Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Bolívar was not pleased about Piar’s order to kill all Spanish prisoners—he had made it clear that the war to the death was over—but he could not deny that Piar’s victories had helped establish the patriot stronghold he needed in Guayana. He praised Piar, promoted him to a full general, and tried to appease him.

  Piar pretended to comply with Bolívar and swore loyalty to him publicly, but he was singularly suspicious of his designs. Piar had led brilliantly, fought bravely, not for the glory of the Liberator, but for the advancement of his own burning ambitions. He resented Bolívar’s assumption that the region was now his to usurp and control. Unlike Mariño in the east, or Arismendi on the island of Margarita, Piar did not have a natural territorial constituency. He had won every acre of his domain on the Orinoco by dint of furious battle. His troops were largely illiterate pardos, marginalized men who obeyed him with unconditional loyalty. Although he rarely admitted it, he himself was pardo—handsome, blue-eyed, ruddy-skinned, flamboyant, with a marked predilection for violence. And although he claimed to be descended from Portuguese nobility, he harbored deep resentments against Creole whites.

  He had been born in Dutch Curaçao, the son of a merchant marine and a mulatta. Uneducated but fiercely proud, he had set out at a young age to make something of himself. He was quick, intelligent, resourceful, and proficient in a number of languages. Other than his native Dutch and Spanish, he could speak French, English, and communicate with blacks in their own languages—Papiamento, Patois, Guyanese. Above all, he was a skilled warrior who had proven his mettle under Miranda, liberated the east alongside Mariño, plotted a wider revolution with Bolívar, and distinguished himself in battles on land and sea. Time had brought him to this remote area of Venezuela, where he had raised a fearsome army of disaffected men. Having labored to dissociate himself from Bolívar and Mariño, he was now in the frustrating position of having his territory wrested from his control. For all his seeming compliance with Bolívar, Piar made no secret of his antipathy toward the man. Only three years before, he had joined Ribas in exiling the Liberator, after all; he had fired on Bolívar’s ship off the coast of Margarita, had set out with a handful of soldiers to gun him down in Carúpano. It should have surprised no one that Piar now began to look for ways to undermine Bolívar’s authority in Guayana. At first, he tried to foment a revolt among the indigenous people of the Caroní missions, who were under his command. Failing that, he decided to provoke a pardo uprising in Maturín: the stretch of land between Guayana and Cumaná, where the ruling governor was black.

  Disobeying Bolívar’s orders blatantly now, Piar announced that he was in poor health and wanted to extract himself from the battlefield to take a long needed respite. Bolívar balked at this. “The nation needs you,” he replied. “If you were my chief, I wouldn’t abandon you.” But eventually, on June 30, he accepted Piar’s request for leave and granted him a passport to travel to Curaçao.

  Piar did not go home to Curaçao. He began canvassing nearby towns, trying to incite racial anger by claiming that Bolívar had discharged him because of his color. He told one of his officers: “I rose to General in Chief by dint of my sword and chance, but because I am a mulatto, I am not allowed to govern in this Republic. . . . I have resolved, on my honor, to fight for those who spill their lifeblood in battle, only to be chained more and more to a shameful slavery; I’m off to Maturín and to the ends of this earth, if necessary, to lead those who are powerless apart from their brawn.” But on Piar’s arrival in Maturín, the black governor, Andrés Rojas, scoffed openly at his proposition of a race rebellion.

  When Bolívar heard of it, he erupted in molten anger. He refused, he told one of his officers, to be undermined again, as Castillo had undermined him in Cartagena, as Ribas and Piar had done in Carúpano, as Mariño and Bermúdez had in Guiria. “If I have been the essence of moderation until now, it has been out of prudence, not weakness. . . . As long as I breathe with a sword in hand, there will be no tyrants here, no anarchy.” Getting wind of Bolívar’s fury, Piar fled toward Cumaná and tried to find shelter with his old leader Mariño, with whom he had had a long and warm friendship, but there was little Mariño could do for him. On the 23rd of July, Bolívar signed the order to arrest Piar. He instructed Bermúdez, now one of his most trusted officers, to hunt him down. Bermúdez was only too happy to comply: he had always held Piar accountable for the death of his own brother. He rode south immediately to make the capture. General Soublette was to bring charges; Admiral Brion was to head the court-martial. After a sleepless night, worrying about the implications of such an action, Bolívar dictated a manifesto to his secretary:

  I want to denounce openly the most atrocious crime a man can commit against society, government and nation. General Piar . . . has slandered the government, proclaimed a hateful race war, instigated civil disobedience, invited anarchy, encouraged assassination, plunder and disorder. . . . What exactly is it that General Piar actually wants for men of color? Equality? No: They already have it, and General Piar himself is irrevocable proof. . . . General Piar, with his senseless, abominable conspiracy has tried to inflame a war between brothers in which the cruel would slaughter the innocent for having been born with a lighter skin. . . . General Piar has broken laws, conspired against the system, disobeyed the government, resisted censure, deserted the army and fled like a coward; in such ways does he put himself outside the law: his destruction is a duty, and his destroyer will be a helping hand.

  Piar was arrested and brought to Angostura. As the revolution raged, a war council was convoked, bringing together some of the highest officers in the patriot army. When the trial opened on October 4, Piar made no effort to defend himself, except to declare that he was innocent of all charges. Perhaps he couldn’t imagine that someone of his stature could possibly be found guilty—the room contained so many of his friends. In any case, he left all arguments to his counsel, Fernando Galindo—a wellborn Creole and distant relative of Bolívar’s—who spoke eloquently on his behalf:

  The accused is the same General Piar who so often has saved the life of the Republic, who has broken the chains of countless Venezuelans, who has liberated whole provinces, whose sword is more feared by the Spaniards than Napoleon’s, and in whose presence tyrants tremble. . . . Where are his conspiratorial plans? Where is the list of his conspirators? Where are the proclamations urging the masses to rise? Where, finally, are the preparations for such a colossal, foolish enterprise?

  In the end, however, the war council found Piar guilty on all counts: insubordination, sedition, conspiracy, desertion. The verdict read out on the 15th of October was unanimous; the sentence, death. When Bolívar was presented with the results, it is said he wept. But he signed the death sentence all the same, taking care to strike the clause that stripped Piar of his rank as general.

  At five o’clock on the following afternoon, General Piar was led up the hill to Angostura’s main square. A crowd of townspeople awaited him, as did all the soldiers who were garrisoned there. He seemed calm, unfazed, likely believing to the end that his sentence would be commuted, that he would be exiled—that one way or the other, Bolívar would not dare to have him shot. He listened as the condemnation was read yet again, staring haughtily at the crowd, tapping his right foot impatiently. But Bolívar never appeared, nor did he send a last-minute order granting the condemned man clemency. As the men of the firing squad filed out and shouldered their muskets, Piar understood he would be shown no mercy. He refused to cover his eyes, tore the kerchief from his face twice, then, when it was applied for the third time, he flung open his cape to expose his chest and instructed his executioners to aim well. As twenty bullets ripped the air, he cried out, “Viva la Patria!”

  Bolívar was in his headquarters when those shots rang out and the citizens of Angostura took up the dead man’s shout: “Viva la Patria!” Tears welled in his eyes once more. But he never regretted his decision. For all Piar’s bravery in battle—for all his value as a skilled general
—he had traits Bolívar despised: he was a divider, a racialist, a man who prized his career above the collective good. Many years later, Bolívar would say: “The death of General Piar was a political necessity that saved the country. . . . Never was there a death more useful, more politic, and at the same time more deserved.”

  He set about explaining the execution to his soldiers. It was no simple matter, as there were pardos among his troops, many of them proud of Piar’s victories. But, as Bolívar told them now, an army needed to be single-minded. Division was unacceptable. Race, though it had plagued the Americas through three hundred years of difficult history, was no longer a justifiable reason for discord. The power of the warlord had to yield to the power of the commander in chief; and even the most laureled general could not be above the law no matter his color. Bolívar assured his soldiers that the promises he had made were real: slaves were free, men were equal, and citizens stood to enjoy all the benefits of an orderly government. As time passed, Bolívar proved less strict with other generals—he did not punish Mariño, for instance, although Mariño had a long history of flagrant insubordination—and, as a result, some wondered why Bolívar had chosen a pardo to make his point. But there was no question that the republican military, which had been fragmented for so long, was gathering force under Bolívar. Its legions numbered almost thirteen thousand now. Bolívar, confirmed as the supreme chief of the republic, busied himself making warlords into generals. He created a general staff to oversee their operations. He established courts-martial, insisted on due process. Ever more unified, more organized—with a pay structure written into law—Bolívar’s military machine, one might even say, was born with the fall of Piar.

  MARIÑO’S TRESPASSES INDEED HAD BEEN grave. In late March of 1817, when Bolívar had set out for Guayana, he had ordered Mariño to march west and await further instructions. But no sooner had Bolívar vanished than Mariño sprang to assume his mantle. He went east instead—to a town near his old base in Cumaná—and there began consolidating his own power. He countermanded orders, flouted the chain of command, outraged his officers; perhaps even worse, he ignored desperate calls for help from troops Bolívar had left behind in Barcelona. As a result, more than four hundred soldiers garrisoned in the convent’s Casa Fuerte, along with several hundred citizens in their charge, were brutally exterminated by the Spaniards. It was a devastating loss, with harrowing stories of valor and sacrifice. One of Bolívar’s aides-de-camp, a young English captain named Chamberlain, had shot himself in the head rather than surrender to the enemy. When a Spanish officer began to paw at Chamberlain’s wife and then tried to take her by force, she took out a pistol and killed him. Infuriated, the officer’s men hacked her to pieces on the spot.

  That butchery at Casa Fuerte would go down in more than one chronicle as an utterly deplorable, possibly avoidable moment in revolutionary history. General Mariño had not been far away; he might have come to the rescue. But Mariño never looked back. He had been willing to assist Bolívar as one commander might assist another; but serving Bolívar on terrain he considered his own was abhorrent to him. He established himself in the tiny coastal town of San Felipe de Cariaco and began spreading the rumor that Bolívar had probably been captured or killed in the crocodile-infested wilds of the Orinoco. With the support of Canon Cortés de Madariaga, who had recently escaped from a Spanish prison and returned to the Americas full of bombast and ambition, Mariño lunged now to grasp at the reins of the republic. On May 8, he called to order a congress of ten men—among them Bolívar’s trusty Brion and the eloquent Francisco Antonio Zea—and announced the new government of the United States of Venezuela. Cortés de Madariaga obliged by nominating Mariño supreme chief, all voted aye, the old federalist constitution of 1811 was reinstated, open trade with the United States and Britain was declared, and Brion was made commanding admiral of its navy. But Mariño’s hastily cobbled regime went totally ignored by the people of Venezuela; a regional warlord could not hope to rule a vast and chaotic republic, nor did a republic really exist, as Venezuela was slipping back into the royalist maw. By the following day, the diminutive congress had put away its gavel and dissolved in haste, since the enemy was fast approaching. By the end of May, Mariño’s entire government had dispersed, Cortés had rushed to safety in Jamaica, and what was left of Mariño’s army began to take a heavy pounding from Spanish forces.

  If Bolívar took notice of Mariño’s breathtaking treachery, he made little fuss about it.

  There had been plenty to draw Bolívar’s attention away from the attempted coup. Come June, Bolívar was desperately trying to consolidate forces along the Orinoco; by July 17, he had won Angostura; by August 3, he had taken Guayana; and then, flush with victory and the conviction that only a disciplined army could carry out a revolution, he had turned the brunt of his fury on Piar.

  Perhaps Bolívar suspected all along that Mariño’s brazen lunge for power would come to nothing. The Liberator of the East was soon discredited, and the Liberator of the West didn’t have to lift a finger to contribute to that fleet fall; thirty of Mariño’s officers, disgusted with their general’s perfidy, left him for Bolívar. Mariño’s former deputy, Bermúdez, had already defected to Bolívar some time before. Now, General Rafael Urdaneta and Colonel Antonio José de Sucre, among many others, rushed from Mariño’s camp to Guayana to place themselves under Bolívar’s command. Admiral Brion, trying to put the whole sordid business behind him, drove a fleet of ships up the Orinoco in time to secure Bolívar’s hold on the river. Writing to a friend, Bolívar commented that the whole enterprise had been as easy to dissolve as cassava in a boiling broth. Mariño had come apart of his own accord.

  In the end, Bolívar decided to forgive Mariño. “I’ve resisted writing a single word or saying anything critical about that so-called federal government,” he told his friend. “Here, men take charge not because they want to, but because they can.” To Mariño, Bolívar was cuttingly direct, singularly chilly. “If you insist on disobedience,” he warned him in a letter, “you will no longer be a citizen of Venezuela but a public enemy. If you are determined to quit serving the republic, just say so and the government will gladly issue you permission to go.” That was a month before the execution of Piar. A month after it, when Mariño might have feared the same ignominious fate, he received a surprisingly different message from one of his former officers. Colonel Sucre appeared at the wayward general’s door, telling him that Bolívar wanted to reenlist him. Bolívar had urged Sucre to employ all the delicacy he could muster to win back Mariño. If he resists, Bolívar instructed, then bring him by force. But “if he submits voluntarily, treat him with the utmost dignity, as you would a man who has just done his country the greatest service by refusing to stain it with civil war. To right one’s wrongs can only be considered a good deed, and good deeds should be rewarded.”

  It took several months to bring Mariño around, but when the renegade finally agreed, Bolívar made him general in chief and placed two of the most capable generals in his service. Slowly, painstakingly, Bolívar was imposing some order over the rebellious warlords who had nettled him for so long. Now with Bermúdez and Mariño on his side—and Piar well out of the way—the east was firmly under Bolívarian rule. It was left to do the same in the west, with Páez.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Hard Way West

  A lightning bolt doesn’t fall from the sky as swiftly as General Bolívar descended on the capital.

  —Francisco Santander

  Bolívar received news of José de San Martín’s mounting victories with a mixture of joy and alarm. The soldier who had helped rid Argentina of Spanish rule was working his way north, cutting a triumphant path for liberty. In February of 1817, just as Bolívar was struggling to raise a few hundred troops in the seaside town of Barcelona, General San Martín had surprised the Spaniards by leading an army of thousands—half of them former slaves—over the ice-capped Andes into Chile. The Spanish generals responsible for defending t
he region hadn’t imagined such a feat was possible. By year’s end, San Martín was routing them in battle after battle. That was the happy news; the unsettling part was that he was headed for the prize Bolívar had dreamed of so often with his men—the viceregal heart of Peru.

  Now that Bolívar had the Venezuelan east mostly under his command, he focused on moving west, over the plains to New Granada. Eventually, with inspired strategy and a bit of luck—as he wrote in a letter to the new republican chief of state in Argentina, Juan de Pueyrredón—he might push his way south, meet San Martín’s effort, and create a seamless, unified America. “An America thus united,” he told Pueyrredón, “if heaven grants us this favor, will call itself the queen of nations, mother of all republics.” What he needed most of all now, however, was to win over allies close by, chief among them the formidable warlord of the western plains, José Antonio Páez.

  Páez’s astonishing victory at the Battle of Mucuritas almost a year before had been a turning point in the war. It had been General Morillo’s first defeat since he had begun his campaign of pacification. Páez had won by sheer force of will: eleven hundred plainsmen and Indians—barefoot, naked except for loincloths, armed with arrows and spears—had charged against four thousand well-equipped, handsomely uniformed veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. Using fire, dust, wind, and a terrifying ferocity, they had outsmarted the Spanish hussars, scattering them over the burning plains like a herd of sheep. It was a hallmark victory, and it made Páez famous. His ranks soon swelled with men wanting to fight under his flag and share in the Spanish booty.

  At twenty-eight years of age, Páez could neither read nor write, had not learned to eat with a knife and fork, had never seen anything that resembled a big city. The child of indigent Canary Islanders, he had grown up in a small village in the backlands of Barinas. By fifteen, he had killed a man in self-defense and fled into the wilds of Casanare to avoid Spanish justice. There, in that sea of grass known as the llanos, he found work as a ranch hand for a paltry few cents a week; and in that punishing terrain he learned the skills of a horseman. His cohort were pardos, Indians, mestizos—the chaff of Venezuelan society—many of them, like him, fleeing to escape poverty or the dungeon. They called him “the fair Páez,” for although his hair was brown, his skin was moon white, his cheeks pink in the relentless heat of the savanna. From rougher men, he learned how to survive the harsh land. Meat became his diet, river water his drink. His bed was a hammock of pineapple twine or a length of dried hide. By three in the morning, he would be up and out on the plains, rounding up the livestock, branding them, castrating them, moving them to pasture. Páez’s overseer was a towering black slave with a long, scruffy beard named Manuelote. He was taciturn, demanding, severe; but he taught Páez the trade: how to break horses, kill crocodiles, cajole cattle into crossing rivers, flip cows by their tails. In the evenings, after a hard day’s work, and as an extra dose of discipline, Manuelote would call Páez to wash his feet and swing his hammock until he nodded off to sleep.