Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  He was so gaunt and skeletal that it almost brought me to tears. He was seated in an old wicker chair, propped up against the wall of a little garden, with his head swaddled in a white kerchief. His trousers were so flimsy that I could see the pointy knees, bony legs; and his voice was hollow and feeble, his face cadaverous. You’ll recall that the Peruvian army under Santa Cruz had just fallen to pieces; they’d had to flee the Spaniards. . . . It all seemed a battery of ills designed to finish off the half-dead hero. With a heavy heart, fearing the ruin of our army, I asked him, “And what will you do now?” His cavernous eyes lit up, and he said without hesitation, “Triumph!”

  Bolívar stayed in Pativilca for two months, unable to travel, and it was during that time—for all his ordeals—that there were signs that the world, too, was convinced he would triumph. In France, the revered bishop and diplomat Dominique de Pradt urged North Americans to support Bolívar’s revolution: South American independence, he insisted, was as important to the United States as its own. Of the Liberator, he had this to say: “When one considers how he began, the obstacles he has overcome and the results of his labors, one has no choice but concede that he has played one of history’s most glorious roles. . . . Posterity will exalt his name.” If Pradt had worried that President James Monroe wasn’t paying attention, he needn’t have. Monroe had just issued a warning to the rest of the world that the United States would not tolerate further interference in Spanish America. Any attempt to impose a foreign will on the hemisphere would be considered an act of aggression and would trigger immediate intervention. The Monroe Doctrine had been the brainchild of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, but it had been prompted by Britain’s foreign minister George Canning, who had made it known that his government considered the future of the Spanish empire hopeless. As far as two great world powers were concerned, Spain was on its way out of America. Liberty was on the ascendant. It was all the medicine Bolívar would require.

  ON HIS WAY BACK TO Lima before he had fallen ill, Bolívar had eagerly anticipated a reunion with Manuela Sáenz. She had returned from Quito several months before, allowing them to resume their love affair. The Liberator had a roving eye, to be sure, but the love between them was deep and abiding—made all the more ardent by months of separation. Manuela had never been one to shrink from society’s censure and she did not hesitate now to raise a collective eyebrow. Her acquaintances were largely artists, liberals, even libertines—she had been seen accompanying a viceroy’s courtesan to the theater—and it was whispered that Manuela’s closest friend, the actress Rosa de Campusano, had spent nights in San Martín’s bed. For propriety’s sake, Manuela continued to live in her husband’s house, but at night she would hurry to her lover’s, where they would spend long, happy hours alone. By then, he had taken up residence in the villa that San Martín had occupied in Magdalena, a quiet suburb far from the hubbub of the city. It was a stucco house with large, comfortable rooms, spacious windows, and a pretty garden that led out to the stables. With a fig tree, a large cherimoya, and clusters of verbena all around, the air seemed perpetually filled with perfume.

  By then, Sáenz had persuaded Bolívar to admit her to his entourage. Certainly by December, as he traveled north, she was a permanent member of his staff, maintaining his personal archives. The arrangement was clearly a departure from the ordinary. Women often accompanied their husbands and lovers into battle; they might even take up arms, dress as men, argue for justice in military tribunals; but they rarely were brought into the bureaucracy and paid a salary. Manuela Sáenz had become a full employee of the liberating army—a cavalry soldier, a hussar. That official role would allow her to stay in contact with her lover, communicate with his secretaries and aides, and, most important, keep track of his whereabouts. It was how she came to know that he was ill and convalescing in Pativilca.

  When she read of it in a routine report, she had wanted to fly to his side and nurse him back to health, casting her husband’s reputation to the winds. But in due course, war itself conspired to bring her north to Bolívar. It had happened in the most unexpected way. Bolívar, struggling with his disease and trying to buy time to rebuild an army, had called on President Torre Tagle to negotiate an armistice with the viceroy. But Torre Tagle had grown thoroughly weary of Bolívar, and, although he agreed to approach the viceroy, he decided to use the conversations as an opportunity to better his own position. He told the Spaniards that he was prepared to change his allegiance altogether, work for them. He had done it before, as had many of his cronies—politicians whose loyalties were so divided between Spain and Peru that they had switched sides again and again, whenever it seemed the other was gaining power. Torre Tagle’s strategy began to unfold on February 5, when the demoralized Argentines guarding Callao decided to mutiny and hand over the fortress to Spanish generals. In a panic, the congress declared Bolívar dictator of Peru—a title he found odious, although at the time the word was still hallowed by a republican aura. Passed over entirely by the republican leadership, Torre Tagle now moved to complete his defection. On February 27, he and his top ministers, along with nearly 350 officers of the Peruvian army, declared themselves on the side of the king. The Spaniards issued an ultimatum, announcing that they would retake Lima. Accustomed by now to mercurial transformations, the capital prepared once again to welcome them. In a flight for their lives, the republicans—including Manuela Sáenz—evacuated the city, swarming north along the dunes, toward Pativilca and Trujillo. Two days later, the royalists reentered Lima and the City of Kings swung back under Spanish rule.

  When he heard of the Argentine mutiny in Callao, Bolívar had no doubt that royalists would take back the capital. In the darkest of moods, he wrote to his aides in Lima, telling them to send all his possessions to Trujillo. He wrote to his generals in Quito and his vice president in Bogotá, warning them to prepare for a terrible war: Peru was irretrievably lost; the Spanish reinfestation would creep up the coast, work its way overland, and threaten the security of Colombia itself. He wrote to President Torre Tagle—unaware that the president was an embezzler and might well have been party to the mutiny—to warn him that certain Peruvians had stolen government money and others were shamelessly seeking power. It would be weeks before he learned of Torre Tagle’s breathtaking betrayal and the defection of so many of Peru’s elites to the royalist side.

  In defense of Peru, its historians have explained that the four years spent under San Martín and his foreign militias had deeply worried the aristocrats of Lima; they had emerged from the experience persuaded that they had stronger ties to Spain than they did to South America. Certainly they felt they had more in common with their colonial masters than with the mixed-race ruffians of the Chilean and Argentine armies. But in the main, it came down to this: the majority of Lima’s Creoles wanted independence handed to them without a fight. They had never wanted to sever their connections to Spain; they had only wanted more economic freedom. And they certainly hadn’t expected to forfeit their old privileges in the process. They had learned to be patriots, as one historian has put it, whenever it looked as if Spain was losing, and royalists when the patriots were on the run. But Lima was not Peru, and, convalescing in Pativilca, Bolívar began to realize that the only way he was going to win Peru was to take firm control of the outlying areas and forge his way back into the capital. This was the strategy he had used in Caracas, the one that had worked in Quito. There was something else. Bolívar’s battle cry was no longer “Liberate!” It was “Triumph!” A curious thing had happened to his revolution since he had fought his way up from Pasto. The butchery had hardened him. It was less a war of independence now than a crusade; less a call to freedom than a call to win at all costs. He was not unaware of that fundamental sea change. At the nadir of his depression about the loss of Callao he wrote Santander: “I’m through making promises . . . I can’t very well tyrannize them into saving their own necks.” But within two days, he was telling Santander that he would set up an “itinerant
government” in Trujillo. Within three, he was writing out a full battle plan for General Sucre.

  By March, the profound depression that had accompanied his disease had lifted. Perhaps it was because of the company of his mistress. Perhaps because world recognition for his struggle had filled him with renewed purpose. Gradually, his health improved, his energy returned. It was summer, and the sun-drenched days and mild sea breezes combined to renew his spirit. He established his headquarters in the main plaza of the city, organized his staff, and made efforts to build a judicial system, lay the groundwork for a university. But rebuilding his army was his major objective and he knew that every day the royalists did not attack was a day he could use toward strengthening military readiness. He instructed Sucre, who had taken his army north of Lima to the mountain city of Huaraz, to hold back from engaging the enemy just yet; he badgered Santander with the endless refrain, “Send troops and we’ll win.” Almost overnight, he turned Trujillo into a teeming arsenal. Every citizen became a laborer, every metal object a potential weapon. Trujillo’s men were assigned to work in improvised forges and factories; women were expected to sew. Highborn señoras along with their servants collected fabric, formed sewing circles, and produced uniforms, flags, tents; no one, no matter how delicate her hands, was exempt. Indians in nearby villages were instructed to produce heavy ponchos and blankets. All available metal was confiscated and melted down for canteens, stirrups, horseshoes. Silver was seized from church altars to melt, mint, and pay for munitions and salaries. Taxes were levied to raise money for food. By force, by persuasion, by whatever means necessary, including outright appropriation, Bolívar made citizens of the north contribute to the war chest. The churches of Piura alone rendered more than 100,000 pesos in silver. Trujillo contributed 300,000 pesos in taxes for the treasury and then went on to give Bolívar 100,000 a month for his liberating army.

  Bolívar threw himself into the task, leaving no detail of preparation unattended. He ordered seamstresses to cut patterns in ways that would conserve fabric; he worried about the precise kind of horseshoes needed for mountainous terrain; he oversaw ironworkers forging weapons. Ripping his trousers on a nail as he rose from a chair one day, he was inspired to harvest all nails from Trujillo’s furniture for solder. He issued directives about gunpowder, soap, cooking oil, rope—even the number of cattle necessary to feed his troops, the kilos of corn needed to feed the cattle. Lambayeque and Piura produced boots; Huamachuco, belts and saddles. Trujillo milled linen for shirts; Cajamarca, broadcloth for trousers. He sent soldiers off to march thirty miles a day: with Sucre up in the mountains, with General Lara on unforgiving sand. As weeks passed, more and more arrived from Colombia, sent by Santander and Páez. Soon he was expecting them from Panama, greater Guatemala, Mexico. By mid-April he had transformed his war machine. It was, as one aide said, as if Mars had sprung from Jupiter’s head, but in place of a single, fully outfitted warrior-god, there was an army of eight thousand. The ranks were overwhelmingly Colombian, heavily reinforced by Peruvian recruits from the countryside; and the army they formed had two distinct advantages: a superb cavalry, made up of horsemen from as far away as Patagonia or Guayana; and a high morale, largely attributable to the fact the men were being paid. Bolívar had insisted on it.

  In April, it became evident that they had a third advantage. The Spaniards had been thrown into confusion by the defection of one of their generals, Pedro Olañeta, a diehard conservative who had carved out a principality of his own in the south of Peru. Olañeta accused Viceroy La Serna of being too liberal; he refused to follow orders, marched his divisions south, and proclaimed himself the “only true defender of the crown.” La Serna, headquartered in Cuzco, had no choice but to send off a good third of his army to muzzle him. Olañeta’s defection had occurred on January 15, just as Bolívar was emerging from the deliriums of his fever, but the news had taken three months to reach him. By then, La Serna’s troubles with Olañeta had only multiplied. The viceroy’s most talented general, Valdés, was locked in a series of bloody battles with the renegade. The army of the crown, which should have pointed north to Bolívar, was now pointed firmly south, at itself. Here, then, was the reason the royalists hadn’t attacked when Bolívar was at his weakest. Olañeta’s rebellion turned out to be exactly the diversionary maneuver Bolívar needed. Its chaos became his second chance.

  Bolívar eventually wrote to Olañeta to try to persuade him to join the republican side, but speed was of the essence now and he needed to move quickly to win the strategic advantage. He instructed Sucre to meet him in the ancient town of Huamachuco, due east of Trujillo, nestled in the periphery of the Andes. As he left Trujillo, he called for the city to send him more forges, more ironworkers, more nails. The people were to surrender every conceivable military necessity: needles, thread, paper, every last fragment of lead—including whatever could be obtained from the city’s statues—every last family jewel. “For God’s sake, send me everything, everything, everything!” he implored his secretary-general.

  Establishing his quarters in a house of many arches in Huamachuco, he wasted no time. He gathered his war council at the first opportunity, spread out a map of Peru, and posed the strategic question: The enemy was in disorder. Olañeta was on the run; Viceroy La Serna had sent General Jerónimo Valdés and five thousand men against him. Should the patriots strike or should they wait for reinforcements? Bolívar looked around the room at his officers, every one a seasoned general save one, the Irish colonel Francis Burdett O’Connor. He called on O’Connor first. The young officer stood, pointed to the viceroy’s position, and then to where a good portion of his army had gone. “As far as I can see,” O’Connor said, “our campaign must begin without delay.” Bolívar promptly folded up the map. “This youngster has just given us a valuable lesson in the art of war,” he said. “There is nothing more to say; nothing more to hear. Tomorrow, we march.”

  He had already made up his mind. They would follow the Andean cordillera south, tracing the fertile valleys that skirted its base. At Huánuco, they would begin the climb, cross the frigid heights of Cerro de Pasco, and provoke the Spaniards to battle where their garrisons stood thick and fast, protecting their hold on Cuzco. He put his army on the move immediately. At some point in mid-May, Bolívar entered the corridor of green known as the Callejón de Huaylas, which lies at the feet of the towering Cordillera Blanca. All around were the rich fields of sugarcane, corn, wheat, barley carpeting the hills with their abundance. Orchards hung with oranges, guava, and cherimoya surrounded the mud huts that lined the roads. Manuela Sáenz was not at Bolívar’s side, but she was only a day’s ride away, and by a route that was always kept secret. It was a hellish journey for a woman—through bogs, over rock, in the glacial mountain nights—riding alongside rough men of war and her fearless black female servants, Jonatás and Natán. A superb horsewoman, Sáenz was up to the challenge and, by all accounts, never complained about the hardships. It was a measure of how crucial she felt it was to accompany Bolívar. But she was not with him when he entered the little village of Huaylas to be met by a girl in virginal white.

  Manuelita Madroño was ravishingly beautiful, as a writer of the day called her: “an irresistibly fresh doll of eighteen springs.” She had been designated by the town council of Huaylas to welcome the Liberator with a crown of flowers. Bolívar was captivated. In high spirits, galvanized by the prospect of war, renewed by his army’s remarkable transformation, he pursued the girl with his customary élan. It is said that within forty-eight hours they were inseparable. For a few weeks, she traveled with his troops, brightening his days with her girlish enthusiasms. From Huaylas to Caruaz to Huaraz, as the patriot army advanced through the bosky abundance that bordered the snowcapped Andes, as Bolívar fretted about lances, hooves, flint, and guns, Manuelita was an undisputable tonic. “You will note that though I beg,” he wrote Santander, “I am hardly sad.” He gamely asked his vice president to give his warm regards to the unattainable Bernardina. On
the whole, Bolívar’s good cheer was evident in many letters of that time, which are among the wittiest, most profoundly human of his life.

  Inevitably, given the garrulousness of men—given the Liberator’s roguish fame—news of his sexual infidelity soon reached Manuela Sáenz. She fired off a letter to Bolívar’s personal secretary, Juan José Santana, a young soldier she had befriended. “The general has written me only twice in 19 days,” she groused. And then, mired in self-pity: “He no longer thinks of me.” She asked the secretary for an explanation, accused him of hiding the truth. Was the general indulging in a romantic affair? “You sin by your silence,” she huffed, “and it’s making me insane.” To Bolívar she was more cautious, “My sir. . . . You, who constantly speak of your genial correspondence with friends, fail to write me even one line, and have consigned me to deadly misery. . . . Show me a little love, if only for a fellow patriot.”

  It isn’t clear whether he ever answered that letter. But it’s very probable that they reunited at the end of June, when he reached Huánuco, before his army climbed the summit of Cerro de Pasco to meet the Spaniards on the other side. His memory of the Madroño girl, left behind in the valley, was quickly overcome by history—and history would remember her as one more pretty conquest for the Liberator. But she would never forget him, shunning all men until she died of old age, seventy-four years later. “So, how is Bolívar’s old lady?” villagers would ask the bright-eyed crone. “As fresh as a little girl,” she always answered.