met as he fled. Inside the house, the frustrated
conspirators severely beat Manuela when she failed to help them find
Bolívar. Her quick thinking and bravery prompted him to dub her "the
Liberator of the Liberator."

Bolívar's dream of a united Latin America was crumbling, and so
was his health. Peru was invading Colombia. Venezuela and Ecuador
were leaving the union. Tuberculosis was ravaging Simón's lungs. He
decided to abandon his native continent and seek exile in Europe. But
he only made it to the small Colombian coastal town of Santa Marta.
Moving in and out of consciousness, he was disoriented in his final, tortured
days, which Colombian writer
Gabriel García Márquez captured
a century and a half later in his best-selling novel
The General in His
Labyrinth
.

Bolívar died on December 17, 1830. Just forty-seven years old, he was
bitter, penniless, and almost friendless. Before he died, in a letter to an
Ecuadorean general he penned a bitter prophecy that would echo down
through the decades of Latin American history: "America is ungovernable.
Those who serve the revolution plough the sea. The only thing to
do in America is emigrate."

Sitting in the military academy classrooms late at night nearly a century
and a half later, Hugo Chávez was not nearly as pessimistic as Bolívar
in his final days. Instead, he was inspired. Eventually he adopted the
Liberator's life and thoughts as a
blueprint for his own mission of
reforming Venezuela's corrupt institutions and achieving a sovereign
and united Latin America free of imperialist exploitation from abroad
and social injustice at home.

He studied Bolívar's "open letters" and speeches, which were models
of the advanced political thought of the time and to Chávez remained
relevant. In his famous
"Letter from Jamaica" in 1815, Bolívar outlined
a visionary plan for the future of Latin America, from Argentina to
Mexico. In an essay written for a congress gathered at Angostura in
1819, he warned against one individual harboring too much power for
too long and called for repeated elections — even though his failure on
these counts contributed to his own demise. "The most perfect system
of government is the one that produces the greatest possible happiness,
the greatest degree of social safety, and the greatest political stability,"
he wrote.

After he liberated the country named for him in 1825, Bolívar drew
up a constitution hailed as the most liberal in the world. It called for civil
liberty and equality before the law, freedoms of speech, movement, and
the press, the abolition of slavery, and provisions for due process of law
and trial by jury. In his final years Bolívar turned his attention and his
wrath
toward the United States, which by now had adopted the Monroe
Doctrine declaring Latin America its "backyard." In another famous
quote he wrote that the United States was "destined by Providence to
plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty."

Bolívar died a disillusioned and detested man. But decades
later as historians and others reassessed his
legacy, it became clear
he had been a
visionary. Generally he was devoted to democracy,
equality, and freedom at a time when dictatorships, oligarchies, and
social injustice reigned throughout Latin America. He was a figure
unmatched in the region, as author
Robert Harvey noted in his 2000
book
Liberators
:

Simón Bolívar is a quasi-deity in Latin American today. He is
the one non-controversial figure, the one continental leader, the
man who freed millions of people from tyranny and did not then
enslave them himself. His reputation transcends the bitterness
of modern Latin American divisions — between left and right,
between militarists and democrats, between oligarchy and revolutionaries.
Among the educated and propertied classes, his radicalism
has long since been quietly forgotten. To hundreds of
millions of ordinary Spanish Americans, many of them illiterate,
he was the leader who tried to overcome class and racial divisions,
who tried to give rights to that vast swathe of humanity that
remains so downtrodden . . .

As soldier, statesman and man of common humanity, Simón
Bolívar stands head and shoulders above any other figure Latin
America has produced, and among the greatest men of world history.
Small wonder that he remains a symbol of hope for millions
of Latin Americans seeking liberation from poverty, ignorance
and disease.

In Chávez's view, Bolívar had laid down the outlines of a formidable
national project for Latin America. Zamora took up that project a
quarter century after Bolívar's
death, and Chávez — at least in his mind
— was to inherit it in the late twentieth century.

He delved so deeply into Bolívar's life that over time he seemed to
almost
become
Bolívar. "When he starts to talk about Bolívar, it seems
like the Liberator is inside him," stated Milagros Flores de Reyes, a
close friend and the wife of one of Chávez's military allies, Luis Reyes
Reyes. "One feels that he was in those places, that he's able to see
what Bolívar saw. He talks to you about the trees, the animals that
were with him, the things that were around him. One day I told him,
'You incarnate him.' He smiled and said, 'Be careful,
co-madre
, what
you say.' "

By the time Chávez attempted to take up Bolívar's mantle,
Venezuelans had forgotten much of his revolutionary thought. It was
watered down over the decades by elites who feared an uprising among
the masses; the social injustices that plagued the country before the
independence movement remained intact. In the words of Venezuela's
most famous 1960s protest singer,
Alí Primera, Bolívar had become
"merely a saint for whom one lights a candle." In his classic
"Canción
Bolivariana," a Venezuelan boy holds an imaginary conversation with
Bolívar, for whom the national currency is named, and informs him
that Venezuelans are still not fully liberated:

Boy:
And what's worse is that my people are now without a
Bolívar.

Bolívar:
They are without money? Terrible.

Boy:
Without consciousness, Liberator, without consciousness.
The people have been fooled into believing the rich
bourgeoisie who go to the National Pantheon to bring
flowers on the anniversary of your death.

Bolívar:
Then why do they go, little patriot?

Boy:
To be sure that you are still dead, Liberator, truly dead.

It would become Chávez's mission to make sure that the Liberator
was truly alive.