Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Eventually, Manuelote took him to another ranch, and Páez, a hardworking, amiable young man, won the notice of its owner, who taught him the business and helped him establish his own herd. That is, until war intervened. By the time he was twenty-four, Páez had served in both the royalist and patriot armies and was quartered in Mérida, fighting with General Urdaneta’s guerrilla forces. But he quit in disgust when one officer commanded him to give up his horse and surrender it to another officer. Páez decided to cross the Andes on foot, return to the llanos, and raise his own legion of horsemen. He undertook that arduous trip with his young wife and child, arriving on the plains of Casanare in mid-1814, just as Boves was charging into Caracas and Bolívar was decamping from the capital with twenty thousand panicked citizens. Páez was convinced he could raise a cavalry as powerful as Boves’s and, although his fellow patriots laughed at the notion, he soon commanded a regiment of more than a thousand men. When Boves was killed in battle a few months later, Páez was in a position to attract the dead man’s multitudes. As Páez’s Army of the Apure began to gather victory after victory, that was exactly what he did.

  Páez’s army rode at night—sometimes sixty miles at a time—in order to avoid the scorching sun. They rode against the wind whenever possible, so that the Spaniards could not see or smell the dust of their approach. They sat on skulls of bulls, for that was their furniture; they had Spartan needs and Bedouin fortitude. Even in torrential rains, they worked, ate, slept under the open skies. When rivers flooded, they rode into the muddy waters, their worldly possessions perched on their heads. They were masters of their terrain, well accustomed to the jaguars, vultures, vampire bats, and flesh-devouring insects that terrified the more urbane soldiers of the king. Chasing Páez, Morillo’s armies grew exhausted, and in the effort thousands of soldiers died. If they weren’t felled by malaria, typhoid, or yellow fever, they succumbed to sunstroke, skin rot, or starvation. Páez’s men, in turn, pursued Morillo like an avenging shadow, making lightning incursions into his camp by night, slaughtering all men and animals in their way, and suffering only trifling losses. Or they would strike Morillo’s forces after a march, sweeping in when the Spaniards were exhausted; thundering through their camps, the llaneros would scare off the Spaniards’ cattle and pack animals, leaving them with no provisions. Little by little, as Morillo later admitted, Páez began to wear him down.

  Páez, known as the invincible Lion of the Apure, had never been inclined to accept another’s authority. He was ambitious, inconstant, and voracious when it came to power. But he was also shrewd and capable of compromise: If it behooved him to make an alliance, he made it; if allies crossed him, he exacted a costly revenge. When Bolívar sent two colonels to suggest to Páez that he recognize Bolívar as supreme chief, Páez’s antiroyalist fervor was such that he agreed. He explained to his army that Bolívar’s achievements were many and known throughout the world, and that the Liberator’s intellectual acuity alone entitled him to the command. He even insisted that they pledge their undying allegiance to Bolívar in a religious ceremony. In truth, Bolívar was as necessary to Páez as Páez was to Bolívar. The Liberator offered the unschooled warlord a wider knowledge of strategic possibility, a more sophisticated approach to war. There didn’t appear to be a risk to allying with such a man. Bolívar may have harbored many ambitions—he, too, could be voracious when it came to power—but he could not be accused of lusting after a horseman’s empire. The two simply wanted to use each other for a while.

  Páez set out to meet Bolívar in January of 1818 with a company of Cunaviche Indians. On his way to San Juan de Payara, where the meeting was to take place, he decided to descend on the town of San Fernando and scare off the Spanish regiment that was occupying that crucial crossroad. Worried that whizzing musket balls would unnerve the Cunaviche, he plied the Indians with strong drink. The aguardiente had the desired effect. The Cunaviche, dressed in leather loincloths and brilliantly colored feathers, stormed the Spanish encampment fearlessly, piercing their tongues with their own spears and smearing the bright blood across their faces. The orderly Spaniards, as startled as they were horrified, scrambled in retreat.

  On January 30, Páez finally met the supreme chief. As soon as Bolívar saw Páez approaching from the distance, he leapt on his horse and rode out to welcome him. They dismounted, embraced heartily, and greeted one another with warm compliments. Yet clearly they were from alien worlds. To Páez, Bolívar seemed the embodiment of an intellectual—refined, highly animated, with a slight frame, delicate features, and quick, luminous eyes. For Bolívar, Páez was like no general he had ever commanded: no Mariño, no Urdaneta, no Sucre or Santander—no Creole aristocrat, nor even a worldly Piar—but a burly plainsman with a coarse appearance and coarser ways. Nevertheless, Bolívar understood his kind; he had known rough Canary Island boys like Páez since his childhood in Caracas, kicked stones with them in the back alleys of town.

  Páez was thirty by that time, and in the full flower of his vigor. He was not tall, but he was broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, built like a bull—the upper half of his body at odds with his spindly legs. His hair was wavy, leonine, bleached by relentless sun; his neck thick and muscular. He was robust and florid where Bolívar was thin and gaunt. He was given to epileptic fits, especially in the heat of battle when blood was flying; he would become so excited by the carnage that he would foam at the mouth and topple from his horse, flailing helplessly until his giant black manservant, “El Negro Primero,” would hoist him up and ride away. Bolívar, on the other hand, was a man of consummate control; he didn’t drink much, was not intrinsically violent, and uncannily managed to avoid physical injury, even when he was leading a charge. Looking upon them there as they met for the first time, a casual observer might have assumed that each would be incapable of coping in the other’s domain: one had come of age playing tennis with princes; the other had come of age washing the feet of a slave. But the assumption would have been wrong. Páez may have been a rube, a ruffian, the untamed Lion of the Apure, but in time he would become a national figure, world diplomat, habitué of the salon. Bolívar, on the other hand, despite his small frame and wiry body, would go on to perform Herculean feats of physical endurance. Within a year, he would be riding longer and harder than any horseman of the Apure, so superhuman in that ability that his troops admiringly named him Iron Ass.

  BOLÍVAR AND PÁEZ SPENT A few days together, discussing the campaign to take the revolution west. The most immediate problem was getting Bolívar’s army across the Apure River. He had come to San Juan de Payara with three thousand men, a third of them on horseback. They had no boats, no wood to build them, no admiral to ferry them across this tributary of the Orinoco, which, as far as they could see, was closely guarded by four Spanish ships. On February 6, when Bolívar and Páez were surveying the river, contemplating their stalemate, Páez suddenly turned to Bolívar and told him not to worry. Start the march, he said animatedly. He would provide the boats. “But, hombre!” Bolívar cried in amazement, “Where from?” Páez replied that they were down on the river, right there, in full sight—the enemy ships lined up before them.

  “And how do you propose to do that?” Bolívar asked.

  “With my cavalry.”

  Bolívar was irritated. “With a sea cavalry, you mean? Because one that operates on land can’t possibly perform such a miracle.”

  Páez called down a company of fifty men, who rode nimbly to the riverbank, their saddles uncinched. When he yelled, “Bring me those boats!” the men slid their saddles to the ground, clenched their lances between their teeth, then, with loud whoops, charged bareback into the river. The Spanish sentinels, brought to life, responded with a volley or two. But they were so panicked at the sight of that fierce horde plowing the water, startling the crocodiles, clambering onto their boats willy-nilly, that they dove into the river and made for the other shore. To Bolívar’s amazement—for he had thought his men would be blown to bits—Páez’s riders succeed
ed in taking all four craft. After that, their armies had no trouble sweeping into the encampment. By the time they were through, they had captured fourteen boats and a store of munitions. “It may appear inconceivable,” a witness later reported, “that a body of cavalry with no other arms than their lances, and no other mode of conveyance across a rapid river than their horses, should attack and take a fleet of gun-boats amidst shoals of alligators; but there are many officers now in England who can testify to the truth of it.”

  Bolívar eventually won the respect and affection of these lawless roughriders, although one can easily imagine their initial suspicions. He was a gentleman from the city, a man who wore spotless white shirts and European cologne, even when he was out on maneuvers. He was a product of precisely the social class they most detested. But he was also a product of Simón Rodríguez’s unconventional outdoor education, with all of its glorifications of the natural man. It didn’t take long for Páez’s horsemen to discover that their new leader was an excellent swimmer, skilled rider, tireless hiker, capable of competing with them in all the rough games they enjoyed. On a dare, he had leapt into a lake with his hands tied behind his back, swearing that even with that liability he could outswim any challenger. Seeing his aide-de-camp spring out of his saddle over his horse’s head and land, incredibly, on two firm feet, he wanted to do the same, and actually managed it, although it took him several tries and a few painful misses. “I confess it was crazy of me,” he later told a friend, “but in those days I didn’t want anyone to say they were more agile or able than I, or that there was anything I couldn’t do. . . . Don’t think that sort of thing isn’t useful in a leader.”

  Eventually, Bolívar decided to waste no more time in San Fernando, and so left Páez and his horsemen behind to lay siege and win what booty they could from the Spaniards. With four thousand men, he marched north to Calabozo, where General Morillo had just arrived with an army of 2,500. Bolívar’s opening strategy was masterful. On February 12, the Liberator gave Morillo the surprise of his life, descending on his post at six in the morning and inflicting punishing losses. Once he saw he was at disadvantage, Morillo shut himself off in his headquarters, prompting Bolívar to send him a high-handed communiqué, inviting him to surrender. But this was no Admirable Campaign in which the mere mention of Bolívar’s name struck fear into Spanish hearts, and Morillo was no tin-hat general. The Spaniard managed to dodge Bolívar’s troops and flee into the night, on foot, with a tiny remnant of his army. Bolívar captured his arms and supplies, but he failed to pursue Morillo and force him to engage in battle. As a result, the patriot advantage was quickly lost. Frustrated and weary, Bolívar waited for Páez to bring fresh troops. His own were exhausted after the 550-mile march that had started in Angostura and lasted almost two months over that merciless terrain. “Fly, fly, join me now!” Bolívar wrote to the Lion of the Apure, “so we can seize the day.”

  But though the union of Páez and Bolívar was a military rock on which the republic eventually would stand, Páez was still unused to taking orders. There followed a string of loud arguments, miscommunications, and misunderstandings. Páez dragged his feet, insisted on making his own decisions. He complained that Bolívar didn’t understand the plains, didn’t rely enough on the wisdom of the locals. He knew, too, that his plainsmen and Indians were not keen to wander too far from their natural habitat; the big cities of Venezuela did not lure them in the least. Bolívar, on the other hand, had his own ideas. He had gone as far north as Calabozo and wanted to go farther still, toward the irresistible chimera of Caracas. It was here that his mistakes began.

  In Calabozo, he had had Morillo in the palm of his hand, and might have taken him there and then; he hadn’t known that Morillo had limped to Calabozo in tatters. The army of pacification had suffered great losses on the patriot island of Margarita, where Morillo—distracted from more urgent matters—had tried to square a long, bitter animosity with its governor, General Arismendi. Morillo’s monthlong struggle to recapture that fevered terrain had been fruitless and damaging, costing him the lives of too many. His army, which had started out as a robust force of three thousand, had been reduced to seven hundred pathetic, diseased men. Hobbled by typhoid and yellow fever, the survivors had dragged themselves back to Caracas, where Morillo asked to be relieved of his post. When Madrid refused the request, Morillo begged abjectly for reserves. The news of Bolívar’s and Páez’s alliance was a further blow to the Spanish general, but when he heard that the two had attacked and laid siege to Spain’s strategic river garrison at San Fernando, he hurried south to help. Had Bolívar been more assertive at Calabozo—had he prevented Morillo from slipping away, had he chased him while he was vulnerable—he might have secured his surrender. As it was, Morillo’s army had been given a chance to recover.

  Bolívar and Páez spent much of the next two weeks bickering: Páez wanted to continue to pressure the town of San Fernando, drive the Spaniards from Apure once and for all, and capture enough booty to remunerate his men. Bolívar wanted to keep pushing toward the capital. On March 3, the day before San Fernando finally collapsed under the weight of Páez’s siege, Bolívar began a march toward Caracas. His approach caused great consternation in the city, which was now largely royalist. “In a few hours,” a witness recalled, “and like a bolt of electricity, the entire population of Caracas rushed to the shores of La Guaira, and men and women of every age clamored to escape.” But Bolívar never did make it to Caracas. Generals Morillo and Morales, with fortified battalions, set out to stop him. Bolívar and Morillo met at last on March 16 on the rolling plains of La Puerta, where the valleys of the Guarico River join the prairies, and where the patriots had fought Boves’s legions twice and lost. The battle began at dawn between Bolívar and Morales, and Bolívar might have won, for Morales’s army was half the size. But General Morillo brought fresh troops to the fray, leading the charge himself in order to animate his soldiers. Although Morillo was seriously wounded and had to be carried away in a stretcher, the royalists crushed Bolívar, pounding the patriots into retreat. The army of the Liberator was seriously crippled now: He had lost more than a thousand infantrymen, a great deal of armaments, and all his papers.

  One month later, on April 17, as Bolívar was trying to rebuild his cavalry in the farmlands of the Rincón de Toros, a band of eight royalists came upon a lowly servant on Bolívar’s staff who happened to be wandering the fields alone. From that hapless captive, they extracted the password of the republican camp and the exact location where Bolívar slept. That night, by the light of a waxing moon, they entered the camp, passing themselves off as patriot soldiers. Claiming to have important information, they asked to see the supreme chief. The acting chief of staff, Colonel Francisco de Paula Santander, quizzed the men until he was satisfied, then pointed to Bolívar’s hammock. “General!” Santander called out, and Bolívar spun around just as the assassins’ shots rang over his head. Bolívar was unhurt, but in the dark of night, and with so much confusion, the royalists managed to dart away, killing patriots as they went. The Spanish generals did not tarry in their next attack: they stormed the encampment before sunrise and sent the republicans running, undoing what little progress Bolívar had made.

  Fortune itself seemed to have abandoned the army of the republic. Its greatest patron, Alexandre Pétion, had died of a raging case of typhoid fever in Port-au-Prince on March 29. In May, Páez was defeated on the plains of Cojedes. Bolívar was forced to retire from the front lines, suffering from a painful case of anthrax pustules he had probably contracted from infected horses or mules. “My lesions are getting better,” he wrote one of his generals wistfully. “One has already burst and soon I’ll be able to get on my horse again, although I doubt I’ll be rid of these wounds in three, even four days. That said, if there’s the slightest need, I’m ready to march, even if they have to carry me in a litter.”

  June brought news from the north that Bermúdez and Mariño had lost Cumaná and Cumanaco to the Spaniard
s. The two former comrades were blaming each other for their ruin. In the west, Henry C. Wilson, an unruly English colonel attached to Páez’s cavalry, was mounting a campaign to persuade Páez to separate from Bolívar. No one at the time knew it, but he had been cleverly planted—along with his unwitting British soldiers—by the Spanish ambassador in London. It seemed the only region Bolívar could truly claim was the heartland of Guayana. When he finally reached its capital, Angostura, the patriot outlook seemed to change, if only by virtue of his optimism. Despite his losses and afflictions, he was stimulated by his surroundings—filled with a newfound energy. Reestablishing himself in his headquarters, he began a flurry of correspondence, ranging from matters of state to matters of the heart.