Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Two days later, he issued an invitation to any and all republics of Spanish America to join a confederation of nations. The institution he had in mind would “serve as a brain trust during major conflicts, a rallying point when facing a common enemy, a faithful interpreter of treaties, a broker of peace when differences between us arise.” It was a blunt rejoinder to the Monroe Doctrine. As far as Bolívar was concerned, the newly liberated countries of South America did not need a burly neighbor to protect them. He had fought a fourteen-year revolution without United States help; he had no intention of relying on its muscle now. Banded together as the United States of South America, the former colonies would be self-sufficient, a force for progress, a new world power. It was a dream Bolívar had nursed for more than a decade. “Unity! Unity! Unity!” he had cried five years before at the Congress of Angostura; in the interim, he had changed approach, adjusted strategy, but he had never lost sight of that shining goal. Eventually, his call to union would give birth to a landmark meeting in Panama eighteen months later, the foundations of Pan Americanism for years to come and the modern-day Organization of American States. And for the moment, at least, it allowed the Liberator to rise above the sting of Colombia’s ingratitude. His eye was on a higher role.

  IN THE RUGGED PERUVIAN LANDSCAPE that lies between the rolling, brown Apurimac River and the mountains of Huanzo, the royalist and patriot armies were stalking each other, moving swiftly, in a constant state of alarm. Sucre’s spies had determined that the great mass of the king’s army was on the move, with Viceroy La Serna himself at the head, and his two infamously squabbling generals, Canterac and Valdés, close behind. Nine thousand royalists in bright red and gold uniforms—the last bulwark of Spanish rule in America—streamed north of Cuzco, over mountain and vale, in pursuit of the rebel enemy. Valdés had been reined in from battling the ultraconservative Spanish general Olañeta to join La Serna’s campaign against the liberating army. After six weeks of a vigorous chase, seven thousand royalists outdistanced Sucre’s army and circled around to its flank about thirty miles south of Huamanga.

  Sucre, ever unflustered, was not worried by those maneuvers. He had only 5,700 men, but was confident they were superior in every way to the royalists. Mobilizing his troops in a torrential rain, he retreated from a grassy ravine to a more advantageous position. The Spaniards pressed on after them, eager to present battle. Moving with lightning speed, they overtook the patriots again on December 3, nipping them in the rear and annihilating half of the famed British battalion, the “Rifles.” Days passed as both armies sought positions for a final conflict. Nearly all the Spanish and patriot forces in Peru would take part in it; there was no doubt it would be the determining battle of Peru’s revolution. As December 6 came and went, frantic defections occurred—war prisoners who had been pressed into service on opposing sides ran through the night to rejoin their former cohort.

  By December 7—the very day that Bolívar reentered Lima—the two opposing armies had marked their ground. But by then the royalist soldiers had traveled longer, faster, over more precipitous terrain, suffering many privations. They had been marched in strict columns to prevent wholesale desertions; they had not been allowed to enter valleys or villages where provisions (and escape routes) might be found; they had been forced by hunger to eat the flesh of their mules. But on December 8, they took, at least on the face of it, the stronger position. The soldiers of the King lined up on the majestic heights of Cundurcunca, overlooking the broad, flat plain of Ayacucho. Circling the area were Indian tribes that had pledged to help them; for weeks the local mountain Indians had been raiding patriot encampments and killing men and cattle; now they vowed to slay any republicans they saw fleeing the field.

  Sucre, sighting the royalists as they progressed along the ridges, had brought his troops to the plain of Ayacucho itself, a dusty mesa surrounded by hulking promontories, more than ten thousand feet above the sea. His notion was to keep the Spaniards from descending to the battlefield until the action started, to destroy them as they spilled down from their perches. The evening before the battle, as dusk cast its long, dark shadows over the Andes, his troops pressed close to the foot of Cundurcunca to prevent the enemy from descending in the night. Surrounded on every side by inhospitable nature, the patriots were exactly where Bolívar would have wanted them to be—in terrain that would force them to fight with desperate courage.

  Dawn on December 9 over the heights of Cundurcunca brought a resplendent sun. It was one of those cool, crisp Andean mornings in which the air is a brisk tonic and the land seems suspended in blue. It was, according to one soldier, the sort of daybreak that lends a warrior wings. Directly before them was the abrupt rise of Cundurcunca, a scruffy behemoth of dirt, rock, and shrubbery. To the right, mounting hills; to the left, a stream; behind, a sheer drop to another plain, and long vistas as far as the eye could see. There was no place to hide on that grim plateau. The terrain allowed for no cowards or laggards, no long, attenuated battle. As the sound of cornets and drums began to resonate through that theater of war, reechoing against the mountain walls, Sucre’s soldiers were well aware that there was no choice for them but to win. Riding through neatly formed columns of men from every station of life, every corner of the Americas and beyond, the young general in chief—then but twenty-nine—was visibly stirred by the significance of the moment. He stopped and, with a voice brimming with emotion, shouted words they would never forget: “Soldiers! On your efforts today rests the fate of South America!” They answered with a resounding roar.

  At eight o’clock, as the sun warmed the morning air, one of the Spanish generals, Juan Antonio Monet, a tall, sturdy man with a russet beard, approached the patriot lines and called out to General José María Córdova, whom he knew from former days. Monet told Córdova that in the royalist ranks, as in the patriot, there were soldiers with relatives on the opposite side: would he allow them to greet each other before hostilities began? When General Córdova consulted with Sucre, the general in chief agreed immediately. And so it was that fifty men of opposing sides met on the slopes of Cundurcunca, among them a number of brothers, to embrace and weep—as one chronicler put it—in a heartbreaking display of farewell. Indeed, for Peruvians as for Venezuelans and Colombians before them, revolution meant fratricide, and men who spoke the same language, held the same religion, even shared flesh and blood, would now set upon one another in defense of an idea. Seeing the heart-wrenching scenes, General Monet asked Córdova if there wasn’t some way to come to terms and avoid the bloodshed. Córdova answered: Only if you recognize American independence and return peacefully to Spain. Monet was taken aback and said as much: Didn’t the young patriot general realize that the Spanish army was vastly superior? Córdova responded that combat would determine whether that was true. Monet walked away shaking his head. There was no turning back.

  The battle was fierce, short. The royalists clambered down Cundurcunca in their red, gold, and blue regalia, laboring mightily under the banners, their helmets glinting in the sun. Republicans in dark, somber overcoats lined up to meet them. Cries went up as they watched the enemy troops descend: “Horsemen! Lancers! What you see are hardly warriors! They are not your equals! To freedom!”—and so on, up and down the lines. Before the battle officially began, a young Spanish brigadier was first to attack and first to fall; even so, the royalists took immediate control of the action. General Valdés and his men descended on the republicans like a horde of punishing angels, splitting their formation so wide that it gaped, momentarily helpless. But patriot morale was strong and the setback spurred them to higher resolve. When Córdova cried out, “Soldiers! Man your arms! Move on to victory!” his battalion scrambled to mount a fierce retaliation and soon the course of battle changed. The patriots bayoneted royalists left and right, snatching their silver helmets as trophies. By one in the afternoon, they had taken the heights. By mid-afternoon the field was littered with the fallen. Before sundown, Canterac offered Sucre his unconditional
surrender.

  Almost three thousand royalists were taken prisoner, surrendering in the face of a daunting republican fervor. Perhaps it was the exhaustion after so many weeks of forced marches; or a terror of Bolívar’s famed barbarian hordes; or the dizzying altitude, which, at thirteen thousand feet, can steal the very breath from a man. Or perhaps what prevailed in the end was Sucre’s brilliant strategy to make the soldiers of the king work harder, climb higher, march longer; and then strike them with a virulent force. The white-haired viceroy La Serna, fighting bravely to the last, had to be carried off the field with injuries; General Miller, who found him by chance in one of the huts where the wounded were nursed, offered the gallant old soldier tea from his saddlebag and insisted that medics attend to him promptly. The dead amounted to 1,800 for Spain; only 300 for the republicans.

  The terms Sucre offered the vanquished were generous, granting every royalist safe passage to Spain, although many chose to transfer to the republican army. But as much as his treaty gave, it extracted. The patriots appropriated Spain’s garrisons throughout Peru, confiscated all weapons and supplies, and secured the surrender of Spain’s last citadel in the New World, the fort of Callao. When Sucre insisted that General Valdés have lunch with him the next day, the old grizzled Spaniard arrived in full battle dress, in bold contrast to the scarlet and gold of his troops. His heavy wool socks reached high over his knees; his boots were short, his jacket frayed, his vicuña hat pulled low over his skullcap. A long faded white coat reached to his heels, a white poncho was slung over his shoulder. “I drink,” said Sucre, “to the man who would have been America’s greatest defender, if only he had been born on this side of the sea.”

  Sucre sent a report to the Liberator immediately, but his messenger was ambushed and killed by Indians. “The battle for Peru is complete,” Sucre had written, “its independence and the peace of all America have been signed on this battleground.” The news eventually reached Bolívar in Lima more than ten days later, as he was preparing for Spaniards to swarm the capital for a final confrontation—even as he struggled with the Pandora’s box that Peru had become. It is said that when he read of his general’s victory in Ayacucho, he abandoned all decorum, leapt in the air, and danced through the room, shouting, “Victory! Victory! Victory!” Sucre had won it for him, and Sucre would have his undying gratitude. With Ayacucho, Spain would be evicted from America’s shores forever. It was Yorktown, Waterloo. With one single, resounding triumph, all South America would be free.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Equilibrium of the Universe

  My hope is that our republics—less nations than sisters—will unite according to the bonds that have always united us, with the difference that in centuries past we obeyed the same tyrant, whereas now we will embrace a shared freedom.

  —Simón Bolívar

  Bolívar’s life had never been short on extremes. But 1824 marked a new threshold of wild aberrations. He had begun the year in a sickbed, traveled a veritable wheelwork of triumphs and calamities, and closed with a victory heard round the world. In London, on the last day of 1824, Britain announced its recognition of Colombia. In Washington, on New Year’s Day of 1825, Henry Clay stood at a dinner in Lafayette’s honor attended by President Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Senator Andrew Jackson, and proposed a toast “to General Simon Bolívar, the George Washington of South America!” It was just the kind of salute Bolívar had hoped for from the English-speaking world. The achievements warranted it. Not Alexander, not Hannibal, not even Julius Caesar had fought across such a vast, inhospitable terrain. Charlemagne’s victories would have had to double to match Bolívar’s. Napoleon, striving to build an empire, had covered less ground than Bolívar, struggling to win freedom.

  The liberation of South America had created a new world order. The Battle of Ayacucho was not just a military exploit in the faraway dust of Peru, but an action that transformed the hemisphere forever. In banishing Spain from American shores, the revolutionaries had confirmed the fundamental incompatibility between America and Europe; they had drawn a firm line between Europe’s conservative worldview and its radical opposite—between ancient monarchies and a fresh democratic ideal. There would be no common ground between Europe’s Holy Alliance, now scrambling to preserve its old axis of power, and the Americas North and South, which were committed to turn those hierarchies upside down. As Bolívar pointed out, “European ambition forced the yoke of slavery on the rest of the world, and the rest of the world was obliged to answer with an equivalent force. . . . This is what I call the equilibrium of the Universe.” It was the essence of Bolívarianism, a clear admonition to bullies. As far as Bolívar was concerned now that the revolution was won, South America needed no overseer, no higher might, no Monroe Doctrine. In his model, the will to power would come from the people themselves, and—with all the republics united—it would be a prodigious force to be reckoned with.

  The next few months were the happiest, most glorious of Bolívar’s life. He gave all the credit for his triumph to Sucre—“this splendid victory is due entirely to the skill, valor, and heroism of the general in chief,” he announced—and he promoted him to grand marshal. Bolívar received the eminent along with the humble in his capacious house in Lima’s suburb of Magdalena; although he reveled in the adulation, he wasted no time reforming Peru according to democratic principle. He reorganized the government, the treasury, the legal system, the schools. He tendered his resignation from the Colombian presidency, telling Santander that he planned to leave Colombia someday and take up residence overseas. When the resignation was read out to congress in Bogotá, the assembly fell into a stunned silence; the man was renowned throughout the world now, adored. Presidents and magnates had toasted the Republic of Greater Colombia because of him. The eminent British diplomat John Potter Hamilton had gone so far as to call Bolívar “the greatest man and most extraordinary character which the New World has ever produced.” A few congressmen sounded scattered applause for the Liberator and soon the rest broke into a wild ovation. They moved to reaffirm his presidency of Colombia. In this halcyon moment, even avowed enemies dared not complain.

  But Bolívar was hardly ready to leave Peru. There was too much unfinished business. It would take several months to subdue the renegade Spanish general Olañeta, who had turned out to be more monarchist than the viceroy, more authoritarian than the king himself; and it would take another year to flush out the royalists in Callao, who had locked themselves up in the fortress against all reasonable hope of survival. Bolívar announced that he would call the Peruvian congress to session on February 10. That day, he said, “will be the day of my glory, the day on which my most fervent desires will be fulfilled; the day on which, once and for all, I resign my rule.” By rule he meant dictatorship; he had every intention of staying on and determining the future of the republic. When February 10 came, an ecstatic Peruvian congress made that possible: he was granted supreme political and military authority for at least another year. The congress also presented him with a gift of one million pesos to compensate him for his victories. He refused to accept it. When the money was offered again—indeed, insisted upon—he asked that it be given not to him but to charitable causes in Venezuela, the republic that had sacrificed most on behalf of Peru.

  Those happy days were marred, nevertheless, by the assassination of Bernardo Monteagudo, San Martín’s widely despised deputy, who had been expelled from Lima during San Martín’s tenure only to return again under Bolívar. Monteagudo, whose agile mind the Liberator respected, had been working on his notion to unite all the republics. The Argentine was found facedown on a street with a kitchen knife plunged deep into his heart and his fingers wrapped tightly around the handle. Dismayed by the crime—and fearing it might be part of a royalist plot to assassinate republican leaders—Bolívar called for an investigation. The inquest soon produced the assassin: a black cook, who worked in the kitchen of one of Monteagudo’s associates. When Bolívar questioned the cook himsel
f—in private, in a dimly lit room of the palace—the trembling man confessed that José Sánchez Carrión, Bolívar’s highest minister, had paid him 200 pesos in gold to do the deed. The Liberator was flabbergasted; Sánchez Carrión was a brilliant intellectual, a republican stalwart, Bolívar’s warmest supporter in Peru. He was also the leader of a powerful secret society. Mysteriously enough, within a few months, Sánchez Carrión, too, tipped over dead. According to a high-ranking official, a Peruvian general had poisoned him. Stranger yet, that general was eventually murdered. It was a murky chain of events and much of it played out after Bolívar had left to tour the country. As far as the people of Lima were concerned, the despised Monteagudo had met a just fate. They had loathed the Argentine when he was San Martín’s éminence grise and they loathed him under Bolívar. He was quickly forgotten in the whirl of that triumphant summer. There were festivities to attend—a grand ball in honor of the victory at Ayacucho, a pending assembly of the Peruvian congress. The city was in a celebratory mood.

  Bolívar delighted in the public tributes. Seldom had he received such complete adoration. He had lost much in the course of his forty-one years: mother, father, brother, wife, a country to which he would never truly return, countless fellow warriors, and in the course of the past year his best friend, Fernando Toro, who had died after long exile. The Liberator’s name was known around the globe, but his intimates were few. He was virtually alone, except for his manservant, José Palacios, and his married mistress.

  During those blissful months, Bolívar enjoyed the unbridled attentions of Manuela Sáenz, who basked in the republican glow beside him. Coming and going freely from his house in Magdalena, she scandalized Lima society with her brazen disregard for decorum. She was hardly free of her husband, but she was long past caring about appearances. James Thorne had struck every register of rage—from sputtering indignation to wretched entreaty—to persuade her to end her affair with Bolívar. Thorne was possessive, “more jealous than a Portuguese,” according to Manuela, and he was tired of the public humiliation. It may well be that he swallowed his pride and begged Bolívar to release her; he may even have gone so far as to file a legal suit to restrain her. Deeply in love, and adamantly unwilling to give up his pretty young wife, he was prepared to do anything to win her back.