Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Sáenz was forthright—even brutal—in her rejection of Thorne. She didn’t want his money; and she most assuredly did not want him. Even as Bolívar was wending his way back to Lima in late 1823, she had written to her husband in no uncertain terms:

  No, no, no, hombre! . . . A thousand times No! Sir, you are an excellent person, indeed one of a kind—that I will never deny. I only regret that you are not a better man so that my leaving you would honor Bolívar more. I know very well that I can never be joined to him in what you call honor. Do you think I am any less honorable because he is my lover, not my husband? Ah! I do not live by social conventions men construct to torment us. So leave me be, my dear Englishman. We will marry again in heaven but not on this earth. . . . On earth, you are a boring man. Up there in the celestial heights, everything will be so English, because a life of monotony was invented for you people, who make love without pleasure, conversation without grace—who walk slowly, greet solemnly, move heavily, joke without laughing. . . . But enough of my cheekiness. With all the sobriety, truth, and clarity of an Englishwoman, I say now: I will never return to you. You are a protestant and I a pagan—that should be obstacle enough. But I am also in love with another man, and that is the greater, stronger reason. You see how precise my mind can be? Your invariable friend, Manuela

  She would later send a copy of this letter to Bolívar, adding coyly that she was hardly a pagan, but had said so for dramatic effect. Certainly to the rest of Lima she seemed diabolically pagan. Even in a city where women smoked cigars, dressed like coquettes, and spoke their minds freely, Manuela was a flagrant eccentric. Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, an overheated young Frenchman whom Humboldt had pressed on Bolívar and who followed the Liberator closely during those years, described her unforgettably in his own memoir:

  At times she behaved like a grand lady, at others like a half-breed; she could dance the minuet or the cancan with equal flair. She was shockingly reckless, promiscuous. The aides told me astonishing tales about her exploits, which Bolívar simply ignored. She was inseparable from her beautiful, young mulatto slave, who often dressed as a soldier. That colored girl was the very shadow of her mistress and, very possibly, her lover—a vice common enough in Peru and one that I myself witnessed. The girl performed lewd, but quite entertaining dances at salon gatherings. And she came and went freely at all hours from Manuelita’s room. We can imagine why.

  Boussingault had a singular turn of mind in this, to be sure, and it may well be that the twenty-two-year-old was infatuated with Manuela himself. But if it was true that Manuela was erratic, a slave to her senses, it was also true that Bolívar didn’t much care. The Liberator’s letters to her are filled with tenderness, admiration. He was in love with his mistress’s humor, her passion, her courage, her intelligence, and—no doubt, too—her tolerance for his own aberrant ways.

  ONCE THE TRIBUTES AND CELEBRATIONS were out of the way, Peru seemed to lose interest in reforming the country. Indeed the entire continent of South America appeared to slide into weary lassitude. The people were exhausted after fourteen years of unremitting violence and chaos. It was as if the very effort of upending the colonial structure had left them without a will to build something new. Far from spurring an era of creativity like the one that now flourished in the United States, newly won liberty gave Spanish Americans a sense that the work was behind them now, that the social challenges were too monumental to tackle—that, having made so many sacrifices, the people had earned the right to sit back and take.

  Bolívar wasted no time in trying to inject the country with his spirit of reform. He sent Sucre and his army to La Paz to carry the spirit of liberation into Upper Peru, the region traded back and forth between Lima and Buenos Aires that eventually would be Bolivia. In April, he started out on an overland trip of his own, averaging an astounding twenty-one miles a day, all of it on horseback, and most over rough terrain. The trails along the coast were dry with a choking dust; the gorges stifling, airless. But as he approached the towering volcanoes of Arequipa, he was met with a sight that seldom fails to move a traveler. It was the point that marks the western limit of the desert, where burning sands climb to majestic heights; where a multitude of snowcapped peaks glisten against azure skies. He rode through the desolation and the mountain splendor, visiting every township along the way; he founded schools, laws, municipal governments. But the vigor he brought with him seemed to dissipate the moment he was gone. Appointments, institutions, visions thrived for a while in his wake until they went neglected—then quietly faded away.

  In Arequipa, he installed the British Lancaster method of education, putting his old childhood teacher, Simón Rodríguez, in charge. Bolívar had been thrilled to hear that the eccentric, imaginative tutor who had opened his mind to the wider world had returned to South America after decades of exile; he urged Rodríguez to come to Peru. Eventually, he would give Rodríguez the responsibility of revamping the entire school system in Bolivia. But Rodríguez, who had turned up by chance after years of aimless peregrinations around the world, had never been handed so great a responsibility. He was now little more than a bumbling professor, spectacularly unprepared for the task. Like many who were entrusted with vital work at this critical juncture, Rodríguez lacked organizational skills. Building a nation was turning out to be far more thorny than waging an all-out war. San Martín, even from his faraway perch in Brussels, could see the challenge before Bolívar now: “The opus is finished,” San Martín wrote to a colleague, “and Americans will begin to see the fruits of their labors and sacrifices; but only if we are wise, and only if twelve years of revolution have taught us to obey—yes, sir, obey—for if a man doesn’t know how to obey, he will never know how to lead.” He had a point. What South America needed now was organization, discipline, a solid foundation of laws. One man couldn’t possibly hope to do it all.

  On June 25, Cuzco gave Bolívar a welcome unlike any he had ever experienced. Triumphal arches leapt up to greet him along the mountain roads, reminding him of the ones that had welcomed Napoleon to Rome. Cuzco itself was a glorious sight to behold. Gold and silver ornaments were hung from the houses; rich brocades festooned the streets. But as he climbed toward the city, it was the breathtaking panorama and the hardy mountain folk who moved him. Peru here—unlike Lima—it seemed to him, was a fierce original; its Indians a noble breed. The ancient Inca capital had not suffered during the punishing revolution—and yet the Indian civilization had been stalled for three hundred years.

  He was presented with a crown studded with pearls and diamonds; golden keys to the city; a horse in a gilded harness, a rich assortment of jewels. In the end, he sent the crown to Sucre, gave the gold and jewels to his aides, and kept only the horse. He stayed for a month, busily issuing laws and decrees. He eliminated all titles of nobility held by descendants of the Inca, just as he had eliminated those that were held by whites; he distributed land to the indigenous peoples; he abolished all race-based taxes. He felt drawn to the plight of the Indians. “I want to do all that is possible for them,” he wrote Santander, “first, for the good of humanity; second, because they have a right to it; and, ultimately, because doing the right thing costs so little and is worth so much.” Every day brought opportunities to undo Spain’s draconian laws: he ordered roads built, demanded that monasteries be converted into schools, built an aqueduct, established the College of Cuzco. But his sympathies for the people of this mountain aerie seemed to confirm that there was something repellent about Peru as a whole—a national character he deeply disliked, forged by a bitter history. He spoke of this aversion only privately, but the prejudice he had brought with him to Lima—the profound conviction that wealth and slavery had ruined the country—ultimately defined his Peruvian experience.

  By August, he was traveling the vertiginous route to La Paz, the capital of Upper Peru. The ride was grueling, but conspicuously free of enemies. The last of the Spanish generals, the renegade Olañeta, stubbornly prowling those mountains for two y
ears, had died months before, mortally wounded in battle. Word had it that he had met his end at the hands of his own men; indeed, he had been the only victim in a fleeting skirmish against Sucre’s army. Seeing Olañeta fall from his horse, his soldiers—a fraction of his original force—rushed to surrender. It was hardly surprising, as royalist defections after the Battle of Ayacucho had been epidemic; everyone wanted to be on Sucre’s side. The grand marshal proceeded to carry out his assignment in Upper Peru admirably.

  Sucre met Bolívar on the shores of Lake Titicaca not far from where the old viceroyalty of Peru ended and the old viceroyalty of Buenos Aires began. There, at long last, Bolívar embraced Sucre and thanked him for his many momentous achievements: the victory at Ayacucho, the suppression of Olañeta, the successful occupation of La Paz and Potosí. It had been almost a year since they had seen each other.

  Sucre’s skirmish with Olañeta represented the last battle against Spain on the American mainland. In the scant year since Bolívar had marched from Trujillo with his hastily improvised troops, an army of eighteen thousand had been brought to ruin. Bolívar’s strategies had been masterful, his preparations meticulous, but it had been Sucre who had brought the patriots to their resounding final victory and it was Sucre who soared to fame throughout Peru. He seemed invincible, a colossus among his Latin American contemporaries. Wherever he went, he was cheered, admired, and Bolívar did not grudge him one bit of the adulation. From Pichincha to Potosí, the young general had brought the patriots nothing but glory. Bolívar took every opportunity to say so. When, in La Paz, the Liberator was handed another crown, he passed it—with gallant flourish—to Sucre. “This belongs to the true victor,” he said.

  But as united as Bolívar and Sucre could be about military matters, they often disagreed about the politics of liberation. It was a measure of how well they worked together: Sucre was unafraid to tell the Liberator things he didn’t want to hear, and, from Sucre, Bolívar didn’t mind hearing them. Bolívar had not wanted to hear that Upper Peru should be left to determine its own future. The region was something of an anomaly—not a province, not a people. According to founding principles, a new republic was supposed to follow the contours of the viceroyalty that immediately preceded it, and so, by all accounts, Upper Peru should have answered to Buenos Aires. But Bolívar wasn’t about to forfeit the mineral-rich region to Argentina, and so his solution had been to make Upper Peru a sovereign republic. Bolívar’s thinking seemed to him as just as it was logical: to deliver the region to war-torn Argentina was to deliver it to anarchy; to deliver it to Peru would be to vitiate the founding principles the revolutionaries had long since established. When he had first arrived in La Paz, Sucre had told its citizens that he wasn’t there to resolve such questions. He was there to liberate, not govern. Bolívar soon disabused him of that idea. They were there to liberate, to be sure; but they were also there to fashion a new America.

  The vastly wealthy Creole aristocrats who guarded the silver-veined hills of Potosí were all too happy to abide by Bolívar’s decision to declare themselves an autonomous nation. Most Upper Peruvians had been followers of the ultraconservative, quixotic Olañeta—indeed one of their present political leaders was his nephew—and now they were being assured that they would not have to answer to anyone; that all the riches of Potosí, the treasure of so many kings, would be theirs alone.

  A hastily gathered assembly of representatives, “elected” by laws that were clearly arbitrary and racist, met in Chuquisaca on July 10 to formally deliberate the founding. It was hardly a democratic exercise. The Aymara Indians—an overwhelming majority of the population, forty thousand of whom had risen up against their masters forty years before—were given no say, and the pecking order that once had prevailed under Spanish rule was put in place again: the whites would lord over the half-breeds, and the half-breeds would lord over the brown.

  On August 6 the members of the assembly officially declared the independence of Upper Peru, changed its name to the Republic of Bolívar, changed it again to Bolivia, and voted to make the Liberator their president. To give him absolute power, they invited the new president to draft their constitution. Bolívar, who was rounding the shimmering, cold waters of Lake Titicaca when he heard of it, was delighted with the news. In the course of one day, his America had acquired a million souls. As maximum leader of three vast republics, Bolívar now ruled over an area that, taken together, exceeded the size of modern Europe. He hurried to accept the honors.

  IF BOLÍVAR WAS AT THE zenith of his career, Spanish America, as a whole, appeared to be heading toward its nadir. From the deserts of Mexico to the pampas of Argentina, independence had brought not a bright new world, but a dizzying surfeit of obstacles. Fatigue was soon overtaken by irritability, ushering in an era of discontent. Bolívar seemed to sense it before it happened. He pressed for the conference of new American republics, his Congress of Panama, to take place as soon as possible. He wanted to capture the flush of enthusiasm that accompanied revolution—have his fledgling republics share ideas before they acted on them—and he wanted to be at the vanguard of that process. “If we wait any longer,” he told the leaders he had invited, “if each of us waits to see what the other will do, we will deprive ourselves of the advantages.” But as 1825 ground on, it was evident that the republics were too mired in their own troubles to think about a wider American ideal. As festivities wound down in Lima at the end of February, Bolívar noted a viral dread creeping into the Creole population, a sense that freedoms would bring social upheaval, and that anarchy would be democracy’s next step.

  Indeed, anarchy had already begun in Mexico. After the spectacular collapse of Emperor Agustín de Iturbide’s reign and his summary execution, the country was in financial ruin: London bankers had stepped in with loans, making the nation a bit player in Britain’s vast economic empire. British foreign minister George Canning was euphoric: “We slip in between,” he wrote a fellow countryman, “and plant ourselves in Mexico. . . . we link once more America to Europe.” He made no secret that in doing so, he felt he had won a victory over Britain’s former colony, the swiftly expanding United States.

  Greater Colombia, too, had its problems. A corrosive peevishness had set in between Caracas and Bogotá. Páez and Santander, whose hatred for one another was evident, were squabbling, readying for a face-off. Bolívar’s proud creation seemed irreparably shot through with fissures. Chile, too, was riven by conflict: its leadership was hesitant, its southern provinces still at war. Argentina was no better. On the verge of declaring war with Brazil over a patch of borderland called the Banda Oriental (Uruguay), the Argentines begged Bolívar to assist them. They courted him throughout his stay in La Paz and Potosí, sending various delegations to convince him to come to their rescue.

  Bolívar toyed with the notion of taking his liberating army to the nethermost regions of the American continent, even wrote to Santander to sound out the idea. “The demon of glory will carry us to Tierra del Fuego,” he wrote animatedly, “and the truth is: what would we risk?” In many ways, it would have been the apotheosis of Bolívar’s American dream, a campaign to fulfill his grand continental ambition. The celebrations in the extravagant heights of Potosí had seemed to persuade him that there were no limits to possibility—his words so euphoric that Sucre had cried like a baby and Bolívar’s old teacher Rodríguez had leapt in the air with joy. But when Santander wrote back, exploding in disbelief at the very notion of a march farther south, Bolívar realized the folly of it. The conflict between Brazil and Argentina was full of perils; to enter into it was to declare another war against a colonial empire and alienate all Europe. Santander reminded Bolívar that there was yet another reason to say no: Greater Colombia was in shambles. The letter was unequivocal:

  The miserable state of our financial affairs has forced me to suspend all combat. Ten years of peace would set us straight. Today our army has estimated costs of 16 to 18 million dollars. Our income is 7 to 8. From where will we ex
tract the difference? We need to reduce spending unless we want to wither away entirely, and the way to do that may be to shrink the army, get rid of the navy.

  He was proposing to collapse the very institution that Bolívar had built so carefully, a military that represented the fusion of all races, the miraculous engine that had won America’s freedom. There was no doubt: times were dire. Santander was proving true to the appellation Bolívar had given him. He was the “man of laws,” the stern voice of reason. Sucre, on the other hand, had been Bolívar’s “man of war.” And Bolívar, thrashing about to advance an agenda for the hemisphere, had become—in his own mind, at least—America’s “man of difficulties.”

  The future would bear this out.

  BOLÍVAR HAD TOURED THE SOUTH for almost a year when he returned to Lima on February 10, 1826, and found the capital in a joyous mood. The royalist forces that had entombed themselves in Callao had just surrendered. Torre Tagle’s minions had consumed the last rat in the fortress, perished by the thousands, and, starved into submission, yielded the last patch of Spanish soil on America’s mainland. The city celebrated for days. When Bolívar stepped ashore, he, too, was met with elation. But anyone who thought all was well now would be sorely mistaken.