Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Bolívar celebrated his thirtieth birthday in Araure, stopping briefly to raise a celebratory glass before he set out to face Monteverde. Even as he prepared to go, he learned that a fearless fourteen-year-old soldier, Gabriel Picón, had flung himself on a Spanish cannon and was in the battle hospital, fatally wounded. In a gesture Bolívar would repeat countless times as such sacrifices mounted, he paused to write to the boy’s father. “The glorious hero who spilled his blood on the battlefield today is not dead, nor is it feared he will die; but if he has ceased to exist, he will live forever in the hearts of fellow patriots.” Tucked into that letter was a short poem—the only verse Bolívar is known to have written. Its closing line: “Pause now your weeping to remember/Your love of country is the primary thing.”

  Joined now by Urdaneta and Girardot, Bolívar’s improvised legion of fifteen hundred finally met Monteverde in the grasslands outside Valencia. In every move, Monteverde had found himself doing too little too late, and this encounter would be no exception. Twelve hundred of his men lined up to defend the road to Valencia but, although they were superbly trained, they were too few—rapidly outnumbered and easily outflanked. Bolívar’s infantry leapt onto his cavalry’s horses and—two or more men to an animal—charged deep into enemy lines. Once inside, they sprang from the horses and attacked the regiment from within. The tactic worked. It was a long and bloody battle, but the lunge at the enemy heart inflicted punishing losses. When Bolívar’s triumphant army finally entered Valencia, Monteverde had already fled, cutting a desperate path to the fortress at Puerto Cabello.

  Caracas was next to fall. Four days later, the Marquis de Casa Léon—who had gone from serving Miranda to serving Monteverde when winds of war required it—now met with Bolívar to finalize the Spanish surrender. With him was Bolívar’s old family friend Francisco Iturbe, the man who had negotiated Bolívar’s safe passage only a year before. The ironies were rich. The marquis had harbored the once fugitive Bolívar in his house; Iturbe had saved his life. For all the blood that had been shed between republicans and royalists, certain family friendships still held. The meeting was cordial. And so, in the very halls where Miranda had submitted to the royalists, the royalists now submitted to Bolívar.

  In return for the peaceful surrender of Caracas, Bolívar offered the Spaniards amnesty, repealing the harsh words of the past. He assured them their safety; granted passports to those who requested them, including soldiers; and gave them permission to emigrate with their families and possessions, even their sidearms. His motive in this, he relayed in a letter to the municipality of Caracas, was “to show the world that even in victory the noble Americans reject rancor and offer mercy.” To President Camilo Torres in New Granada he wrote, “Here, your Excellency, is the fulfillment of my promise to liberate my country. We undertook no battle we could not win.”

  But in Caracas, there was no one to receive Casa León and Iturbe when they returned with Bolívar’s promises in hand. Monteverde, who had holed up in Puerto Cabello, had delegated all power to the governor Manuel del Fierro; and Fierro, in turn, in a breathtaking act of cowardice, had abandoned the city without so much as ratifying the treaty he had personally called for. He rushed to La Guaira in a panic, as did a thundering horde of six thousand royalists. Slipping out under cover of night, Fierro embarked secretly and set sail for Curaçao. The scene at La Guaira as he departed was raucous, tumultuous: the Spanish so desperate to board ships that they elbowed their way onto canoes only to be capsized in a rough black sea. Eventually fifty ships ferried them to safety. In Caracas, where an unforgiving heat choked the city, the royalists left behind had no recourse but to abandon their possessions, cast off the clothes they had heaped on their backs, and try to make a swift passage overland to the fortress of Puerto Cabello.

  Bolívar entered Caracas on August 6, 1813. An assiduous student of Julius Caesar, he knew how a conqueror should make his appearance. He arranged to be met at the gates of Caracas as Caesar’s chariot had been met in Rome—by radiant girls in the flower of adolescence, dressed in white, bearing laurels, and casting garlands. In Caesar’s case, the chariot had been drawn by white horses; in Bolívar’s, it was drawn by the daughters of the most prominent families of Caracas. A good number of the city’s thirty thousand residents were there, lining the roads in a noisy throng. The Admirable Campaign, as the past six months of war came to be called, was celebrated as heartily as a beleaguered population could manage. There were rounds of artillery, a din of cathedral bells, Te Deums to liberty, and, at the end, the title of Dictator and Liberator was bestowed on the returning hero.

  No one could doubt that Bolívar’s victories were astounding. He had started eight months before with fewer than five hundred men and bested Spain’s formidable war machine. In contrast, Napoleon, with a colossal army of 500,000, was limping out of Spain at about the same time, on his way to losing the war in Europe. As Bolívar rode in with his exuberant mustache and dazzling smile, stepping off his cart to embrace residents of his native city, he was as loved as he ever would be. Colorful silks hung from balconies, horns blared a joyful noise, roses rained from windows, people clamored to get a glimpse of the great man and his liberating army: the roar of jubilation was heard for miles around. So glorious was the reception—so realized the dream—that Bolívar could not restrain tears of joy. An observant witness might have seen the bright-eyed dog trotting at Bolívar’s side, the faithful mastiff Nevado, who had been given to him during the campaign and would accompany him for eight more years. That bystander might have noticed, too, that one of the girls in white, a nubile nineteen-year-old with lustrous hair and black eyes, was in palpable thrall to the hero she was ferrying. Bolívar himself had noted the animation in her face.

  She was Josefina “Pepita” Machado, daughter of a prosperous bourgeois family in Caracas. She was not a Mantuana or a titled Spaniard—not endowed by birth to expect society’s favors. She was a young woman who had come of age in a time of bewildering upheaval, who very well may have understood that, in revolution, the world was fluid, easily altered, and that the illustrious warrior in the rig behind her might offer a rare chance. We cannot know who was more avid in the pursuit, but as fireworks illuminated the summer evening—as dungeons emptied of rebel prisoners and Caracans celebrated into the night—Pepita became Bolívar’s lover. She would continue to have a hold on him for six more years.

  History does not call her a beauty. She had full lips, a hearty, infectious laugh, and an undeniably appealing figure; she could dance. But apart from her kittenish ways, she was ordinary of face. She was also obdurate, outspoken, feisty, and Bolívar’s officers would come to detest her. With her mother and sister in tow, she followed Bolívar everywhere, even onto the battlefield when it proved necessary.

  There is scant evidence of Bolívar’s romantic life between his time in Paris and that August day when Caracas welcomed him as its savior, but the legend is rich and well known. He was an openly flirtatious bachelor—an enthusiastic if fickle suitor—and, in every city he liberated, there were lovely maidens to greet him and ambitious parents to spur them on. After all, not only was he a hero, he was a very rich man. We can be sure that, during those footloose years, Pepita Machado was not the only “nymph in white” to win his attentions. But in Pepita, he found a woman who was at once a revolutionary and a striver. Comfortable in his ambit of war, she was also acutely aware of the social luster that her romance with the Liberator offered. Bolívar, on the other hand, was a soldier in the flush of victory, a prodigal returned home after many a hardship, and he plunged into the affair spiritedly. Eventually, Pepita gained his trust and even participated in matters of state, to her detractors’ dismay. “The most important business,” one grumbled, “would end up in the hands of those who fawned over him, especially in the hands of Señorita Josefina, his infamous mistress, a conniving and vengeful woman if ever there was one. I’ve been in the company of that siren more than a hundred times and I have to confess I can’t
imagine what he saw in her.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Legions of Hell

  All murderers shall be punished, unless of course they kill in large numbers, to the sound of trumpets.

  —Voltaire

  For all the happy distractions Pepita provided, there was a nation to found, order to wrest from chaos. It would not be easy. Fifteen hundred Spaniards had remained in the capital and, in the course of a full-scale evacuation, homes had been sacked, shops and warehouses looted. Bolívar secured the streets, promised a peaceful transition, installed former president Cristóbal Mendoza as governor, and invited foreigners to immigrate and help rebuild the country. But he made no effort to restore congress or hold an election. He arrogated all power to himself. He had his reasons. He would not tolerate, he said, the fractious government that had scuttled the 1810 republic in the first place. When the governor of Barinas called for the restoration of the old federalist constitution—the very document Bolívar blamed for the demise of the first republic—Bolívar balked, saying that henceforward Barinas would be ruled out of Caracas. He insisted that the new republic, later known as the “second republic,” be conceived as a united whole. He argued that there were strong, unified governments in France and England; and as federalist as the United States had become, it had a centralized treasury and War Department.

  It didn’t stop there. Even as Santiago Mariño—liberator and supreme chief of Venezuela’s eastern provinces—insisted on separate states in Barcelona and Cumaná, each with its own commander, Bolívar responded that Venezuela should be one polity with one head of state. That head, by implication, would be Simón Bolívar. Two independent authorities, he told Mariño, “will look ridiculous.” He went on to say that Venezuela not only should remain one, but should unite with New Granada, thereby “forming a nation that inspires respect. How can we think of dividing anything in two?” Mariño refused to hear of it. He was not alone. As prominent republicans gathered around the country, they began to grouse about Bolívar’s arbitrary authoritarianism. Home had turned out to be a devilishly unruly place.

  But Bolívar was not home for long. Despite his eagerness to get on with the business of government, it soon became clear that Spain would not go so gently. Perched a little more than a hundred miles away in the fort of Puerto Cabello, General Monteverde now flatly refused to acknowledge independence. “Spain does not treat with insurgents,” he responded when the treaty was delivered to him under a flag of truce, and then promptly imprisoned the priest who brought it. He rejected Bolívar’s offer to exchange prisoners of war, no matter how advantageous the trade. Boosted by an infusion of twelve hundred fresh troops, Monteverde’s army attacked the republicans on the plains of Valencia in late September of 1813, and was roundly pounded back. That rebel victory came at some cost. One of Bolívar’s ablest officers, the valiant and much loved Granadan Atanasio Girardot, was killed by a musket ball to the forehead as he tried to plant the republican flag on high ground.

  When Bolívar heard of the young colonel’s valorous death, he mourned deeply. But in it he saw an opportunity to inspire men to a higher zeal; he decided to stage a funeral worthy of a great hero. He ordered Girardot’s remains returned to his birthplace in Antioquia and his heart carried in an elaborate procession to Caracas. So it was that Girardot’s heart was cut from his chest, placed in a gilded urn, and borne to the capital by an army chaplain. A corps of drummers led the cortège, and they rolled a slow, mournful dirge as Bolívar and three companies of mounted dragoons in full regalia rode somberly in the rear.

  The theater had its effect. Patriot generals made bold by grief wasted no time in attacking the Spaniards; they succeeded in wounding Monteverde before capturing and killing his fearsome adjutant Colonel Zuazola, the butcher of human ears. But these advances only quickened the fears of blacks, who continued to be apprehensive of a white-led revolution. A counter-insurrection of slaves ripped through the countryside, surprising the patriots with its rage. On the prairies of Calabozo, rough-riding plainsmen, eager to raid the rich, declared their loyalty to Monteverde and swept into republican strongholds, plundering haciendas and massacring their residents. By November, a galvanized Bolívar was back on the battlefield, leading the troops. By then, too, his war to the death had resumed with vehemence. As a result, the entire population was swept into the business of combat: wives, children, cooks, servants, surgeons, musicians—even traveling brothels—followed soldiers to battle. Like a mighty river, the mass of humanity moved overland, pots clanging, babies screeching, laundry fluttering in the wind. Among Bolívar’s retinue were Pepita, possibly her mother and sister (without whom Pepita seldom traveled), as well as his old black nursemaid, Hipólita, who cooked, tended the wounded, and ironed his clothes.

  A British traveler in the service of Spain now noted a marked change in Caracas. Spaniards were being dragged to the dungeons, made to surrender their wealth to patriot coffers. The unwilling were taken to the marketplace and shot. Not outright, but limb by limb, so that onlookers could watch them wriggle as musicians struck up lively airs. These spectacles caused such merriment that the multitude, provoked to an obscene frenzy, would finally cry, “Kill him!” and the executioner would end the victim’s suffering with a final bullet to the brain. A Spaniard in agony had become a source of amusement, a ready carousel of laughs.

  Outside Caracas patriots hardly fared better. The “Legions of Hell”—hordes of wild and truculent plainsmen—rode out of the barren llanos to punish anyone who dared call himself a rebel. Leading these colored troops was the fearsome José Tomás Boves. A Spanish sailor from Asturias, Boves had been arested at sea for smuggling, sent to the dungeons of Puerto Cabello, then exiled to the Venezuelan prairie, where he fell in with marauding cowboys. He was fair-haired, strong-shouldered, with an enormous head, piercing blue eyes, and a pronounced sadistic streak. Loved by his feral cohort with a passion verging on worship, he led them to unimaginable violence. As Bolívar’s aide Daniel O’Leary later wrote, “Of all the monsters produced by the revolution . . . Boves was the worst.” He was a barbarian of epic proportions, an Attila for the Americas. Recruited by Monteverde but beholden to no one, Boves raised a formidable army of black, pardo, and mestizo llaneros by promising them open plunder, rich booty, and a chance to exterminate the Creole class.

  The llaneros were accomplished horsemen, well trained in the art of warfare. They needed few worldly goods, rode bareback, covered their nakedness with loincloths. They consumed only meat, which they strapped to their horses’ flanks and cured by the sweat of the racing animals. They made tents from hides, slept on earth, reveled in hardship. They lived on the open prairie, which was parched by heat, impassable in the rains. Their weapon of choice was a long lance of alvarico palm, hardened to a sharp point in the campfire. They were accustomed to making rapid raids, swimming on horseback through rampant floods, the sum of their earthly possessions in leather pouches balanced on their heads or clenched between their teeth. They could ride at a gallop, like the armies of Genghis Khan, dangling from the side of a horse, so that their bodies were rendered invisible, untouchable, their killing lances straight and sure against a baffled enemy. In war, they had little to lose or gain, no allegiance to politics. They were rustlers and hated the ruling class, which to them meant the Creoles; they fought for the abolition of laws against their kind, which the Spaniards had promised; and they believed in the principles of harsh justice, in which a calculus of bloodshed prevailed.

  At first, Bolívar easily routed Boves’s undisciplined troops. On October 14, he sent his fiercest colonel, Campo Elías, and an army of twenty-five hundred men against the llaneros in Calabozo and nearly eradicated them, along with their horses. After the battle, Campo Elías took hundreds of prisoners and slaughtered them all. But Boves got away. In time, Boves formed alliances with similarly enterprising Spaniards—Juan Yañez and Francisco Tomás Morales, a former haberdasher and a former butcher, respectively—who had scrapped their way up
the royalist ranks and created marauding armies of their own. By the start of the following year, Boves and Morales had raised a formidable horde of seven thousand roughriders with machetes; Yañez, in turn, had leveled Barinas, killing every last inhabitant, branding corpses’ foreheads with R for “republican,” and burning the city to the ground. In the Spanish bastion of Puerto Cabello, the wounded Monteverde had been deposed, deported, and replaced by the equally ruthless Colonel Salomón. In the stronghold of Coró, Field Marshal Juan Manuel Cajigal—who would eventually be made captain-general—sent out the city’s governor, José de Cevallos, to join Yañez in a full-frontal attack on Bolívar. The republicans and royalists traded one victory after another, massacring each other’s ranks at every turn. Atrocities became so common on either side that no army could say it had a moral advantage.

  It soon became clear to Bolívar, especially after the first pitched battle of his career at Araure on December 4, 1813, that although he might triumph—as he did, and brilliantly—his army simply couldn’t recruit soldiers as quickly and effectively as the enemy. For every thrashing the republicans could deliver, the Legions of Hell would come hurtling back like the mythical Hydra, with ever more heads and a greater fury. The reason for this was obvious, although republicans were slow to see its significance: the Spanish had race on their side. The vast majority of the nation’s people—black, Indian, mixed-blood—were acting on age-old democratic impulse. They were joining an effort to squelch the people of privilege, level the classes. But it was a narrow interpretation of democracy, promoted by Spanish generals, and blind to the revolutionary struggle at hand. The colored masses understood that the world was unjust, that the Creoles who lorded over them were rich and white, but they hadn’t understood the true pyramid of oppression. They hadn’t factored that the roots of misery were in empire, that Spain had constructed that unjust world carefully, that tyranny was rooted in the colonial, and that its system had been in place for over three hundred years.