Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  For all the shared ambition between San Martín and Bolívar—for all the history that would forever join them—they were markedly different men. The Argentine was secretive, aloof, impatient with adulators, intolerant of frivolity and excess. He was tall, striking, with lustrous black eyes and hair; his skin was so dark that it was rumored he was the son of an indigenous woman. The aristocrats of Buenos Aires referred to him as “El Indio,” “El Cholo,” “El Mulato,” “El Tapé” (a nickname for Guaraní Indians). Unwilling to speak about his roots, or about the date of his birth—which is disputed—or about anything remotely personal, he did nothing to dispel that gossip. Indeed, he had declared in a gathering of Indian chieftains, “I, too, am Indian, and will finish off all the Spaniards who have robbed you of your ancestral lands.” But, according to family record, he was born into a Spanish household in Yapeyú, in the Guaraní territory of Argentina. His father was the governor of Yapeyú and a captain in the Spanish army; his mother was a Creole. At the age of seven, San Martín sailed with his family for Cádiz. By the tender age of eleven, he was a cadet in the Spanish army. Rising steadily through the ranks, the boy was sent to battle in Africa and the Mediterranean; as a young man, he fought with distinction in the Battle of Bailén—alongside Morillo—defending Iberia against Napoleon. By the time the French emperor was driven from Spain, Colonel San Martín had accumulated twenty years of military experience. Along the way, he had befriended the Chilean officer Bernardo O’Higgins and served under two notable British officers: General William Beresford, who once had directed a failed British invasion of Argentina, and the Scotsman Lord MacDuff, who introduced the young soldier to secret lodges of revolutionaries who were conspiring to liberate South America.

  They were the very lodges Bolívar had visited. Indeed, in London, Bolívar and San Martín had known many of the same people, walked the same floors in Miranda’s house on Grafton Street, spoken with the same British sympathizers. But the paths of the liberators would be as different as their natures. The two had never met. After getting to know the revolutionaries in London—among them Bolívar’s old friend and tutor Andrés Bello—San Martín renounced his Spanish citizenship and terminated his service in the king’s army. He returned to Argentina—a land he hadn’t seen for twenty-eight years—in 1812 on the British frigate George Canning. Accompanying him was Carlos Alvear, who had established a secret society in Cádiz, and with whom San Martín would found the Lautaro Lodge, a brotherhood of South American Freemasons dedicated to the ideals of independence. Whereas Bolívar paid only marginal attention to such lodges—availing himself of their connections, yet banning secret societies in the nations he founded—San Martín was resolutely loyal to the Lautaro Lodge, and drew advice and support from its members throughout his revolutionary career.

  In Argentina, San Martín proved a brilliant patriot general. He distinguished himself in the decisive Battle of San Lorenzo in February of 1813, defending the port of Buenos Aires against the Spanish navy and gaining such fame that he was granted command of Argentina’s Army of the North. As Alvear and others dedicated themselves to the founding of the republic, San Martín ostensibly restricted himself to soldiering. But he was quietly plotting the realization of a secret vision: a plan to press on beyond the borders of independent Argentina and liberate America from Chile to Peru. In the relative seclusion of the Andes, he spent years, as one historian describes it, “conspiring, corresponding, intriguing in his obscure and spidery way, trying to save his great idea of the march on Lima from the dangers that threatened it.” He was adamantly uninterested in Argentine politics, refused all promotions, and played no part in the formation of the new nation. With single-minded will, he lobbied to push his way north, getting himself appointed the governor of Cuyo, a ruggedly beautiful region that lay on the Chilean border. With his child bride, a sweet fifteen-year-old girl from a noble family in Buenos Aires, he settled in Mendoza, where he could take closer stock of the situation. It was there that he formed and trained the Army of the Andes, eventually persuading the supreme director of Argentina, Juan de Pueyrredón, to allow him to take his men over the cordillera into Chile. Although Argentina was staggered by poverty, the government hardly able to manage its own affairs, Pueyrredón gave San Martín what he wanted. In November of 1816, the supreme director wrote to his general:

  Here go 40 saddle blankets. By separate post, in a small box, go the only two bugles I’ve been able to scrounge. By mid December you will receive the 35,000 pounds of jerked beef you’ve asked for. . . . Here go the 2,000 spare sabers you need. Here go 200 tents, and there are no more. Here goes the World. Here goes the Devil. Here goes the Flesh. I don’t know how I shall ever extricate myself from the debts I have incurred for this. . . . God damn it! Don’t ask me for anything else, unless you want to hear that I’ve been found in the fort, hanging from a rafter.

  San Martín did not disappoint him. He worked for almost two years to build his war machine, operating a clandestine factory in Mendoza that made bullets from church bells and canteens from bullhorns. “He wants wings for cannon,” said the fanatical priest who ran the operation, “and he shall have them.” Meanwhile, San Martín disciplined his troops with a rigor hitherto unknown in the republican army. He recruited Indians, freed and enlisted thousands of slaves—half his infantry would be black—and welcomed Chilean patriots who had been forced out of Santiago by Spain’s reconquest of the rebel city in 1814. He was stern with his soldiers and brooked no unruliness, but he inspired them to great sacrifice. “If a Spaniard resists,” he told them, “split his head open like a pumpkin.” If a republican soldier was so incapacitated that he couldn’t walk, he was to be left to his fate on the battlefield. By the end of 1816, he had a fierce, disciplined fighting force.

  Together with Bernardo O’Higgins, the illegitimate son of a former viceroy, San Martín took an army of four thousand men over the snowy heights of the Americas’ tallest peak, Aconcagua, in February of 1817, achieving one of the most astonishing feats in the annals of military history. When 1,200 survivors reached the other side, they surprised the Spanish army and overwhelmed it in the Battle of Chacabuco. The killing field was littered with Spaniards, their forces decimated, their skulls split wide and gaping like smashed pumpkins. With trademark economy, San Martín reported to Buenos Aires, “In twenty-four days, we have completed this campaign, crossed the highest mountains in the world, put an end to the tyrants, and given freedom to Chile.”

  He was not inclined to stirring dispatches or dazzling oratory. He shunned exaggerated language, preferred to keep a noble silence. Not particularly well read, he wasn’t apt at quoting great writers or adding clever flourishes in foreign tongues, as Bolívar was so fond of doing. He was enigmatic, profoundly guarded—and that mysterious nature was not always well received. “There is a timidity of intellect,” one Englishwoman sniffed; another contemporary described him more generously: “It is impossible to know what is happening in that impenetrable soul.” Modest to the point of asceticism, San Martín refused salaries and grandiose ceremonies: admirers who gushed with praise were waved away impatiently. When offered a promotion to brigadier general after liberating Chile, he declined it twice; “your approval,” he told his government, “is reward enough.” When the jubilant city of Santiago presented him with money to defray the cost of his Andean crossing, he refused it, donating it instead toward the creation of a public library. He was solemn, uncomfortable in his skin, easily exasperated.

  He was also profoundly ill. As a young soldier in Spain he had suffered crippling bouts of rheumatism. After the Battle of San Lorenzo, he began to experience worse: fierce gastric seizures that caused him to hemorrhage and vomit blood. The pain was so excruciating that he was driven to calm it with opium. By 1816, he was deeply addicted to the drug, taking it not only for gastric attacks, but in order to sleep, in order to quiet his nerves, in order to quell disappointment. “An angry hemorrhage and the consequent debilitating weakness have kept me n
ineteen days in bed,” he wrote a friend, and indeed his cohort began to worry. His speech began to slur, his movements grew unsteady. Friends tried to persuade him to stop abusing the drug; they stole the potent little tubes from his bedside. Somehow, by dint of determination and the close attention of medics and aides, he managed the punishing climb over the Andes. On April 5, 1818, with heroic resolve, he triumphed in the decisive Battle of Maipú, driving the Spaniards, once and for all, from Chile. He was so exhausted by battle’s close that his report to Buenos Aires was all of three sentences on a soiled scrap of paper. His detractors in the capital accused him of being drunk. “I found the hero of Maipú sick in bed,” an Englishman reported soon after, “looking so pale and thin that if it had not been for the brilliance of his eyes I would hardly have recognized him.” Within months, the hero would be carried back over the Andes on a stretcher.

  All the while, San Martín was carefully preparing for the greatest campaign of his career. By the beginning of 1820, he had risen from his bed, recrossed the Andes, and installed himself near Valparaiso. Several thousand skilled soldiers answered to his command, spurring him to believe he was ready to make a concerted attack on the powerful viceroy in Lima. But at roughly the same time, political disagreements that had plagued Argentina for years erupted in civil war, and chaos overtook the fledgling republic. Suddenly, the viability of San Martín’s campaign abroad was called into question. He was ordered to rally his troops, bring his armies home, and defend Buenos Aires. But by then his mission had reached messianic proportions: he believed that the liberation of America superseded internal politics. Gravely sick, his illness compounded by worry, he decided to disobey his government’s orders. With a zeal bordering on madness, he insisted on executing his war plan.

  The citizens of Argentina rose up in anger against their famous general. San Martín was accused as a traitor, a power seeker—maligned for gross indifference to the Argentine cause. There were rumors that he would be court-martialed if he stepped foot on his native soil. Others claimed that foreign powers had bribed him; that he had made away with a staggering fortune. He protested it all as a grotesque lie. But he refused to change course in favor of the national interest. “I have pledged my honor to the cause of America,” he wrote Bernardo O’Higgins, by then the supreme director of Chile. “I have no homeland without it, and I will not sacrifice such a precious gift for anything in the world.”

  Joining forces with O’Higgins and the veteran British admiral Lord Cochrane, San Martín soon commanded much of the western coast of South America. The infamous Thomas Cochrane—“Wolf of the Seas”—a flamboyant Scotsman convicted of financial fraud in London, had been given full run of the Chilean armada, and, virtually destroying Spanish sea power in the Pacific, had allowed San Martín to launch a successful expedition to Peru.

  San Martín and four thousand troops slipped onto Peruvian soil in the fog of August 1820, just as Bolívar was negotiating the peace with Morillo in Venezuela. Spilling onto the white sands of Paracas, not far from the ancient, impenetrable lines of Nazca, his patriot troops quietly moved inland. Soon, the glittering city of Lima—that nexus of power, coveted city of kings—would fall without so much as a sword raised against it. In the course of almost a year, San Martín blockaded it to near starvation. He frightened the rich whites of Lima with his army of blacks and cholos, mixed-race natives. He virtually honeycombed Peru with secret agents, winning the sympathies of Spanish Freemasons. He negotiated craftily with Viceroy Pezuela, suggesting that the eminence might appoint his own regency to rule an independent Peru. In January of 1821, an uprising of Spanish army officers deposed the viceroy, and General La Serna was thrust into power. Six months later, after fruitless negotiations with San Martín, the new viceroy and his standing army of thousands evacuated the capital, pinched with hunger. A major earthquake ripped through the coast, as if to mark Spain’s historic departure. Terrified, the whites of Lima wailed that the ghosts of the angry Inca were about to wreak their revenge. On July 12, the patriot general entered the capital with no opposition whatsoever. It was a frigid day—one of those dull, dank days of coastal winter—and the place seemed unrelievedly gray, inscrutable.

  San Martín was the essence of decorum, taking every precaution to make little of his very large victory. At first, he took lodging at a monastery, accompanied by only one aide, and then he quietly moved to the government palace, where he installed himself with a full delegation of assistants. Two weeks later, with a formidable army of peons behind him, he named himself Protector, waved his flag over the central plaza, and declared the City of Kings a bastion of freedom.

  BOLÍVAR WASTED NO TIME IN writing to San Martín to congratulate him. But midway through the flattery, he added, “I hope to heaven that you won’t need the Colombian army’s services in your liberation of Peru!” It was a barbed remark: Lima may have been liberated; but Peru was not. It was also a prescient observation: Bolívar had no way to know—just yet—of the political bog that would mire his rival in Lima.

  General Sucre, too, was soon beset by troubles in Guayaquil. Months before, Bolívar had sent him there with a thousand men to prepare for the liberation of Quito. But Quito remained in Spain’s stubborn grip; the people of Guayaquil, who had gleefully declared their independence when San Martín arrived in Peru, were now stalled in fractious argument. Would they join Peru? Or Colombia? Officially, the strategic port city of Guayaquil had been part of the viceroyalty of New Granada, but over the years it had become more closely allied to Peru, with which it did an active trade. Guayaquil was a thriving center of naval commerce; a place where ships were built and where they undertook a busy traffic. Of great importance to Lima, it was also vital to the landlocked colony of Quito.

  Bolívar insisted that Santander find five thousand good troops to send ahead to Quito so that he could set out at once and resolve the issue. He was tired of managing, ready to push on. “I’m not going to lose the fruit of eleven years in a standoff,” he wrote Santander. “I don’t want San Martín to see me as anything but the chosen son.” As far as he was concerned, the valuable land poised between the dying viceroyalties would be Greater Colombia’s, not Peru’s, and certainly not San Martín’s.

  He arrived in Bogotá on October 21, 1821, and dedicated himself immediately to the business of organizing a decisive southern campaign. He didn’t stay long. Before two months had elapsed, he was off, headed for the mountain redoubts of Quito. But he did have time for one personal obligation. On November 27, he bought a magnificent house in the very heart of Bogotá, purchasing it with the salaries due him, which—until now—he had been loath to collect. The mansion was on Santa Clara Street, not far from the cathedral and the old viceregal palace. On the deed of purchase, he designated it as a gift for the mother of Bernardina Ibañez, the young girl whose romantic attentions he had fervently sought and whose valiant young husband had died on the fields of Carabobo. What did that purchase mean? Was it an attempt to compensate for the ultimate sacrifice of Colonel Plaza, whom the Liberator had claimed to love as much as he loved the young officer’s fetching wife? Or was it an expression of love for the bereft widow? And why had he paid for the property with his salary—state funds, which he rarely accepted—rather than with personal money? Was it a way to ease his conscience about the gossip to which he and Vice President Santander had subjected the family? Or had the vice president, who went on to keep her sister, Nicolasa, as a mistress for fifteen more years, requested that purchase himself? Historians have conjectured but we may never know the truth.

  What we do know is that when Bolívar left Bogotá for Cali on the 13th of December, the Ibañez women had already moved into that comfortable house on Santa Clara Street, and they accepted Bolívar’s gift with the fullest gratitude. From Cali, Bolívar would write Bernardina one last letter, professing his ardor and forever leaving open the question whether, in the scant six weeks he had spent in Bogotá, he had been able to win some measure of the widow’s love:<
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  Fussy, beautiful Bernardina, . . . What love can do! I think of nothing but you and your lovely temptations. . . . You are the only one in the world for me. You alone, celestial angel, inspire my most vivid feelings and desires. From you I hope to win whatever happiness and pleasure you deign to give me, for you are what I long for. If I say no more—much more—it is out of modesty and discretion; don’t think it is because I don’t love you. And stop accusing me of indifference or callousness. You see how time and distance only combine to boost the thrill of memory. It’s not right to blame me with empty suspicions. Think only of my passion and my eternal devotion, which you cannot deny.

  War would soon conspire to put Bernardina far from Bolívar’s mind. The road from Bogotá to Cali was arduous, depleting. Initially, he had thought he would march to the coast and sail to Guayaquil, where he could join Sucre in a coastal attack on the colony of Quito. But word had it that Spanish frigates controlled Ecuadorian shores. It wasn’t true. The craft that had caused that fleeting worry was the one depositing the new captain-general. He was Juan Mourgeón, an accomplished soldier who had fought alongside San Martín in the wars against Napoleon and, ironically enough, had once saved the Argentine’s life. The Spaniard Mourgeón had sailed from Panama, where he had been governor, and landed on the coast of Ecuador with eight hundred men and orders to fortify Quito.

  The faulty intelligence made Bolívar opt for land rather than sea, forcing him to take an army of four thousand across 250 miles of punishing mountain terrain. It was either a fool’s or a hero’s journey. The Colombians traversed burning plains, perilous rivers, improvising bridges of rope over deadly gorges and cataracts. By the time they reached the other side, the army was a fraction of itself. Those who survived had marched thousands of miles, many of them from as far away as Valencia, some from the battles of Boyacá and Carabobo. Now, as they filed into Cali, they were a shattered force—crushed by exhaustion, hypothermia, disease. Hundreds had deserted. Among those who remained—many of them languishing in litters—few could march, much less muster and fight.