Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Bolívar started toward the mountains on May 26, on the very day when the rains began to pelt down in earnest. The soldiers had not been told where they were headed—first, in order to keep the operation fully secret, but just as important, because Bolívar feared they would desert if they knew the perilous direction of their march. As they poured into the town of Guasdualito, the army was finally told, as was the government in Angostura. Bolívar’s tight force of 2,100—four infantry battalions and three cavalry squadrons, accompanied by medics, auxiliary forces, women, children, and a herd of cattle—was now poised to undertake one of the most remarkable feats in military history.

  On June 4, Bolívar’s army crossed the Arauca River and passed into Casanare, where the rains were torrential, savannas flooded, and creatures adrift as far as the eye could see. His soldiers constructed boats of cowhide to transport the ordnance and keep it as dry as possible. They marched with mud sucking at their feet, or wading through waist-high water, or—when floods rose to their highest point—swimming. If they had families, they used their threadbare blankets to shield women from the cold and damp; if they didn’t, they used them to protect guns and ammunition. Hungry, weary, drenched through to the skin, they traversed a landscape such as they’d never seen. Men on horseback were no better off than those on the ground. Hooves grew soft in the bog and swamp, rendering animals lame. Feet swelled to such tender misshape that riders could no longer use their stirrups. The army carried on anyway, marching for more than a month, lured by trees that floated like promises of dry earth in those vast inland waterways. The frail were soon sick; the rugged, wounded; the unfortunate, at the mercy of tiny, flesh-eating fish that could strip limbs to bone in seconds. Horses and cattle fell into deep water, never to rise again. Cargo became too heavy to carry; reins too shriveled to use. At night, they camped wherever they could—sleeping in standing water, or on their horses—only to be set upon by mosquitoes, sand flies, and stinging gnats. They finally reached hard land at Tame, where Santander’s troops awaited; and there, at long last, the army of liberation gained a measure of relief in dry beds, eating bananas, potatoes, barley, and salt. In the distance, whenever a strong wind cleared the clouds away, they could see the forest of San Camilo, whose tangle of green lined the lower cliffs of the towering Andes.

  After a week’s rest, on July 1, they were off again, bound for the mighty cordillera—a snowbound, airless barrier of rock and cliff. The patriots, bolstered by Bolívar’s enthusiasm, staggered up those slopes, with nothing but dreams of glory. As they rose into thinner air, the icy wind and hyaline numbed some minds, clarified others. Many of Páez’s horsemen, who had slogged unhesitatingly twenty miles a day through mud and flood, decided the vertiginous heights and unstable rock were too punishing for their horses. Some gave up on the expedition, deserting the revolution in favor of their afflicted animals. Few beasts would survive the five days’ march over the dizzying Páramo de Pisba.

  The rain was ceaseless, the cold unrelenting. Within a few days, the remaining livestock were gone: a string of carcasses marked their trail. “The harshness of the peaks we have crossed would be staggering to anyone who hasn’t experienced it,” Bolívar reported to his vice president. “There’s hardly a day or night it doesn’t rain . . . our only comfort is the thought that we’ve seen the worst, and that we are nearing the end of the journey.” Often, the streams they crossed were swift and fierce, and travelers had to negotiate them in solid lines, moving hand in hand, until every last person had been dragged through the white water. To traverse ravines, they lassoed trees on either side, then pulled travelers on leather ropes, over the plummeting abyss, suspended in improvised hammocks. Bolívar carried soldiers who were too weak to stand, or the women who had dutifully followed them. “He was,” according to one British observer, “invariably humane in his attentions to the sick and wounded.” Slipping and sliding over the wet, icy rock, the army kept on the move, ascending to thirteen thousand feet, knowing that to stop and lie down at those bone-chilling heights was to give up and die. By the time they had scaled the Páramo de Pisba, their shoes had no soles, their clothes were in shreds; hundreds had died of hypothermia. Many of the surviving officers, a witness later wrote, “had no trousers, and were glad to cover themselves with pieces of blanket, or whatever they could procure.” A full quarter of the British contingent perished in that crossing. Yet there were scenes of extraordinary strength and courage. The patriot women, mistresses or wives, were indispensable medics: tending wounds, giving hope to the ill, evincing an admirable fortitude. Some proved even more sturdy than the men. On the night of July 3, as the army huddled at the very heights of the crossing, Bolívar’s aide-de-camp was told that a soldier’s wife was there among them, giving birth. The next day he saw her marching along behind her husband’s battalion, a strapping newborn in her arms.

  On July 6, survivors began to straggle down the other side of the mountain. Weak, famished, in tatters, it was all they could do to pick their way down the steep escarpments. At Socha, jubilant Granadans rushed out to meet them with food and drink, horses and weapons. The village women, filled with sympathy for the half-naked soldiers, set to work, making them shirts, trousers, underwear, and jackets—sewn from their own clothes. Bolívar had chosen the route well, for there was no one to challenge the patriot presence. The Spaniards had dismissed the Páramo de Pisba as too difficult a crossing: there were no guards in the area, no enemy garrisons for miles. The expedition would have precious time to recover.

  Over the next few days, while the army rested, the British legion trickled into Socha, lugging the liberating army’s trunks and ammunition. Most of it had been badly damaged. Bolívar didn’t waste time fretting about the loss. He busied himself organizing supplies, raising troops, making sure the sick were minded and the hungry fed, as well as gathering intelligence on royalist movements. Granadans, who had suffered three years of harsh rule under their tyrannical viceroy, now rushed to enlist in Bolívar’s effort, as one village after another welcomed him with open arms. The young Granadan general Santander later wrote of Bolívar’s efforts: “Here is where this man distinguishes himself above all the rest, exhibiting extraordinary resolve and energy. In three days, he remounts and arms the cavalry, musters ammunition, reassembles the army; then sends out patrols, energizes the citizens, and plans an all-out attack.”

  THE LIBERATION OF NEW GRANADA came quickly only days after the last of Bolívar’s soldiers descended the snowy heights of Pisba. It was a measure of Bolívar’s genius that his army had met with no resistance; the test now would be to spring that army into a winning war. At dawn on July 25, one day after his thirty-sixth birthday, Bolívar’s soldiers met the Spaniards in a battle at Pantano de Vargas, a hill-rimmed swampland about 120 miles northeast of Bogotá. Brigadier José María Barreiro and his royalists had all the advantages: higher ground, more troops, better arms and training. But just when all seemed lost for the patriots—a blistering fire on all sides, their forces surrounded—Bolívar shouted to the horseman Rondón, who had been the hero at Queseras del Medio, “Colonel! Save the republic!” The fearless cowboy led his plainsmen in a furious charge up the hill, and, swinging machetes and spears, managed to drive the Spaniards from that promontory. The patriots, elated, now fought with renewed zeal. Rattled by this reversal, the royalists shrank in alarm, then rushed to withdraw, especially as rain began to spill from the darkening heavens. Santander would later say that the battle at Pantano de Vargas was won by the horsemen’s intensity and a British calm, and because Bolívar, like some mythic war god, seemed to appear everywhere at once. The patriots had more advantages than that: the core of Bolívar’s troops—seasoned, challenged, culled to an able few—were a well-honed fighting force now. The Spaniards, terrified by the Liberator, by his legendary war to the death, by his startling appearance on their side of the Andes, simply lost their nerve. Barreiro’s army may have had the numbers, the equipment, the spangled uniforms, the peninsular training,
and certainly the optimism of Barreiro himself, but, as Bolívar understood, they had a distinct—and crushing—disadvantage: they were afraid.

  The determining Battle of Boyacá was fought a few days later, on August 7. But by now, the balance of power had shifted. It was no longer the Spaniards who were trying to block Bolívar from marching to Bogotá; it was Bolívar trying to block the Spaniards from reuniting with their viceroy and collecting badly needed reinforcements. By mid-morning of that fateful day, the Liberator’s army had taken a position near the bridge at Boyacá, on a hill that oversaw the road to the capital, Bogotá. At two in the afternoon, the royalist army appeared. Brigadier Barreiro sent out a vanguard, assuming that the row of patriots he saw on the far bluff was merely a band of observers. He ordered his second in command, Colonel Francisco Jiménez, to scare them off so that the main body of his troops—three thousand strong—could pass. But Bolívar accelerated the patriot march, and before long his entire army coursed over the hill, wave after wave of roaring soldiers. Rondón’s horsemen, in galloping charge, plunged like a knife into the royalists’ tidy formation, dispersing them like a flock of sheep. General Anzoátegui then fell upon the same soldiers with his hardened veterans; Santander flew after their vanguard and overtook them. By four o’clock, it was done. The Spanish commander, in desperation, tried to retreat to a hillside to regroup his forces, but by then his army had been devastated—two hundred lay dead in the open meadow, the rest were in disarray. When Anzoátegui’s cavalry charged up that hill with bloodied lances, the Spaniards laid down their arms. Sixteen hundred royalists were taken prisoner that afternoon. The battle had taken all of two hours.

  In the course of that conflagration, many of the British were wounded. O’Leary had taken a gash in the head. Colonel Rooke had sustained a grave wound to his left arm. When the field surgeon amputated that arm in order to save his life, Rooke grasped the hewn limb with his good hand, thrust it high in the air, and shouted, “Viva la patria!” Someone asked, “Which country, England or Ireland?” but the Irishman shook his head. “The one that will bury me,” he said. Three days later, his corpse was lowered into Colombian soil.

  On the evening of that battle, Pedro Martínez, a twelve-year-old stablehand in Bolívar’s retinue, noticed two men crouched in a gully by the river. When he and an armed companion surprised them where they hid, the runaways tried to pay him off with a few gold coins. But the boy refused. By the time the youths had escorted their prisoners back to the patriot camp, they knew that one of them was Brigadier Barreiro. The army had already captured his second in command, Colonel Jiménez.

  For all that the Spaniards had agonized about Bolívar’s legendary war to the death, not one prisoner taken at the Battle of Boyacá was singled out for execution. Bolívar would be generous to Barreiro and his officers, making it clear that he planned to pursue an exchange of prisoners. But as the battle drew to a close and Bolívar chased stragglers over the rolling hills for many miles and managed to apprehend some, he chanced upon a face he knew. It was Francisco Vinoni, the republican traitor who, in 1812, had thrown open the dungeons of Puerto Cabello and turned over that valuable fortress to the Spaniards—the infamous Vinoni, whose treasonous act had precipitated the most bitter and damaging experience of Bolívar’s career. The Liberator had always said that if he ever got his hands on Vinoni, he would extract a cruel revenge. He pulled the prisoner out of the lineup and ordered his men to hang him.

  With the road to the capital open now, Bolívar and a small squadron set out for Bogotá. As one of his officers wrote, “A lightning bolt doesn’t fall from the sky as swiftly as General Bolívar descended on the capital.” He rode, ragged and shirtless, his coat fluttering against bare skin, for all seventy miles of the journey. As he raced through the humid countryside—his wild long hair riding the wind—he hardly looked like a general who had vanquished a king’s army. But it was so. His war to the death, discarded so many years before, now worked greatly to his favor: the Spaniards in Bogotá fled the capital with little more than the clothes on their backs, abandoning houses, businesses, the entire viceregal treasury, to the patriot army. Viceroy Juan José de Sámano, author of so many atrocities against New Granadans, had no time to worry about the fate of his people now. The viceroy saved himself, stealing away in the guise of a lowly Indian. By the time Bolívar strode into his palace, he was gone.

  In the official report to Spain’s Ministry of War, the most important Spaniard in those American colonies, General Morillo, would sum it up this way:

  The rebellious Bolívar has occupied the capital of Bogotá, and the deadly outcome of this battle gives him dominion over the enormous resources of a highly populated, abundantly rich nation, from which he will take whatever he needs to prolong the war. . . . This unfortunate loss delivers into rebel hands—apart from the Kingdom of New Granada—many ports in the South, where he will now deploy his pirates. . . . The interior of the continent, all the way to Peru, is at the mercy of whoever rules in [Bogotá]. . . . In just one day, Bolívar has undone all we have accomplished in five years of this campaign, and in one single battle he has reconquered all the territory that soldiers of the king have won in the course of so many past conflagrations.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Way to Glory

  A weak man requires a long fight in order to win. A strong one delivers a single blow and an empire vanishes.

  —Simón Bolívar

  Bolívar dismounted swiftly and ran up the steps of the viceroy’s palace. It was five P.M. and the mountain air was beginning to regain its vigor. It had been unseasonably warm, a stifling day in the capital. Dazed and disbelieving, the republicans of Bogotá had just begun to emerge from the torpid ignorance in which the viceroy had kept them. They had been told the royalists had prevailed at Pantano de Vargas, which was patently untrue; but then came the Spaniards’ swift and frenzied departure from the capital, the stores of gunpowder detonating in the distance. As Bolívar rode into the viceregal capital, hurtling along the city streets—windblown and shirtless—citizens ventured out, curious at first, and then in wild, gleeful abandon.

  He astonished the throngs, according to one witness, with his memory for names. He greeted Granadans as he went, although it had been more than four years since he had seen them. His movements were quick, economical, with little apparent regard for the grandness of the moment—his energy electric, despite the eight-hour ride. Once he was inside the palace, republican leaders asked if he didn’t want to rest a while and he responded, “Absolutely not. I never tire on a horse.” He addressed them briskly, courteously, grasping the lapels of his jacket as he spoke. Mainly, he asked questions, and, as they answered, he crossed his arms and listened intently. He asked about his benefactor and supporter Camilo Torres, the former republican president. (“Where Bolívar is,” Torres had once said, “there is the republic.”) The president had been brutally executed and dismembered by Morillo’s officers, his head thrust on a spear and displayed a few yards from the very spot where Bolívar now stood. Bolívar asked, too, about President Torices, the young warlord of Cartagena who had welcomed him years before, and whose head had met the same fate as Torres’s, on a spear, in front of that palace. As Bolívar glanced about, it was clear that Viceroy Sámano’s reign had taken a hard toll on the people. He could see evidence of it etched deeply into their faces.

  He wrote to his vice president in Venezuela to report that Bogotá was his now. The viceroy had fled in such a fright that he had left a bag of gold on his desk, a half million pesos in the treasury, and enough arms and munitions to supply an entire army. In the course of a single battle, Bolívar had toppled his iron rule. But not until hours before the Liberator’s arrival had Viceroy Sámano realized his reign was over. He had been dining with his courtiers, blithely unaware that his army had been crushed, his commanding officer taken prisoner. Because Brigadier Barreiro had lied to him about the outcome of the battle at Pantano de Vargas, calling himself the victor, the vi
ceroy believed that Bolívar’s ragtag soldiers were not a threat and Spain’s army was invincible. The viceroy had been bragging about Barreiro to his dinner guests on that evening of August 8 when an official burst into the room with news that the king’s army had been vanquished at Boyacá, the commander taken prisoner, and patriot forces were fast approaching the capital. “All is lost!” the official wailed. “Bolívar is upon us!” As a historian of the day recounted it: “The bravura of the viceroy quickly evaporated into terror, and all he could think of was saving his own skin.” He fled west to the Magdalena, disguised as a lowly peasant, then embarked incognito for the five-hundred-mile voyage downriver to Cartagena and, eventually, across the seas to Spain. When Bolívar dispatched a division to apprehend him, he was gone, lost among the crowds—one more traveler on a busy waterway.

  Bolívar went through the viceroy’s palace, amazed by the riches that had been abandoned in the mass evacuation, but he was careful not to gloat. As far as he was concerned, the war had not ended with the liberation of Bogotá. There was much yet to accomplish: Caracas was not free; Morillo was still on the loose; and, in spite of all patriot advances, Spain still controlled a number of vital areas—Coró, Cartagena, Cúcuta, Pasto, Quito, the viceroyalty of Peru. There was no question that Bolívar was thrilled by the victory at Boyacá and sure of its consequences, but he made no public claims. He kept his generals on the move, enlisted prisoners to the patriot side, and worked hard to raise more troops.