Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  There were other worries. Federalists in Caracas, lobbying for more autonomy, had begun to question the Colombian constitution. They proposed reverting to the old constitution established in Venezuela a decade before so that they could establish more independence from Bogotá. Bolívar was furious. To him, the Colombian constitution was sacred, inviolable, and the concept of a strong, centralized government essential. He contemplated going to Bogotá to ensure that Santander stamp out this new threat, but his fulminations alone seemed to persuade the malcontents to back down for the time being. In this brief apogee of glory, Bolívar’s moral authority was the strongest it would ever be; there was little the Venezuelan people wouldn’t do for him.

  The uprising in Pasto, on the other hand, was another story. Young Boves’s rebellion had erupted at the end of 1822 in a breathtaking show of violence. Opting for cruelty in the face of cruelty, Bolívar ordered all royalist property in Pasto seized and parceled out to his officers; anyone suspected of supporting the crown was arrested and forced to serve in the patriot army; guns, weapons—all metal objects—were forcibly removed from houses. The populace responded with renewed violence: Bolívar’s veteran general Bartolomé Salom reported that Colombia had two choices now: grant absolute pardon for all residents of Pasto or embark on total destruction of the region. “You cannot imagine the obstinacy,” Salom wrote to Bolívar. “We have captured prisoner boys who are no more than nine and ten.” Finally, with the help of General Sucre, the republican army was able to overtake young Boves in a bloody encounter at Yacuanquer, in which soldiers and civilians, women and children were indiscriminately slaughtered. The carnage did honor to no one; nor was the battle at all decisive. Pasto would need to be tamed again and again. Like an indefatigable Hydra, its royalists would rebound from apparent annihilation to fight again for the king.

  Somehow, in this ongoing crucible of history, Bolívar found time for Manuela Sáenz. Their trysts were few and far between, and she complained bitterly about their infrequency. She had stayed on in Quito to be closer to him, refusing to go back to her husband in Lima, but she was learning that life as the Liberator’s mistress was one of short, ardent assignations and long, excruciating months of want. As he crisscrossed the Ecuadorean terrain, trying to secure it for Colombia, she was inconsolable. “The victory at Yacuanquer has cost me dearly,” she protested. “You’ll tell me I’m not a good patriot for what I’m about to say, but I would have preferred my own triumph to ten in Pasto. I can imagine how bored you must be in that little town, but as desperate as you may be, you can’t possibly be as desperate as your best of friends—Manuela.”

  It was probably in the course of his incessant peregrinations to subdue Pasto that Sáenz understood that the only way she was going to be able to see him as much as passion demanded was to travel with him. During the year or more that she stayed on in Quito waiting for him, he had passed through the city only four times. She was lovesick, obsessed. She was also unafraid of danger. A declared patriot before she had ever met him, she was a fanatical partisan of his cause, an excellent horsewoman, comfortable around men, known to savor a good cigar. Moreover, she wanted nothing left to chance. Some have described Manuelita as fierce in her jealousies, capable of mauling his face with her fingernails when she suspected he had been unfaithful. She knew as well as anyone that her lover was a lothario. In any case, sometime during 1823, she likely offered to serve as an informant, secretary, or—as his attentions turned south—a liaison in the republican circles of Lima. He would find Manuelita impossible to resist. “She has a singular configuration,” a French physician later said of her, leaving all future historians to contemplate whether the attribute he had in mind was corporeal, psychological, or sexual; whatever it was, it would captivate Bolívar for the rest of his days. He did not object to having her follow.

  Her familiarity with Lima was further glue between them. His eye was firmly on Peru’s liberation now. He had been coy in committing troops to San Martín, but the moment his rival had fled Callao, Bolívar made it known to Peruvians that he would take up their cause. He now asked the congress in Bogotá for approval to do so. But Santander dawdled, insisting that a man should mind his own house before setting out to salvage another’s. By March, with San Martín gone and the original liberation army thoroughly routed, the situation in Lima had deteriorated seriously. Soon, the city began preparing for the worst; people sensed it was only a matter of time before the Spaniards retook Lima. Santander finally took Bolívar’s request to congress.

  With every return to Guayaquil from the firestorm of Pasto, Bolívar anxiously awaited Bogotá’s response. But Colombia’s congress, like its vice president, was hesitant to release the president to a foreign war. Bolívar knew Peru could not wait. Lima, the only liberated part of the colony, was about to be overrun by the King’s army. He sent it six thousand troops under the command of General Sucre. By the time those reinforcements arrived, however, Lima was already in extremis. On June 18, nine thousand royalist soldiers overwhelmed the capital. Somehow, Sucre was able to whisk congress and his army safely to Callao. But within twenty-four hours, the chaos and intrigue were such that Riva Agüero’s government collapsed, he was driven out of Callao unceremoniously, and the Peruvian congress pressed Sucre to accept the presidency of the republic. “The anarchy here is beyond description!” Sucre wrote to Bolívar. “I curse the day I came to Lima. What a task you foisted on me!” He was appalled by the vicious nature of Peruvian politics. Within weeks he had had enough of it, and he handed off the presidency to the Marquis of Torre Tagle, a former mayor of Lima and a republican who had spent most of his life in service to the crown. But Peru hadn’t seen the last of Riva Agüero. The former president removed himself to the old, venerable city of Trujillo, where he raised his own army, set up a government, and insisted that he was still in charge.

  The fourth and last delegation from Peru to Bolívar arrived in Guayaquil at the end of July. As fate would have it, the mission was led by Olmedo, the erstwhile poet-president of Guayaquil who had gone off in San Martín’s ship and become a member of Lima’s congress. Now representing the new president, the Marquis of Torre Tagle, Olmedo showed Bolívar a very different face from the one he had worn in Guayaquil. He beseeched him to come, make haste: Peru, he said, was teetering on the verge of a double abyss. If civil war didn’t devour it, the Spanish crown would. “Peru awaits the voice that bonds, the hand that leads, the genius that opens the way to victory,” the official letter pleaded. “All eyes, all hopes, are naturally on you.”

  Bolívar composed a careful response to Torre Tagle: “For a long time now, my heart has drawn me to Peru . . . I have begged permission from [Colombia’s] congress to allow me to serve my brothers of the South; I have yet to receive an answer. This inaction has brought me to the brink of despair: my troops are already there with you, hovering between hazard and glory; and I linger here, so very far away.”

  He wrote those words on the evening of August 6. But early the next day, just as he was about to sign and seal the missive, he received news that the congress in Bogotá had finally given him permission to go. He tore up the letter, called for his officers, and—before the hour was out—boarded a ship for Lima.

  CHAPTER 13

  In the Empire of the Sun

  All the power of the supreme being is not enough to liberate Peru, that accursed country; only Bolívar, backed by true might, can hope to accomplish it.

  —José de San Martín

  “Peru,” Bolívar wrote, “contains two elements that are the bane of every just and free society: gold and slaves. The first corrupts all it touches; the second is corrupt in and of itself.” He had written it eight years before, while he languished in Jamaica, his revolution undone. But he was reminded of it now as he stood on the deck of the Chimborazo, watching the bare, desolate flank of Peru scroll past on his approach to Lima. It was the 1st of September, and the morning air was still pricked by the raw and damp of a Peruvian winter. B
y noon, a long, gray spit of land, the port of Callao, came into view, lancing the sea like a mortal wound. Gold. Slaves. Any visitor to the bustling center of Lima could see why Peru was loyal to the crown, why it hadn’t been easy to raise an independence army: it was an altogether Spanish city, the richest viceroyalty in the empire. With its palaces, bejeweled aristocrats, and spirited commerce—its streets clattering with six thousand gilded carriages—Lima possessed a magnificence known to few capitals in the Old World, much less the New. Gold and silver coursed through that harsh landscape; and a vast population of indigenous had been shackled to answer the demands of a brisk world trade.

  The schooner dropped anchor at one o’clock. A full-cannon salute announced its arrival and what was left of Lima’s patriot army—largely made up of Argentines, Chileans, and Colombians—spilled down the road to Callao, forming a procession for the Liberator’s long-awaited entrance into the city. The Spaniards were no longer there: General Canterac had occupied Lima only long enough to wring money, guns, and uniforms from the people, threatening to reduce the capital to ashes if they didn’t comply. After a month, Canterac had gone off to rejoin Viceroy La Serna in the highlands, leaving the city to its own chaotic devices. Now Lima was rendering up a cautious welcome for the Colombian Liberator. The streets were festooned with ribbons and flags; church bells pealed; the hum of celebration filled the air. People clamored to get a glimpse of the man who would replace San Martín. Members of Congress, with President Torre Tagle at their head, came down to the port to escort him into the city. He was carried in triumph to the ancient urban heart, where a palatial house had been readied for his stay.

  At first, Bolívar refrained from saying much of anything publicly to his Peruvian hosts, aware that the political situation was fragile and that no one was really sure who was in power, nor had anyone said with any specificity what Bolívar’s role would be. Sucre had warned him of vicious rivalries: “You could probably get Congress to give you all the power, if that’s what you want,” he had written Bolívar months before, “but I wouldn’t advise it. . . . A son of the soil should govern, and you should dedicate yourself to war.” Bolívar followed that advice religiously. The rich Creoles of Lima had worried about the advent of the Colombians. Rumor had it that Bolívar was a mulatto, that his army was a thundering horde of blacks and Indians wanting nothing so much as booty. He was all too conscious of those anxieties. But the expectation that he could save the Peruvian revolution without wielding ultimate power was an illusion. Those who had called for Bolívar’s help—first Riva Agüero, then Torre Tagle—thought of him as a brilliant general for hire, a liberator who would serve their interests, not a president of a vast territory with a concrete vision of his own. It was the same error of judgment San Martín had made when he had tried to engage Bolívar’s assistance in Guayaquil.

  Bolívar understood this. On September 2, when he was offered the supreme military command, he accepted it for what it was. He assured the Peruvian congress that it could count on his service and support. But he warned that he would require radical reforms to be introduced into every branch of the administration—including congress—to address the corruption that plagued it. Those were ominous words. His listeners nodded in agreement, but the demand did not augur well for many of them. President Torre Tagle had raided the public treasury to buy every congressman in the room.

  As far as the Peruvian public was concerned, Bolívar seemed the antithesis of the sullen San Martín. He spent those first few days attending the theater, laughing heartily at opera buffa, enjoying a bullfight in the long-neglected ring. He attended parties in his honor, admired the women with their elegant gewgaws and bewitching eyes. He had been at sea for twenty-five long days and the pleasures of a cosmopolitan city were not lost on him. “The men seem to admire me . . . the women are lovely,” he wrote Santander, “and that is all very nice.” But within days in that city of delights, he was hard at work, addressing the Peruvian juggernaut. There were two presidents to contend with, four patriot armies, a vast and demoralized indigenous population, a seemingly unbridgeable ravine between rich and poor. In private, he called Peru “a chamber of horrors.” His closest aide, Daniel O’Leary, called it “a corpse.”

  He sent Riva Agüero in Trujillo a letter, urging him to give up his misguided efforts to hold on to the presidency; a president and congress were operating perfectly well in the capital. Riva Agüero’s act dissolving congress had been a travesty, and Bolívar told him so: the institution was larger than any one man; it had given Riva Agüero the power in the first place—“Stop conducting a war against your nation’s offices,” he scolded. In an attempt to be conciliatory, Bolívar offered him a way to save face: a role in the military, perhaps, or a diplomatic appointment. But Riva Agüero, in the meantime, had approached the viceroy himself. He had offered La Serna a plan to eject Bolívar and Sucre from Peru altogether—even rid the arena of San Martín, if the Argentine general were to reappear. Riva Agüero had offered the Spaniards an armistice of eighteen months, during which time a permanent peace would be negotiated between Spain and Peru. It was blatant treason. There was no choice now but to forcibly arrest the ex-president. Riva Agüero was apprehended by his own general, sent to prison, and exiled to Chile.

  Everywhere Bolívar looked there was evidence of bad faith and duplicity. The Peruvian general Santa Cruz—whose loyalty to Sucre had been so crucial in winning Quito—now marched his army south to devastating losses, spurning all offers of assistance from the Colombian legions. Indeed, since the Colombians’ arrival in Peru, Santa Cruz had changed his attitude toward Sucre entirely. He was jealous of his former general, suspicious of his six thousand men, wary of some larger, nefarious design in the Colombian offer. But in that maelstrom of mistrust, even Santa Cruz was accused of questionable ambitions—he had overreached, thought himself a greater general than he had proved to be. His officers worried that he was a puppet of the renegade ex-president Riva Agüero. Some even alleged that Santa Cruz wanted nothing more than to create a personal empire in his native La Paz, in the southern reaches of Peru, where he could control the coveted silver mines of Potosí. No one in this Peruvian enterprise, it seemed, could be trusted. The politics and loyalties seemed utterly alien to Bolívar. Questions of pecking order and jurisdiction were harder to parse. The germ of suspicion that had surfaced between Bolívar and San Martín in Guayaquil seemed to have spread like a contagion in Lima. For the first six months of his tenure in Peru, the Liberator was just as vexed, just as paralyzed as his predecessor had ever been. “I shall always be a foreigner to these people,” he wrote gloomily, registering Peru’s palpable xenophobia. “I have already regretted that I ever came.” But in more sanguine moments, he refused to be cast as another San Martín: “If we lose Peru,” he confided privately, “we might as well say adios to Colombia. . . . I’m riding out this storm.”

  Bolívar noted right away that San Martín’s likeness was not on display in the palace in Lima and he commented on it. He was told that Riva Agüero had removed the portrait when San Martín had departed a year before. The Liberator insisted that it be hung again. He made a point to toast San Martín at the first available opportunity, but quickly separated himself from his strategy: America, he insisted, would not tolerate a throne or a king. Nor could Peru afford to be passive in the face of a determined enemy. He made it clear that he would wage an all-out war against the colonizer. It was, as far as he was concerned, a battle for survival: Caracas and Bogotá would not be free until Peru was free; Peru would not be free until La Paz was free; and so on, all the way down the continent. The chain of republics from Venezuela to Argentina had to be defended at all costs, for one weak link might destroy the whole. It was the essence of his revolutionary theory and it could be synthesized in two words: attack and unite. “The soldiers who have come from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela will not return to their fatherlands unless they do so covered with laurels,” he told congress. “They will either t
riumph and leave Peru a free nation or they will die.”

  It was in this spirit of resolve that Bolívar set out to reconnoiter the very heart of Peru—Cajamarca, Huaraz, and the fertile valley between the two cordilleras of the Andes. He wanted to salvage any damage Riva Agüero might have created, spread word of his liberating mission, and learn something about the potential fields of war. But the links in his chain were already beginning to give way. Argentina pulled out of the Peruvian effort quietly, wanting to expend no more soldiers or funds. A fleet of Chilean ships, which had been making its way up the coast to assist the Liberator, decided to turn around and abandon the operation altogether. Bolívar was now truly alone in Peru. The news from Greater Colombia in recent weeks had been uniformly good—Páez and his plainsmen had finally dislodged the Spaniards from their last bulwark at Puerto Cabello—but here, in this most vital of revolutionary theaters, anarchy reigned. There seemed to be no hope for foreign assistance. His optimism gave way to desperation. He wrote to Santander, expressing grave doubts about the reliability of Peruvians: they lacked mettle, dedication, patriotism. He pleaded with his vice president for a solid battalion of horsemen, a modest contingent of five hundred men from Páez’s hordes; within a week he was pleading for an army of twelve thousand. The man called “victory’s favorite son” had become a general without any legions.

  Sailing back to Lima from Trujillo, he fell ill. On January 1, 1824, his ship found harbor in Pativilca, a tiny village thirty miles north of the capital, and Bolívar was carried ashore, racked with chills and high fevers. In that deserted hamlet, far from hope of medical attention, he slipped in and out of consciousness, struggling for life. He was thought to be suffering from typhus, but it may have been an early manifestation of the tuberculosis that would never leave him. The fever lasted seven days, and he emerged from it a phantom of his former self. Weak, scrawny, he began dictating letters as soon as he could sit up. Officers were brought into his room for conferences, but he insisted they talk to him from the other side of an enormous curtain; it would be weeks before he would allow them to see his face. “You would not recognize me,” he wrote to Santander. “I am completely wasted, old. . . . At times I even have episodes of dementia.” The envoy from Colombia to Peru, Joaquín Mosquera, stopped in to visit the Liberator a few days later and reported a heartbreaking sight: