Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Although Bolívar had written to Morillo, to La Torre, even to King Ferdinand himself, in hopes of reaching independence peacefully, he could see that it was no use: he was back at war. Bolívar moved quickly to unite the three armies of the west: his own, Páez’s, and Urdaneta’s. He knew that his only recourse now was to present the full force of the republic’s military power—all at once, and in one great battle. But before he did, he directed General Bermúdez, commander of the army of the east, to prepare to attack Caracas, distract the Spaniards, and force them to split their forces. Bolívar was leaving nothing to chance. He planned every detail of the engagement with utmost precision. Well aware that General Morales, La Torre’s second in command, had been passed over for La Torre’s job, he was going to use that resentment to his advantage.

  On the morning of April 28, 1821, the mobilization of the three armies began: Páez and his horsemen, accompanied by the British Legion, started the long journey across the rain-whipped Apure to the appointed meeting place in San Carlos, a Venezuelan town on the plains of Carabobo where La Torre’s army was garrisoned. Urdaneta undertook the grueling passage along a rough coast and over the mountains from Maracaibo. By early May—as Napoleon lay in St. Helena, surrendering his soul to the hereafter—Bolívar set up camp in the rubble of Barinas, having wended his way down the Magdalena River and recrossed the Andes to Venezuela. One week later, Bermúdez’s eastern army invaded and occupied Caracas. Just as Bolívar had hoped, La Torre directed Morales to march on the capital and eject Bermúdez. It was an easy commission. The fierce Morales, commander of Boves’s former Legions of Hell, was glad to go off on his own and, with his superior force of two thousand, handily shooed off the patriot soldiers. But all went exactly as Bolívar planned: his diversionary tactic had worked. La Torre, in San Carlos, was left with a weakened defense, and the patriot generals were now able to march overland toward him, unhampered.

  On June 11—more than a month later—Páez’s horsemen and the British battalion reached the outskirts of San Carlos, where Bolívar awaited them. General Urdaneta and his corps of infantrymen arrived within days, having successfully taken the port city of Coró. The royalist army, aware now of this impressive patriot advance, had withdrawn to the north, as Bolívar had predicted. Five thousand strong, they camped outside the village of Carabobo, fifty miles away. Once informed of their position, Bolívar didn’t need to know more: La Torre’s forces were clearly in shambles; the Spanish general was doing little more than blocking the road to Caracas and Puerto Cabello, his two strongholds; he was not going to attempt an offensive move. In any case, the patriot army now greatly outnumbered the royalists. By the time Bolívar reviewed his troops on the open fields of Tinaquillo, he had 6,500 soldiers under his command, including some of his most skilled officers. This was the republican army Bolívar had worked so diligently to build—“the largest and most superb ever to bear arms on any battlefield in Colombia,” in his own estimation. To have brought them together from such distances, in such an advanced state of readiness, was a true testament to his military acuity.

  On the night before the battle, the heavens opened with torrential rains, drenching the open ground and all the warriors who camped on it. The British who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars took it as a good omen; the same had happened before Waterloo. So it was that on June 24, 1821, the morning dawned bright and clear, presenting a cloudless sky. The patriots moved swiftly to carry out Bolívar’s orders. Páez’s cavalry was dispatched to the west, with instructions to attack the enemy’s left flank. Undertaking a forced march for two and a half hours, they rode up and down steep terrain, hacking past tropical undergrowth, fording streams, until they were two miles from the valley where La Torre had taken position. By the time they reached Carabobo, they were laboring under a broiling sun.

  The Spanish general had been confident that no cavalry could possibly negotiate the precipitous landscape to his west, and so he expected the republicans to flood into the valley from the south, where a gap in the hills beckoned. But Bolívar’s vanguard did not take the bait. Instead, they moved stealthily along a narrow ravine on the western side. Hacking their way up a tangle of green, they scaled the heights and there, past trees and uneven ground, were able to spy the royalists in the valley, preparing for a frontal attack. The patriots spilled over the ridge, assaulting the Spaniards where they least expected it. Initially, La Torre’s soldiers shrank back, but rallied with such a murderous volley of gunfire that Páez’s men, who had chased them to within a pistol shot, broke and fled in disorder. The British Legion then took up the fight. Wielding their bayonets in their famous “hollow square” formation, they held off the royalists, allowing Páez’s forces to regroup. When the horsemen rushed back into the fray, they came at the enemy from the rear, brandishing twelve-foot lances. The Spaniards were helpless in the face of that double onslaught.

  Stunned by heavy losses and the abiding fear that they might be taken prisoner, the royalists fled the battlefield even as La Torre was issuing commands. When the smoke of war lifted from that sun-baked sepulcher, the stench of blood was pungent: more than a thousand royalists lay dead; 1,500 more had been taken prisoner; the rest had fled to the hills. The patriots had suffered fewer losses, and yet their dead were never recorded. Eventually, it was reported that six hundred British soldiers lost their lives at Carabobo, along with their commanding colonels, Manuel Cedeño and young Ambrosio Plaza, who had only recently been married to the lovely and highly coveted Bernardina Ibañez. As Bolívar approached to console the dying Plaza, the young man told him, “My general, I die happy here on this battlefield, in a position so far forward that even Páez could not reach it.” Indeed, Páez lay in the dirt, not far away. Exhausted, the battle done, he was writhing, foaming at the mouth, being convulsed—as he so often was after a fray—by one of his violent fits of epilepsy. Nearby lay the towering First Negro, who had always protected him in battle—dead now, with a hole in his heart. As soon as Páez regained consciousness, his soldiers erupted in shouts of joy. There was no doubt that Páez’s horsemen and the soldiers of the British Legion had won the afternoon, the battle, the war. Bolívar wasted no time in honoring them. There on the field, before the end of day, he promoted Páez to general in chief of the army. Then, as the Irish and English marched off—a bedraggled third of the number that had marched in—Bolívar was overcome with emotion. “Saviors of my country!” he cried after them in gratitude. They returned the praise with a crisp salute.

  The victory was complete. The Battle of Carabobo was the last major engagement of the war in Greater Colombia, crucial not only because the patriots had prevailed, but because Bolívar’s generals—small-time provincial warlords who heretofore had contributed only sporadically to a nation’s welfare—had decided, if only briefly, to commit their allegiance to a greater good. For a brief time they yielded all personal ambition to Bolívar’s vision. Some did so blindly; others, because they had become fervent partisans of a national idea whose possibility, until then, was only dimly seen. It didn’t matter. Their dedication would be repaid in kind. On July 16, 1821, Bolívar issued a decree with his generals in mind. In it, he assigned the western provinces of Venezuela to Páez and Mariño; the east was placed under the control of Bermúdez. In essence, he was institutionalizing the Latin American warlord. The decree would have deep, subliminal effects on the continent, which would reverberate for centuries to come.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Chosen Son

  I am not the governor this republic needs—a soldier by necessity and inclination, I found my destiny in fields of war.

  —Simón Bolívar

  At times, it seems the hardest road of war is that which leads to peace. For Bolívar, it was ever so. “I am a soldier,” he liked to say, even when others begged him to be something more. Despite his well-honed faculties for social justice—despite his gift for imparting democratic ideals—he found the quotidian business of government numbing. He was a man of the sw
ord, not the scepter. But it was the scepter he was handed when he rode triumphantly into Caracas on June 29, 1821, five days after his decisive victory at Carabobo.

  Although he reached the city at night and went directly to his house on the cathedral square, delirious crowds engulfed him, eager to embrace their hero. It was morning before he could escape their attentions. The glory of it was seductive, inebriating—but he knew all too well that beyond the fevered joy, there was a deeply demoralized country to govern, and he questioned his patience for carrying out the task. Months before, as he prepared to meet the Spaniards in one last battle, he had written to confess these fears to Antonio Nariño, whom he had just appointed interim vice president of Colombia, which along with Venezuela and Quito, was a subdivision of Greater Colombia. Nariño was an intellectual as well as a military man and had just returned from prison in Cádiz, where he had been captive more than once in his long, rebellious career. It was he who had translated France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man into Spanish, and he who had been credited for instigating the Granadan revolution. Just before marching to battle, Bolívar wrote to ask him to organize the inauguration of a new Colombian congress, and, in the same letter, admitted to strong personal doubts about his own gifts for administration. Colombia was a military camp, not a functioning society, he told Nariño. As one lone man, struggling against the abuses of government, he had seen how venal and corrupt politicians could be, and he had been powerless to control them. It seemed to him that all the good men had disappeared, and that only the bad had multiplied. He wrote on:

  Since I am fully convinced that the command of the army and the control of the Republic must be kept separate, I will tender my resignation. . . . Please, friend, believe me when I say that I have meditated at length on these matters during the eight years I have governed the Republic. I am not versed in the art of government. I cannot and do not wish to govern, for to do it well one must have an inclination or, better yet, an uncontrollable passion for it. For my part, each day I feel a growing repugnance toward the command.

  He had never aspired to lead governments. His ambition—as simple as it was ardent—had been to drive out the nation’s oppressor. What troubled him now that that task was done was the undeniable evidence that his people were not ready for democracy. On the contrary, they were in urgent need of a strong, authoritative government. Three hundred years of injustice and ten years of hellish war had turned them into a nation of belligerents; they were as feral and rapacious as any horseman of the Apure. “Even I, riding at their head, have no idea what they’re capable of,” he confessed. He had the ominous feeling that peace would be worse than any war: “We are poised on an abyss; over a volcano, ready to explode.” Anyone who thought participatory rule could be handed blithely to the ignorant would be in for a rude shock. Knowing his countrymen as well as he did—having crossed and recrossed the land so many times—Bolívar concluded that Greater Colombia was governable only by a strong hand. That conclusion was far from the teachings of the Enlightenment that had animated his vows—far from Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu—but it was, he insisted, the hard truth. Any armchair philosopher or graybeard politician who thought otherwise was clouding his head with foolish dreams and imperiling the future of the republic. He said as much to Santander:

  In Colombia the people who count are the army, those who have liberated the country. . . . The rest are old men. . . . This view of reality, which certainly does not derive from Rousseau, will have to be the view we favor in the end, otherwise those old gentlemen will be our ruin. They believe that Colombia is a nation of docile sheep huddled around cozy hearths in Bogotá, Tunja and Pamplona. They haven’t bothered to see the Caribs of the Orinoco, the horsemen of the Apure, the boatmen of the Magdalena, the bandits of Patía, the ungovernable people of Pasto, the Guajibos of Casanare, and all the savage hordes from Africa and America who roam like wild deer in the wilderness of Colombia. Don’t you think, my dear Santander, that these legislators—ignorant rather than malicious, presumptuous rather than ambitious—are leading us down the road to anarchy, and from there to tyranny, and finally to ruin? I am sure of it. And if the horsemen don’t bring us down, the philosophers will.

  By “old men” he meant the representatives of congress, who had begun to carp about Bolívar’s leadership. In the insular capital of Angostura—uninformed about the nation at large, surrounded by nothing so much as their own gossip—they had begun to question the wisdom of uniting Venezuela and New Granada. They worried about losing their regional authority, fretted about Bolívar’s insistence on a centralized government. They had also taken issue with his decision to move the congress to Cúcuta, although it was clear that a governing body could not govern from such a remote location as Angostura. No one could deny that Bolívar was the indisputable leader in the eyes of the people—the victor of a long and dearly won war—but there were many in government who disagreed with him. Even in the face of his ringing achievements, his enemy ranks had grown.

  Bolívar did not tarry in Caracas. Within a few days, he went on to visit his estate in San Mateo, which had suffered greatly from the war. It had seen battles, been occupied by royalists as well as patriots, and now the old hacienda was but a phantom of the paradise he’d known as a boy. It was hard to believe that he’d been so rich as all that. By now, his entire fortune had been lost to the war; his finances were in disorder. What little he took in pay, he took in small sums, and that only to purchase life’s essentials. For years now, he had refused to collect his government salaries.

  While in San Mateo, he freed the few slaves who had stayed behind. Among them was his old wet nurse, Hipólita, who had sustained him as an infant, raised him as a boy, even traveled with him on the battlefield; to him she was “the only father I have ever known.” Born in San Mateo almost sixty years before, she had been the product of another time, another order, and had spent her life dedicating herself to the comfort and well-being of the Bolívars. Now, in her sixth decade, she was being released to an unfamiliar world. It doesn’t take much to imagine her bewilderment.

  After several days, Bolívar traveled on to Valencia, Tocuyo, Trujillo. He was antsy, nervous. He knew he was no longer Venezuelan, but a citizen of something else, the guardian of a larger concept. He felt a strong responsibility to Bogotá. “I belong to the family of Colombia, not of Bolívar,” he wrote to his old friend and in-law Fernando de Toro, with whom he had made his vows on the heights of Monte Sacro. But just as urgently, he felt the pull of America at large. He felt a duty to those who still languished under the rule of King Ferdinand—to Quito (the future Ecuador), Quito’s ungovernable district of Pasto, and most irresistibly of all, to Lima, the heart of the Spanish viceroyalty. “I need to round out Colombia,” he wrote a friend, as he busily planned a campaign in the south. And to another: “I need to give a third sister to the Battles of Boyacá and Carabobo.” There were more nations to free, more avenues to greatness. He would not sit and fret about the minutiae of government. “Send me that book about the Incas of Peru,” he instructed Santander.

  On September 7, he learned that the congress of Cúcuta, in an overwhelming vote, had elected him president of Greater Colombia. Many among the members had argued for a federal system—a union of separate states—and indeed they had borrowed freely from the United States model, but in the end, out of respect for their Liberator, they had put a centralized government in place. It was salve for the moment.

  Bolívar accepted the presidency, but only halfheartedly, having joked that if elected, he would always manage to be away from the capital or deathly ill. He was, by then, firmly pointed to the liberation of Quito and Peru. But he also understood that Greater Colombia needed him, if nothing else, for continuity, for stability, for his name. He opted to take the responsibility even as he was moving on, hoping all the while that it was a titular honor, a transitory state. When he went reluctantly to Cúcuta in October to accept the honors, he stood before Congress and spoke his
mind:

  I am a son of war, a man whom combat has elevated to the halls of rule. Fortune has brought me to this rank and victory has confirmed it. But mine are not titles that have been consecrated by the scales of justice, by happy circumstance, by the people’s will. The sword that has governed Colombia is the whip of misfortune. . . . This sword will be useless in a day of peace and, when that day finally comes, my power will be finished, because I have sworn as much to myself, because I have promised it to Colombia, and because there can be no republic unless people take power into their own hands. A man like me is dangerous to a popular government, a threat to national sovereignty.

  He believed that stark evaluation, especially those last words: he was dangerous to anyone who would press full democracy on Colombia too quickly; he was a threat to anyone with narrow, sectarian loyalties; and he was convinced that South America would never know greatness unless it was a seamless, fully integrated whole.

  AS BOLÍVAR WARILY ASSUMED THE presidency, eager to march toward Peru, San Martín was already there, establishing a dictatorship in Lima. The Argentine general had been in the viceregal capital for more than a year, blockading the coast and patiently awaiting Lima’s capitulation. Eventually, the acting viceroy, General La Serna, was forced to evacuate his formidable army, scattering a force of ten thousand to the sea fortress of Callao or to citadels in Cuzco, Huancayo, and Arequipa. By July 12, 1821, the jittery, intensely Spanish city of Lima was in the hands of San Martín and his liberating army. It had surrendered to him without a drop of bloodshed.