Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  The boys were immensely wealthy, with a net worth equivalent today to at least $40 million, and because of it, they would never go ignored. But money had bought them little happiness. Within the first decade of life, Simón had lost his father, mother, grandparents, a sister, and most of his aunts and uncles on the Bolívar side. That so few Bolívars had survived to lay claim to the family fortune convinced the Palacios it was theirs to take. So confident was Don Feliciano Palacios of this rightful heritage that he took care before his death to make sure that all the wealth eventually flowed to his own children. He drew up a will, making his sons legal guardians of the Bolívar boys. Twelve-year-old Juan Vicente was put in the custody of his uncle Juan Félix Palacios and transferred to a hacienda fifty miles away. Ten-year-old Simón was entrusted to his uncle Carlos, an ill-humored, lazy, and grasping bachelor who lived with his sisters in Don Feliciano’s house—at the other end of the passageway.

  So busy did Carlos become in the venture of squandering Bolívar profits that he had little time for his impressionable young charge. He relegated the boy’s welfare to his sisters and servants. Ever headstrong, Simón began to spend time in the company of street boys, neglecting everything his tutors had tried to teach him, learning the vulgar language of the time. Whenever he could, he headed for the back alleys of Caracas, or took a horse from the family corral and rode out into the surrounding countryside. He avoided his studies and turned his attention instead to the highly imperfect world around him, a world that Spain had made. He would not understand much of what he saw until later, until he had crisscrossed the continent as a full-grown man. But it was an education that would serve him for the rest of his life.

  FOR TWO HUNDRED YEARS, FROM the mid-1500s through the mid-1700s, the world that Spain had made had struggled against fiscal failure. The empire whose motto had once been a rousing Plus Ultra! had glutted world markets with silver, thwarted the economic growth of its colonies, and brought itself more than once to the brink of financial ruin. Nowhere was Spain’s misguided fiscal strategy more evident than in the streets of Caracas in the late 1700s, where a deep rage against the madre patria was on the rise.

  The case of the Spanish American colonies had no precedent in modern history: a vital colonial economy was being forced, at times by violent means, to kowtow to an underdeveloped mother country. The principal—as Montesquieu had predicted a half century before—was now slave to the accessory. Even as England burst into the industrial age, Spain made no attempt to develop factories; it ignored the road to modernization and stuck stubbornly to its primitive, agricultural roots. But the Bourbon kings and their courts could not ignore the pressures of the day: Spain’s population was burgeoning; its infrastructure, tottering; there was a pressing need to increase the imperial revenue. Rather than try something new, the Spanish kings decided to hold on firmly to what they had.

  At midnight on April 1, 1767, all Jesuit priests were expelled from Spanish America. Five thousand clerics, most of them American-born, were marched to the coast, put on ships, and deported to Europe, giving the crown unfettered reign over education as well as over the widespread property of the Church’s missions. King Carlos IV made it very clear that he did not consider learning advisable for America: Spain would be better off, and its subjects easier to manage, if it kept its colonies in ignorance.

  Absolute rule had always been the hallmark of Spanish colonialism. From the outset, each viceroy and captain-general had reported directly to the Spanish court, making the king the supreme overseer of American resources. Under his auspices, Spain had wrung vast quantities of gold and silver from the New World and sold them in Europe as raw material. It controlled the entire world supply of cocoa and rerouted it to points around the globe from storehouses in Cádiz. It had done much the same with copper, indigo, sugar, pearls, emeralds, cotton, wool, tomatoes, potatoes, and leather. To prevent the colonies from trading these goods themselves, it imposed an onerous system of domination. All foreign contact was forbidden. Contraband was punishable by death. Movement between the colonies was closely monitored. But as the years of colonial rule wore on, oversight had grown lax. The war that had flared between Britain and Spain in 1779 had crippled Spanish commerce, prompting a lively contraband trade. A traffic of forbidden books flourished. It was said that all Caracas was awash in smuggled goods. To put a stop to this, Spain moved to overhaul its laws, impose harsher ones, and forbid Americans even the most basic freedoms.

  The Tribunal of the Inquisition, imposed in 1480 by Ferdinand and Isabel to keep a firm hold on empire, was given more power. Its laws, which called for penalties of death or torture, were diligently enforced. Books or newspapers could not be published or sold without the permission of Spain’s Council of the Indies. Colonials were barred from owning printing presses. The implementation of every document, the approval of every venture, the mailing of every letter was a long, costly affair that required government approval. No foreigners, not even Spaniards, could visit the colonies without permission from the king. All non-Spanish ships in American waters were deemed enemy craft and attacked.

  Spain also fiercely suppressed American entrepreneurship. Only the Spanish-born were allowed to own stores or sell goods in the streets. No American was permitted to plant grapes, own vineyards, grow tobacco, make spirits, or propagate olive trees—Spain brooked no competition. It earned $60 million a year, after all (the equivalent of almost a billion today), by selling goods back to its colonies.

  But, in a bizarre act of self-immolation, Spain enforced strict regulations on its colonies’ productivity and initiative. Creoles were subject to punishing taxes; Indians or mestizos could labor only in menial trades; black slaves could work only in the fields, or as domestics in houses. No American was allowed to own a mine; nor could he work a vein of ore without reporting it to colonial authorities. Factories were forbidden, unless they were registered sugar mills. Basque businesses controlled all the shipping. Manufacturing was rigorously banned, although Spain had no competing manufacturing industry. Most galling of all, the revenue raised from the new, exorbitantly high taxes—a profit of $46 million a year—was not used to improve conditions in the colonies. The money was shipped back, in its entirety, to Spain.

  Americans balked at this. “Nature has separated us from Spain by immense seas,” exiled Peruvian Jesuit Viscardo y Guzmán wrote in 1791. “A son who found himself at such a distance would be a fool, if, in managing his own affairs, he constantly awaited the decision of his father.” It was as potent a commentary on the inherent flaws of colonialism as Thomas Jefferson’s “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.”

  A rich orphan boy wandering the streets of Caracas would not have understood the economic tumult that churned about him, but the human tumult he could not fail to see. Everywhere he looked, the streets were teeming with blacks and mulattos. The colony was overwhelmingly populated by pardos, the mixed-race descendants of black slaves. European slave ships had just sold 26,000 Africans into Caracas—the largest infusion of slaves the colony would ever experience. One out of ten Venezuelans was a black slave; half of the population was slaves’ descendants. Though Spain had prohibited race mixing, the evidence that those laws had been flouted was all about him. Caracas’s population had grown by more than a third in the course of Simón Bolívar’s young life, and its ranks swarmed, as never before, with a veritable spectrum of color. There were mestizos, mixed-race offspring of whites and Indians, almost always the product of illegitimate births. There were also pureblood Indians, although they were few, their communities reduced to a third of their original numbers. Those who weren’t killed off by disease were pushed deep into the countryside, where they subsisted as marginal tribes. Whites, on the other hand, were a full quarter of the population, but the great majority of these were either poor Canary Islanders, whom the Creoles considered racially tainted and markedly inferior to themselves, or light-skinned mestizos who passed themselves off as white. Even a child, kicking stone
s in the back alleys of this crowded city, could see that a precise, color-coded hierarchy was at work.

  The question of race had always been problematic in Spanish America. The laws that forced Indians to pay tribute to the crown, either through forced labor or taxation, had provoked violent race hatreds. As centuries passed and colored populations grew, the system for determining “whiteness” became ever more corrupt, generating more hostility. Spain began selling Cédulas de Gracias al Sacar, certificates that granted a light-skinned colored person the rights every white automatically had: the right to be educated, to be hired into better jobs, to serve in the priesthood, to hold public office, to marry whites, to inherit wealth. The sale of Cédulas created new income for Madrid; but it was also a canny social strategy. From Spain’s point of view, the ability to buy “whiteness” would raise colored hopes and keep Creole masters from getting cocky. The result, however, was very different. Race in Spanish America became an ever-greater obsession.

  By the time of Bolívar’s birth, a number of race rebellions had erupted in the colonies. The trouble began in Peru in 1781, when a man who called himself Túpac Amaru II and claimed to be a direct descendant of the last ruling Inca kidnapped a Spanish governor, had him publicly executed, and marched on Cuzco with six thousand Indians, killing Spaniards along the way. Diplomacy hadn’t worked. Túpac Amaru II had first written to the crown’s envoy, imploring him to abolish the cruelties of Indian tribute. When his letters went ignored, he gathered a vast army and issued a warning to the Creoles:

  I have decided to shake off the unbearable weight and rid this bad government of its leaders. . . . If you elect to support me, you will suffer no ill consequences, not in your lives or on your plantations, but if you reject this warning, you will face ruin and reap the fury of my legions, which will reduce your city to ashes. . . . I have seventy thousand men at my command.

  In the end, the royalist armies crushed the rebellion, costing the Indians some 100,000 lives. Túpac Amaru II was captured and brought to the main square of Cuzco, where the Spanish visitador asked him for the names of his accomplices. “I only know of two,” the prisoner replied, “and they are you and I: You as the oppressor of my country, and I because I wish to rescue it from your tyrannies.” Infuriated by the impudence, the Spaniard ordered his men to cut out the Indian’s tongue and draw and quarter him on the spot. But the four horses to which they tied his wrists and ankles would not comply. The soldiers slit Túpac Amaru’s throat instead; cut off his head, hands, and feet; and displayed these on stakes at various crossroads in the city. The torture and execution were repeated throughout the day until all members of his family were killed. Seeing his mother’s tongue ripped from her head, Túpac Amaru’s youngest child issued a piercing shriek. Legend has it that the sound of that cry was so heartrending, so unforgettable, that it signaled the end of Spanish dominion in America.

  Word of Túpac Amaru II’s fate reverberated throughout the colonies, inflaming and terrifying all who would contemplate a similar rebellion. For blacks, for whom slavery’s depredations were ever more untenable, the urge for an uprising only grew; they had nothing to lose. But for Creoles, the thought of insurgency now spurred a fear that revenge would come not only from Spain but from a massive colored population. Those fears were tested in New Granada months later, when a Creole-led army of twenty thousand marched against the viceroyalty in Bogotá to protest high taxes. One of the leaders, José Antonio Galán, swept by the fever of the moment, proclaimed the black slaves free and urged them to turn their machetes against their masters. Galán was executed—shot and hanged—as were his collaborators, and, for the moment at least, Spain succeeded in quashing the malcontents with a brutal hand.

  But Spain could hardly quash the eloquent calls for liberty that were issuing from the European Enlightenment and traveling, despite all injunctions against foreign literature, to the colonies. In 1789, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” was published in France. Five years later, one of the leading intellectuals in the viceroyalty of New Granada, Antonio Nariño, secretly translated it along with the American Declaration of Independence and smuggled the documents to like-minded Creoles throughout the continent. “L’injustice à la fin produit l’indépendance!” was the rallying cry—Injustice gives rise to independence!—a line from Voltaire’s Tancrède. Nariño was arrested and sent to the dungeons of Africa. But in the interim, as French republicans stormed the Bastille and guillotined the royal family, as Marie Antoinette’s severed head was held high for all Paris to see, a bloody echo resounded on the streets of Santo Domingo, and Venezuelans, too, took up the battle cry.

  It wasn’t the stately ascent to independence that intellectuals like Nariño had envisioned. It was an insurrection led by the son of slaves. José Leonardo Chirino—half black, half Indian—had traveled from Venezuela to Santo Domingo and seen firsthand how the slave revolt there had virtually exterminated the island’s whites and transformed that colony—once the most productive in the New World—into the black Republic of Haiti. He returned to Venezuela in 1795 and raised a revolutionary force of three hundred blacks, who plundered the haciendas, killed white landowners, and terrorized the city of Coró. But it didn’t take long for the Spanish to subdue them. Chirino was chased down and decapitated, his head displayed in an iron cage on the road between Coró and Caracas, his hands sent to two different towns due west. There was a crystal-clear lesson in this for the disgruntled Mantuanos: those willing to lay down their lives for liberty might also want equality. A revolution could truly turn.

  Simón Bolívar doubtless heard news of these events in the street, in the stables, in the kitchen, as he listened to the frightened servants. He was all of twelve years old.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rites of Passage

  A child learns more in one split second, carving a little stick, than in whole days, listening to a teacher.

  —Simón Rodríguez

  Simón’s irritable uncle and guardian, Carlos Palacios, had no patience for children. He left his nephew for months at a time as he traveled the colony, visiting the Bolívar family haciendas. He sent Simón to an elementary school run by Don Feliciano’s former secretary, the eccentric young Simón Rodríguez. It was a shabby little institution, plagued by truancies, one teacher for 114 students, and barely any supplies, but it was a salve of conscience for Don Carlos, who, with a bachelor’s logic, decided that a schoolroom was the perfect remedy for a restless boy.

  In June of 1795, as the black revolutionary Chirino fled through Venezuela’s forests, evading his angry pursuers, Simón, too, decided to run. His uncle had been away from Caracas for two and a half months. Simón gathered a few of his things and headed across town, seeking refuge in the house of his sister María Antonia, where his old wet nurse, Hipólita, worked. María Antonia and her husband, Pablo Clemente, happily took him in, registered his change of address with the courts, and made a formal request that the Palacios family—who, after all, were living on Simón’s inheritance—contribute financial support for the boy.

  Eight days later, Carlos Palacios was in court, trying to win back custody. On July 31, he filed a lawsuit against María Antonia and her husband, insisting that Simón be returned to his house, even if it had to be done by force. Pablo Clemente argued that if the child were returned to Carlos’s house, his lively mind would only continue to go ignored. “We’ve already warned his guardian about this neglect,” Clemente fumed. “The child is always wandering the streets alone—by foot as well as on horseback. What’s worse is that he’s always in the company of boys who are not of his class. The whole city has taken notice.”

  Despite those pleas, the courts of the Audiencia ordered the Clementes to return the boy to his legal guardian. Simón refused to go. No matter how much the magistrates tried to persuade him to rejoin his uncle or how much the Clementes, who ultimately didn’t want to disobey the law, urged him to go, the twelve-year-old stood his ground. “Slaves have more rights than this!�
� he insisted. “The courts have every right to dispose of property and do whatever they want with a person’s things, but not with the person himself . . . you cannot refuse someone the right to live in whatever house he pleases.”

  Peeved by the rejection, Don Carlos decided to send the boy to live with Simón Rodríguez, the public school teacher. Don Carlos assured the Audiencia that since Rodríguez was “a highly respected and capable individual, someone whose business it is to teach children, he will provide for the boy’s education and keep him in sight at all times in his very own house, which is spacious and comfortable.”

  The Audiencia readily agreed. But Simón still stubbornly refused to leave his sister’s house. Even his uncle Feliciano Palacios, whom he liked better than Carlos, was unable to budge him and ended by punching the boy’s chest in frustration. The family was in such an uproar over that assault that Pablo Clemente threatened to draw his sword. Finally, a strong black slave dragged Simón, kicking and howling, to Rodríguez’s house. On August 1, 1795, the Audiencia’s records show, the child became a ward of his twenty-five-year-old teacher.