Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Colonel Castillo, along with his paltry three hundred troops, was getting ready to defend New Granada against an impending invasion by Monteverde. As soon as he learned that Bolívar had penetrated the interior as far as Ocaña, he sent a messenger asking for Bolívar’s help. Bolívar demurred, replying that he needed Cartagena’s approval. In truth, he was seeking approval for something else: the ability to lead his troops over the border into Venezuela. For weeks now, he had prepared his men to invade his homeland. If he was going to fight Monteverde’s army, which had already spilled over into the Granadan valley of Cúcuta, he was not going to do it under someone else’s command.

  There were other reasons Bolívar needed to buy time. His army was experiencing rampant desertions. Many of the recruits Bolívar had gathered on his triumphant march up the Magdalena had lost their enthusiasm for warfare, either because the booty fell short of their expectations or because they had no desire to risk their lives to liberate lands beyond their own. Bolívar left his army in charge of his uncle, José Félix Ribas, while he traveled to Mompox, appropriating munitions and recruiting fresh troops from both sides of the river. By February 9, he had increased his ranks to four hundred good men; President Torices instructed him to join them to Castillo’s three hundred and march against the Spanish in Cúcuta. Only then would he be willing to listen to Bolívar’s request to take his soldiers into Venezuela.

  Wanting to please his benefactor, Bolívar left for Cúcuta immediately with his army, cutting a path to the high, windswept cordilleras, where desolate plateaus stretched as far as the eye could see. His soldiers carried what food they could; there were no villages along the way, nor any sign of human habitation, except for the odd hut on the mountainside. Few braved the punishing journey easily, for they were river dwellers, born and bred in the languid tropics, unprepared for the cold and vertiginous terrain. They made their way through February rain, across slippery rock, and deep into humid canyons, edging along cliffs where one false step would hurl them to sure death. In Alto de la Aguada they caught a glimpse of the royalist army, guarding a high pass as Monteverde mobilized his invasion of New Granada. Bolívar decided to send out a spy with a letter containing the lie that Castillo and his republican forces were advancing from Pamplona. The spy was captured, the letter confiscated, and the Spanish general Ramón Correa took the bait. He abandoned the pass and headed for Pamplona, thinking he would surprise Castillo en route. When Bolívar fell on his rear, the Spanish scattered in stupefied retreat. Correa limped his way back to Cúcuta to regroup his forces.

  In time, Bolívar was joined by Castillo, and together they pressed ahead, until by dawn of February 28—the last Sunday of Lent—their troops crossed the Zulia River, just west of Cúcuta. General Correa was in church, attending Mass at nine in the morning, when one of his officers burst in to warn him of the approaching patriot army. Hastily, he rallied his troops and attempted to take the offensive. The Battle of Cúcuta was bloody, uneven—Correa’s troops were double the force of Bolívar’s—but just as the republican effort seemed all but lost, Bolívar ordered Ribas’s division to make a full-bayonet, uphill charge. The bout was rabid, quick, relentless, inflicting countless casualties; in the skirmish, General Correa fell to the ground with a wound to his head. That brazen charge—a desperate act in the face of superior force—succeeded in stunning the Spaniards. They fled that border city in alarm, leaving Bolívar in control of a vast supply of food and ammunition, and a million pesos in merchandise, which the rich royalists of Maracaibo had transported to Cúcuta for safekeeping. At the cost of only two dead and fourteen wounded, Bolívar had secured New Granada’s freedom.

  The Granadans wasted no time in thanking him. Bolívar was lauded in Cartagena, Tunja, and Bogotá. President Torices awarded him the title of honorary citizen and he was promoted to brigadier general. The young Venezuelan had met every challenge, conquered every obstacle, including a raging fever as he had scaled the heights of the cordillera. Within a few months, in a rare show of solidarity, Camilo Torres and Antonio Nariño met in Tunja to confirm the Union of New Granada and to proclaim its independence from Spain.

  Even so, Bolívar felt his work had hardly begun. Venezuela was yet to be free; Spain had yet to be ejected from the continent. Restless and anxious, he dispatched the tall, elegant Ribas to meet with Torres and Nariño, and argue the case for a Venezuelan invasion. In the interim, he rallied his soldiers, paid them with the booty he had captured, and then, superseding his command, led them across the border into Venezuela. Stopping in the rugged Andean town of San Antonio, he spoke to them of greater sacrifices. “Loyal republicans!” he appealed fervidly, “America awaits its liberty and salvation from your hands!” The fortunes of New Granada, Bolívar told them, were tied inextricably to those of its neighbor. He had believed it from the beginning and he believed it now. “If one country wears chains,” he wrote days later in an impassioned letter to President Torres, “the other is equally enslaved. Spanish rule is a gangrene that starts in one place and then overwhelms everything else, unless it is hewn off like an infected limb.”

  But the prospect of liberating a foreign land did not sit well with all his men, most notably Colonel Castillo and his able sergeant major Francisco de Paula Santander. Although Castillo had been thrilled by Bolívar’s victory at Cúcuta and said so in early reports, he was bitterly opposed to engaging Granadan soldiers in Venezuela. More, Castillo had been stung by Bolívar’s promotion; he considered himself the exclusive commander of his troops, and now President Torices had named Bolívar chief of the whole liberating expedition. A deep fissure entered Bolívar’s ranks—a rancorous envy—and it would have profound implications for his future.

  For two months, Castillo worked to undermine Bolívar, making no effort to mask his pique. He bickered about rank, lodged formal complaints about the new brigadier general’s allocation of the Cúcuta booty, railed to anyone who would listen about his “mad undertaking” to free Venezuela. On May 7, when Bolívar finally received approval to march as far as Mérida and Trujillo, Castillo patently refused to go. An invasion of Venezuela, he argued, was anathema to his principles. Bolívar tried to calm him, sending a friendly letter as a palliative. But Castillo was determined to thwart the action. He resigned abruptly, taking one hundred of his men with him, and left the rest of his troops under the command of his junior officer Francisco Santander.

  Santander, too, was a proud Granadan, put off by the brash, willful Bolívar. At first, he ignored the brigadier’s order to cross into Venezuela and stood fast in defiance. An angry Bolívar confronted the mutinous officer. “March at once!” he barked. “You have no choice in the matter! March! Either you shoot me or, by God, I will certainly shoot you.” Santander obeyed, but he never forgot the humiliation. A lifetime and many victories later, the insult would continue to gall him. For Bolívar, the clashes with Castillo and Santander would mark the beginning of a long struggle with his subordinates. He would learn in time that for every revolutionary brother there was a ready traitor; and for all his vision of a unified Colombia, there were small-minded obstructionists, happy to lord over their tiny turfs.

  NOT ALL HIS OFFICERS WERE so perverse. For the time being at least, Bolívar could count on men like José Félix Ribas in his showy red cap, or the fearless youth Atanasio Girardot, or even his hot-tempered old neighbor Antonio Nicolás Briceño; or stalwarts like Rafael Urdaneta, who would be with him until the last and wrote him now to say, “General, if two men are enough to liberate the fatherland, I am ready to go with you.” With these and a small “liberating army” of five hundred, he set out to mount a swift, decisive campaign that would surprise the enemy at every turn and spill like quicksilver toward Caracas.

  Anyone with the slightest judgment would have seen how foolhardy an operation it was. As soon as he was given the approval to march, Bolívar wrote to the newly installed president of the union, Antonio Nariño, to tell him about the true condition of his troops. Many were hungry
, fevered by plague, in tatters. Some had deserted. Others, in distant garrisons, hadn’t been paid in weeks and had to beg handouts from the locals. Meat was rare. Rice nonexistent. Weapons faulty. The march to Trujillo promised to tax his soldiers further, Bolívar added, taking them over difficult, unyielding terrain. They could count on no food along the way: farmers, devastated by the war, had not planted; ranchers had lost their livestock to marauders. He pleaded with the president to issue him the badly needed ammunition and funds. “I will await the result of this request when I get to Trujillo,” he ended confidently. “The campaign will depend on it.”

  But when Bolívar’s army swept down from the Andes into the green vale of Mérida on May 23, they found no enemy to oppose them. The Spaniards, having heard of Bolívar’s successes in New Granada and expecting a much larger force, had evacuated the city. As Bolívar entered Mérida, its residents, ardent partisans of independence, swarmed down the road to greet him, and, leading them with a broad smile, was the former president of the republic Cristóbal Mendoza. The city was hung with bright bunting, Bolívar was proclaimed “Liberator,” and six hundred recruits signed on to his cause, many of them sons of the region’s aristocratic families. A good number were royalist defectors, leading one Spanish commandant to posit that they had been stealth revolutionaries all along—a veritable Trojan horse.

  To lead the new troops from Mérida, Bolívar installed Vicente Campo Elías, a Spaniard by birth who so loathed his native land that he had murdered some of his own relatives and vowed that when he had finished killing every last Spaniard in Venezuela, he would turn his sword on himself and end the accursed race. The wrath against the colonizer was at such an extreme within Bolívar’s ranks, in fact, that for some of his officers killing Spaniards became a goal in itself. This had not occurred in a vacuum: in nearby Barinas, the king’s commandant had just posted a Royal Order that called for the extermination of all avowed republicans—without exceptions. Nicolás Briceño, who had once channeled aggression into lawsuits and pitchfork assaults against his old neighbor and cousin-in-law Bolívar, now went on a fanatical rampage. He took off on a bloody campaign through the mountainous terrain with his 143 soldiers—men who had never been on a horse, never carried weapons, whose only qualification to recommend them was an all-consuming racial fury. In the town of San Cristóbal, Briceño published a broadside exhorting slaves to murder their Spanish masters, and then, to prove his point, had two quiet, unassuming Spaniards decapitated on the square. He sent one of the heads—along with a letter signed in the victim’s blood—to Castillo. The other he dispatched to Bolívar.

  Bolívar was horrified. He denounced it as “the work of Satan” and sent an officer to rein in Briceño. But by then Briceño was listening to no one. Like other renegade caudillos, he saw himself as the anointed liberator. “The Devil Briceño,” as he subsequently became known, declared that any ordinary soldier who presented him with twenty Spanish heads would become a second lieutenant; thirty made him a lieutenant; fifty, a full-fledged captain. But two months later Briceño was overcome by royalist forces, taken prisoner along with eight other patriot leaders, and shot. The news came as a great blow to Bolívar. He had disapproved of Briceño’s conduct, but no one could fault the man’s patriotism and passion for liberty. He had waged an unconditional war against the Spanish and, for a while, succeeded in terrifying them. His ruthlessness made a deep and lasting impression on Bolívar. He needed to turn that angry energy into a unified war machine.

  On June 14, Bolívar’s army liberated the province of Trujillo much as it had liberated Mérida: he ordered his spies to penetrate the royalist camp and persuade the enemy that his troops were fierce, indestructible, and numbered in the thousands; the Spaniards fled at the prospect of his advance. At nine o’clock on that warm summer morning, the Liberator’s army rode into that ancient city without so much as a sword wagged against them. The republicans received the hero with unalloyed joy, sending their pretty adolescent daughters to lay wreaths of laurel on his head.

  Bolívar was well aware that he was waging psychological warfare. Surprise and deception had been his ablest adjutants, striking fear into the enemy wherever he went. His soldiers, like him, were self-taught; they had learned war as they went, in the roar and clang of battle. Some were as young as thirteen, filled with nothing so much as a child’s sense of invincibility. They understood that they were inferior to their Spanish counterparts in every way—in weapons, training, and experience—but they were also discovering that, with stealth, ingenuity, and swift guerrilla strikes, they could confuse their opponents. There was another advantage: the Spanish were an imported population and, therefore, limited in number; Americans, the thinking went, were a boundless resource, and vastly more acclimated to the terrain. In the end, nothing bred confidence like victory, and rebel victories were growing exponentially, lending the sheen of indomitability to what had once seemed an impossible venture.

  After an exultant arrival in Trujillo, Bolívar sat down to think through a strategy he had had in mind for some time. In Mérida, he had complained about the enemy’s disdain for rules of war, railing vociferously against their summary execution of eight republican prisoners of war, including Briceño. “We’ve run out of goodness,” he had announced, vowing to avenge those murders. “Now that the enemy has forced us to a deadly war, we will eradicate them from America, and this land will finally be purged of the monsters that infest it. Our hatred will be implacable, and our war will be to the death.” It had been just another bit of battlefield rhetoric, a timely flourish, but now, on the occasion of his victory in Trujillo, he considered writing it into law. All night he pondered it, and by dawn, he had made a decision: Miranda’s revolution and the first republic had failed because of a sloppy tolerance—a lack of mettle. He would not let it happen again. Before daybreak on the 15th, he called a council of war to announce his new edict. In it, all Spaniards in Venezuela would be targets in a war of extermination, unless they renounced King Ferdinand and fought on the American side. Americans who had once fought for the royals, on the other hand, would face no punishment. The language was brutally clear:

  SPANIARDS AND CANARY ISLANDERS:

  COUNT ON DEATH, EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN INDIFFERENT.

  AMERICANS: COUNT ON LIFE, EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN GUILTY.

  Not one member on his war council opposed the decree. Indeed, they all roundly approved it. Persuaded that he had found a way to unite mavericks like Briceño and harness their rage, Bolívar signed the document that very day. For all the clarity he thought it would give the war, the ultimate consequence of the decree was a storm of violence.

  History has not been kind to Bolívar’s decision to proclaim war to the death. Some historians have called it an outright abomination. Others have said it was a rash act, impetuous in the extreme, and unnecessary. United States politicians would later use it to decry the bloody, Jacobin nature of Bolívar’s revolution, and the inherent barbarity of the Spanish American people. Still others have rushed to Bolívar’s defense, claiming that his was the logical response to three hundred years of inhuman oppression and the deadly Royal Order against the patriots that Spain had just decreed. Perhaps more persuasive is the argument that Bolívar’s edict tried to make clear that what was being fought was not a civil struggle but an uncompromising war against an outside invader; with it, the ejection of Spain became a manifest goal and Americans—regardless of race or ideology—were the heroes. “Either Americans allow themselves to be exterminated gradually,” Bolívar argued, “or they undertake to destroy an evil race that, while it breathes, works tirelessly toward our annihilation.”

  The response was immediate. After Bolívar’s proclamation, hundreds of royalist troops defected to the republican side; wherever the liberating army marched, it found soldiers willing to join it. Under the slack leadership of Miranda, as Bolívar knew very well, republican troops had deserted in droves, betting on the likelihood that if they defected and fought fo
r Spain, they would be spared Spanish cruelties, and, if they were captured by lax, softhearted patriots, they would likely be pardoned. Now there was no doubt about it: Bolívar’s patriots were forgiving no one. It may have been a horrifying declaration, but, for the short run, it worked: it worried the royalists and fortified the republican will. In the long run, however—as history would show all too vividly—it engulfed Venezuela in a sea of blood.

  WITH HIS VICTORIES IN MÉRIDA and Trujillo, Bolívar’s campaign was technically over. His bosses in New Granada had given him explicit orders to stop; he was not to proceed to Caracas. But when Bolívar learned that his fellow republican in the east Santiago Mariño was marching toward the capital with a force of five thousand, he could not restrain his impulse to best him. In a letter to Camilo Torres, he wrote with extraordinary frankness, “I worry that our illustrious brothers-in-arms will liberate our capital before we can share the glory. But we will fly, and I hope no liberator will tread the ruins of Caracas before me.”

  By the end of June, Bolívar and his army were on the march again, headed over a perilous mountain route toward the plains of Barinas. When Monteverde heard of it, he went south to meet them. Although the Spanish were greater in numbers and better disciplined, the republicans proved more nimble. Colonel Ribas won a decisive victory against a Spanish division on the outskirts of Niquitao, descending from glacial peaks to engage them in hand-to-hand combat. He took more than four hundred prisoners and succeeded in drafting them all to the republican cause. Only eighty miles south, Bolívar rode across the dusty plains of Barinas in a sweltering heat. He made a rapid, preemptive strike on the city of Barinas and took it on July 6, forcing the Spanish into a frenzied northern retreat. Without delay, he chased after them and, as he went, joined forces with Ribas and Girardot. The speed and audacity of republican movements confounded the enemy completely. In skirmish after skirmish, the patriots emerged victorious, so that in the course of a hundred miles, they were able to scatter two divisions and send the Spaniards flying for their lives. Within ten days, they had destroyed, imprisoned, or disbanded five thousand enemy troops.