Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Yet even with the seriousness of the work at hand, Bolívar never failed to enjoy lighthearted pursuits. He played cards with his officers, bantered with them, rode with them, organized festive celebrations. Soon after his entry into the capital, he gave a fancy ball for all the leading families of Bogotá. That night, just before dinner, Colonel James Hamilton, a British officer with whom he had developed a warm friendship, arrived in such a state of dishabille that Bolívar couldn’t help but express surprise. “My good and brave colonel!” he gasped, when he saw him, “what a dirty shirt you have on!” There was good reason for Bolívar’s candor: a year before, when he had lost all his shirts in battle, Hamilton had generously given him six of his own. The Englishman now apologized for his slovenliness and explained that he was wearing the only shirt he owned. Bolívar chuckled and ordered his servant, José Palacios, to fetch the colonel a clean shirt; but Palacios only stared at his master, until Bolívar was forced to say, “Well, why don’t you go?” The servant stammered, “Your excellency has but two shirts, one is on your back, the other is in the wash.” Bolívar and the colonel laughed heartily at that. Shirts had always been a precious commodity in the revolution: lost in transport, seized in battle, used as tourniquets, robbed from corpses. Now they had become a source of brief merriment between two men who, until that war, had never lacked for sartorial finery.

  The official celebration of Bolívar’s victory was held on September 18, and all Bogotá turned out for the festivities. Church bells pealed, twenty young beauties in pristine white dresses came forward gamely to bestow crowns of laurels, and Bolívar marched alongside Santander and Anzoátegui in a victory procession that led to the very square where so many of his cohort had died. But even with all the joy and high spirits, few Granadans understood how momentous their victory truly was. In seventy-five days, in a wholly improvised maneuver, Bolívar had freed New Granada and opened the way for the liberation of much of Spanish America. His march over the cordillera had much in common with Hannibal’s over the Alps, except that terrain and climate were harsher in the Andes, and Hannibal had taken years to prepare for the challenge. San Martín had crossed the Andes, too, on the far south of the continent, but, like Hannibal, he had trained his soldiers for years in advance. Bolívar’s genius was to achieve the feat as an improvisation, fashion his strategy on the fly. As one historian put it: he had fulfilled all of Napoleon’s maxims—destroy the army, capture the capital, conquer the country—but he had realized them in one sweeping motion. As Bolívar himself had written prophetically four years before: “A weak man requires a long fight in order to win. A strong one delivers a single blow and an empire vanishes.”

  For all the grandness of the victory procession, for all the pomp and apotheosis of the ceremony, the Liberator again proved human. He had an eye on one of the beauties in white—a lovely dark-eyed girl of seventeen, Bernardina Ibañez. He had met her six years before, as a guest in her parents’ house during his campaign up the Magdalena River. She had been a child then; now she was in the full flower of young womanhood, an irresistible beauty whose charms escaped no one’s notice. The British captain Charles Cochrane described her as an ebony-haired Venus with the eyes of a coquette and the lips of an angel. Bolívar was taken with her immediately. He danced with her at the ball and began seriously to court her favor; some historians say she became one of the great infatuations of his life. But she was already in love with one of Bolívar’s most able colonels, Ambrosio Plaza, and the young lovers hoped to marry. Although Bolívar considered sending his officer far away so that he could have Bernardina to himself, General Santander interceded. Santander pleaded with Bolívar to allow the young man to stay in Bogotá and remain by Bernardina’s side. Eventually, Bolívar agreed, writing to Santander good-naturedly, “No doubt this marriage will please you, for it is sure to increase the population of young Granadans. Me, too, for I love this young couple.” There was good reason for Santander’s interest in the girl’s welfare: he had fallen into an ardent affair with her older sister, Nicolasa, a married woman whose royalist husband had fled—all too conveniently—in the evacuation. The Ibañez women would be the source of much gossip in New Granada for months, even years, to come.

  Triumph, as it turned out, was an aphrodisiac; and balls and parades somehow always managed to sharpen Bolívar’s appetite for a woman. But if he couldn’t have Bernardina, he could always count on his mistress, Pepita. In a letter to Vice President Zea soon after his arrival in Bogotá, he included a personal note: “I hope you will look after the female visitors who await me there.” It was a reference to Pepita, her mother, and sister, all of whom, he reasonably assumed, had reached Angostura safely. Months would pass before he learned that Pepita had died trying to reach him. For the moment, however, the very thought of his high-spirited mistress was comfort enough. He was eager to see her again.

  Bolívar now threw himself into the business of establishing a government in Bogotá. It was no secret that he wanted to join New Granada to Venezuela and, in so doing, create a larger, more resilient nation. But before he could achieve that more perfect union, he had to return to his fractious land and finish its revolution. He needed to work quickly, keep patriot enthusiasms alive. Within the course of a few weeks, he established the bare bones of government: a supreme court, a system of provincial governors, a police force; he elected a minister of war and a minister of the interior. He appropriated Spain’s coveted gold, silver, and emerald mines, putting into practice the recommendations made by his old friend Baron von Humboldt. He revoked the king’s taxes, confiscated Spanish property, set up a school for orphans, instituted a fund for war widows, and levied fines on priests who continued to support the Spanish cause. He also issued an open letter to Viceroy Sámano, proposing an exchange of prisoners. In trade for the charismatic Barreiro—“the Adonis of Bogotá,” as women liked to call him—he hoped to secure the freedom of a number of valuable republicans. But the viceroy, on the run and obsessed with his own safety, never replied to Bolívar, and so the fate of Brigadier Barreiro and his officers was left to chance.

  Although Bolívar soon managed to construct a rudimentary government, he had never been a man for the desk. Dealing with the minutiae of paperwork was always sheer torment for him. He needed an amanuensis who could govern the country and attend to details while he moved on to the more pressing business of liberation. In late September, just before he announced his return to Venezuela, Bolívar named General Santander to the post of vice president, entrusting to that methodical, inordinately ambitious, and mercurial man the foundation of a new republic.

  No sooner had Bolívar departed Bogotá than Santander began to impose his own stamp on the country. He was a jurist by training—a man of the law, as Bolívar called him—and thus well suited to the business of government. He was also an indefatigable worker, spending long days at his desk, writing memoranda, decrees, statutes. It is no exaggeration to say that Santander constructed the legal foundation for democracy in Colombia. But he was also a complicated man: sullen, calculating, peevish, and far too much in love with money. Along the way, he had acquired a streak of cruelty, and a deep aversion to admitting his own mistakes. The horsemen of Venezuela, with whom he had once served, had never liked him, and said so openly. There was a reason for it: he had always been a mediocre soldier, lacking the physical prowess of a true warrior. But in the halls of government the man shone.

  Indeed, Santander had much to offer Bolívar during this crucial period in the history of New Granada. He dove happily into the complex business of administration that Bolívar so deeply abhorred. But on October 11, within days of the Liberator’s departure, Bolívar was given a hint of the bad he would have to suffer along with the good in his vice president. Santander summarily ordered Brigadier Barreiro and thirty-eight prisoners of war to be taken from jail and marched to the main square to be executed. They were led four abreast, dragging their noisy chains to the very place on the plaza where so many republican
leaders had met bloody ends. Barreiro was ordered to kneel, at which point he realized why he had been brought there; and then he was shot in the back without preliminaries or explanation. After that, all remaining thirty-eight were lined up and gunned down. General Santander watched the killings from atop his horse, peering out from the gate that led to the government palace. He spoke a few words of approval, then led a parade—complete with triumphant song—through the streets of Bogotá. His celebration continued into the night, with a grand ball at the palace.

  Republicans were horrified. Barreiro may have been a Spaniard, but the people of Bogotá had had considerable respect—even admiration—for the dashing young officer. They liked his soldierly grit, his personable manner. There was an additional, poignant detail, which surprised no one in those days of jumbled allegiances: the Spanish brigadier was engaged to be married to the sister of a republican soldier. Thrust to his knees, Barreiro came to the swift realization that they meant to kill him, and so asked one thing only: that his executioners remove a tiny portrait of his fiancée from the pocket nearest his heart.

  Even in Venezuela, the shootings were seen as cowardly, unnecessary, inhumane. Republican authorities tried to dissociate themselves from the atrocity, refusing to write it into the public acts. If the patriots had learned anything from ten long years of struggle, it was that blood sacrifices—wars to the death—were damaging to their revolution. They wanted no part of them. When Santander tried to explain himself in a private letter to Bolívar, the words rang hollow: “In the end, I had to get rid of Barreiro and his thirty-eight companions. The pressure was making me crazy, the public was up in arms, and nothing good was going to come from keeping them behind bars.” He made it seem as if all the prisoners had been Spanish officers—which they were not—and that their very presence on earth had been a threat to New Granada. In closing, he added slyly: “The records have been doctored, but since even you (sadly for America) are not immortal, and since I cannot govern forever, it’s essential that your reply cover me for all time.” Bolívar’s reply did just that; the Liberator’s ire barely showed behind the conciliatory phrases:

  I have learned with great regret of the deceitful conduct of our prisoners of war, which forced you to shoot them even though we were waiting to negotiate an exchange that might have given honor to the Republic. . . . Our enemies will not believe that our harshness is an act of justice. But be that as it may, I thank Your Excellency for your zeal and dedication in the attempt to save the Republic with such an unpopular measure.

  FOR THE NEXT TWO MONTHS, Bolívar moved tirelessly from town to town, gradually making his way to Venezuela. Riding his legendary white horse, Palomo—acquired before the Battle of Boyacá—he traced a circuitous route from Tunja to Bucaramanga to Pamplona. He enlisted troops as he went, raised money for arms, conferred with his officers. In every town he was met by adoring crowds and triumphant processions, and at every point he worked avidly to keep the revolutionary spirit alive. He posted flyers, distributed literature. He was a fervent believer in the power of the written word and, although Spaniards laughed at him for it, he always carried a printing press on military campaigns and into battle. It was a cumbersome contraption, requiring many pack animals for its portage, but—to him—it was as essential a weapon in war as any cannon. There was no maneuver—and certainly no victory tour—that couldn’t profit from a well-worded broadside.

  There was, too, hardly a stop in that protracted voyage that wasn’t accompanied by a jubilant ball celebrating the republic. Bolívar deeply understood the psychological value of a festive ritual: the confidence and loyalty that a high-spirited “bread and circus” could inspire. But there was another reason for hosting a ball at every opportunity. The Liberator loved to dance.

  The waltz was his favorite, and he was inclined to dance it for hours at a time if he had a good partner—into the wee hours of morning. He would revel in the music, the physical exertion of it, until, filled with a new energy, he would leave the floor briefly to issue a battery of letters, orders, publications. Like Caesar or Napoleon, he dictated several at once, to two or three different secretaries. He formulated ideas quickly, pacing the room or swinging vigorously in his hammock, and then he would rush back to dance some more. He found that in dancing, concepts became clearer; his writing more eloquent. “There are men,” he would say, “who need to be alone and far from the hubbub to be able to think or mull. I deliberated, reflected, and mulled best when I was at the center of the revelry—among the pleasures and clamor of a ball.”

  But the war was all consuming, even on the dance floor. Revolution was constantly on his mind. As he traveled through New Granada, being toasted for his heroics, he was working to increase his army, which—despite Morillo’s fears—was pitifully depleted. In Pamplona, he met his generals Soublette and Anzoátegui, and with them planned an offensive against Morillo, but the Spanish general seemed in no hurry to engage them. He was biding his time in the Venezuelan hills, waiting out the rainy season, putting off hostilities until he received the promised reinforcements from Madrid.

  When Bolívar finally crossed into Venezuela, he was given the unexpected news that his vibrant young general Anzoátegui, whose valor had emboldened them all at the Battle of Boyacá, had taken ill and died. Bolívar could hardly believe it. Anzoátegui had seemed, when Bolívar laid eyes on him only days before, the very picture of health—strong, barely thirty, with a wife who anxiously awaited him and an infant he had never seen. Bolívar was devastated, as stricken as he had been to lose Girardot so many years before. But other reports would conspire to vex him.

  Surely it was here, as he made his way back to Angostura, that Bolívar learned Pepita was dead, too. He had not been true to her—he had not been true to any one woman since his wife’s death—but he had cared for Pepita deeply. She had always been a comfort in difficult times, a vivacious, passionate companion, and he had sorely missed her affections. But as demoralizing as all this news might have been, his personal grief was quickly overshadowed by the intelligence he was receiving about Venezuela itself. He had thought that he was returning to some semblance of the country he had left behind, but as he descended the cordillera, rode across the parched plains, and sailed down the low waters of the Orinoco, he began to hear of the political bedlam that had overtaken Angostura in his absence.

  There were rumors of insubordination. The warlords he’d thought he’d tamed had gone back to their old, defiant ways. Páez, he now learned, had ignored his command to march west and check the enemy’s movements. Mariño had disregarded orders and refused to join forces with Bermúdez. Worst of all, Arismendi, spinning off into a wild revolution of his own, had had to be apprehended, brought to the capital of Angostura, and thrown into jail.

  Vice President Zea may have been an erudite scholar and skilled orator, but he was a weak leader overall and had fallen victim to running gossip that Bolívar had been routed by Morillo’s army and was languishing in a dungeon in Bogotá, or that he had simply fled—a deserter and outlaw—into the vast expanse of New Granada. As the reins slipped daily from his hands, Zea found it impossible to control Venezuela’s warlords. He was a Granadan, after all—a mousy little foreigner with no military experience—and they had little respect for a chieftain who couldn’t swing a sword. Congress, fidgety and nervous, began to worry that in Zea’s uncertain hands the republic would surely fail. Before long, members began to conspire with one another and, from captivity, Arismendi shrewdly worked to build a constituency among them. Mariño, whom Zea had unwisely relieved of his command, suddenly appeared in the capital and joined Arismendi in the intrigue. In the face of those two indisputable heroes of the revolution, the bookish Zea didn’t stand a chance. Eventually he was forced to step down. In an extraordinary reversal of fortune, the swashbuckling Arismendi went from prison to palace, where he was named vice president of the republic. His first official act was to make Mariño commanding general of the armed forces of the east.
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br />   Bolívar arrived in Angostura at three o’clock in the morning on December 11, 1819, well aware by now that the fate of the republic hung in the balance. As always, when things were at their worst, Bolívar was at his calmest. He disembarked in the capital as if all were under control—as if he had hardly left it—although he had been gone for almost a year. Despite the late hour, the citizens rushed to greet him. They were hardly prepared for his arrival, unaware until two hours before that he was alive and on his way. Arismendi was gone, on a tour of inspection; Mariño was in the north, reorganizing his army. Even so, Bolívar was met by resounding cheers and a round of salvos. Surprised, ecstatic, the people of Angostura welcomed their long-gone hero and carried him triumphantly to the palace.

  He was careful to treat his minions with great respect and equanimity, even those who had declared the Bolívarian era finished. Exhausted after his arduous sixty-four-day voyage, he rested for two days, took measure of the situation, and received Zea and others privately in his quarters. Arismendi, who had arrived in Angostura only hours after Bolívar, had thought the pealing bells, salvos, and fireworks had been for him, but realized what was happening when he heard the shouts of “Long live Bolívar!” and his own secretary hurrying away, warning him with an ominous, “Farewell, General!” When Arismendi saw him, nevertheless, Bolívar was the essence of collegiality. He congratulated the vice president heartily for reorganizing the military, staging an admirable defense of the capital, and showing just enough muscle to scare off the royalists. “As soon as those two met,” an English seaman reported, “Bolívar evinced the same affectionate joy that he would have shown at meeting a brother from whom he had been long separated. He embraced the general, kissed his veteran cheek, encircled him in his arms, and pressed him to his bosom repeatedly, exclaiming as if with the warmest delight ‘¡Mi querido general!’ ” Overcome by the Liberator’s generosity, Arismendi submitted his resignation. Bolívar returned him to the governorship of Margarita, pretended no knowledge of the intrigues, and reinstated Zea. Allowing everyone to save face, including his petulant warlords, Bolívar was able to restore order. It was as if nothing at all had happened in his absence.