Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Almost immediately, Bolívar was handed an agitated letter from Páez, reporting the miserable state of affairs in Venezuela. “You cannot imagine how ruinous the intrigues have been in this country,” Páez told him. “Morillo was right when he said he did you a favor when he killed all the lawyers.” But according to Páez, the Spaniards hadn’t killed enough of them. It was men of laws, he insisted, who were crippling the republic. He begged Bolívar to return, crown himself king, and wrest a modicum of order from the chaos. Páez didn’t tell the whole tale, but he had been accused of brutal methods of recruitment. He claimed that he had only responded to duty, that royalists in Havana were poised to attack the coast and the country was desperate for soldiers. To Páez, and to the many Venezuelans who venerated him, the accusations of violence were only a ruse by lawyers in Bogotá—and, by extension, Santander—to humiliate the army and drive Páez from power. Páez pleaded with Bolívar to return as Napoleon had returned to France: with a crown on his head and a strong arm that brooked no argument.

  “Colombia is not France,” Bolívar replied to Páez, “and I am not Napoleon.” For him, the title of Liberator was far superior to any a monarchy might bestow. But a wider campaign to crown Bolívar was clearly afoot in Venezuela. Bolívar soon received a letter from his sister María Antonia, advising him that if anyone urged him to the throne, he should resist at all costs. “Tell them you will be Liberator or nothing, that is your true title, the one that honors your hard-won glory.” Eventually, Sucre told him the same thing. But it was clear that Venezuela was in such turmoil that it was grasping at extreme solutions. Its needs were urgent, and yet his work in Peru was hardly finished. His house in Magdalena had become a hive of Latin American activity. Foreign delegates came and went offering ideas; representatives from new republics constantly appeared with proposals; Peruvians who feared a vacuum of power begged him to stay.

  Critics of Bolívar—and Peru is replete with them—say that he should have left Lima there and then. The war was won, the last Spaniard stripped of power, the question of Upper Peru resolved. Why would a lover of liberty with a nation’s best interests at heart remain with a vast army of occupation? Bolívar had his reasons. First, he had been beseeched to stay. Second, and more convincing, the political situation in Peru was tenuous, bordering on ruin. During his travels outside Lima, he had delegated power to José de La Mar, a Peruvian general born near Guayaquil, or to Hipólito Unanúe, the Peruvian doctor who had nursed him to health in Pativilca. But after the serial treacheries of Riva Agüero and Torre Tagle, he harbored an essential distrust of Peruvians; he was reluctant to leave them to themselves. As the days wore on and he concentrated on putting the finishes touches on the Bolivian constitution, he became convinced that the document he was creating was the answer to all of America’s ills.

  BOLÍVAR’S CONSTITUTION WAS A TESTAMENT to how the social realities of the continent had altered his liberating vision; it was a curious combination of deeply held republican principle and authoritarian rule. He had long feared the lawlessness that a hastily conceived democracy might bring. To hand power too quickly to illiterate masses was to snuff out what little order there was. He had once told a British diplomat in Lima, “If principles of liberty are too rapidly introduced, anarchy and a wholesale purge of whites will be the inevitable consequences.” In other words, he had granted all races equality, but he worried that in the process of institutionalizing it, the blacks and Indians would simply kill off the old aristocracy—the very class from which he hailed. It was exactly what had happened in Haiti. Bolívar’s new constitution meant to free the people, and yet, for their own good, keep them in a tight harness.

  His constitution’s proposed division of powers—executive, legislative, judicial—was similar to that of the United States, although he added a fourth branch, a separate electoral college. The legislative branch was to be made up of senators, tribunes, and censors. Senators were to enact and guard the laws; tribunes would deal with money and war; censors would safeguard liberties. The government would offer the people a “moral” education in order to instill principles of civic responsibility. The constitution provided for freedoms of speech, press, work, and passage. It ensured citizens all the benefits of personal security, equality before the law, and a jury-based system of justice. It abolished slavery. It put an end to all social privilege. Up to this point, Bolívar’s constitution resembled—even improved on—its British and United States counterparts. Where it differed starkly was in its conditions for the presidency, and it was here that the document ran aground.

  Bolívar had stipulated that the president be appointed for life. To him, presidential power was key; upon it would rest the entire Bolívarian concept of order. Although he claimed that he had rendered the position headless and harmless because a president would be powerless to appoint anyone to the legislative government or to the courts, there was no doubt that the presidency would be the most powerful institution in the land. A president’s influence would extend into perpetuity by virtue of his ability to choose a vice president, who would be his successor. Thus, Bolívar contended, “we shall avoid elections, which always result in that great scourge of republics, anarchy . . . the most imminent and terrible peril of popular government.” He had come a long way from his address to the congress of Angostura seven years before, in which he had roundly averred: “Regular elections are essential to popular government, for nothing is more perilous than to permit one citizen to retain power for an extended period.” In the course of taking his wars of liberation south, he had changed his mind entirely.

  When the Bolivian constitution was complete, Bolívar sent that “ark of the covenant” off to Sucre in Bolivia, in a special mission led by his personal aide, Colonel Belford Wilson. Eager to promote its adoption in other republics, he had several editions printed and dispatched to Colombia by the very courier who had delivered Páez’s message begging him to become king. In Peru, his secretary of state made sure that every member of the electoral college had a copy. Bolívar’s constitution, in short, was to be distributed as widely as possible, throughout the Americas as well as strategic points in Europe. As his handiwork circulated, reactions were mixed. The English regarded it as an enlightened charter, generous in its promised liberties, but wise in its mitigation of a “mischievous excess of popular power.” In the United States, on the other hand, legislators were outraged by its provision for a president for life; Southern politicians were infuriated by its abolition of slavery. In South America, opinions were divided. In Chile and Argentina, it was received with moderate praise; in Colombia, it was trooped from town to town by a Venezuelan known to have urged Bolívar to the throne, and so it was no surprise that it was seen as a prologue to monarchy. At first, Santander withheld his opinion, knowing that for the vice president to disagree with the president would be impolitic. He wrote to Bolívar that he considered the document “liberal and popular, strong and vigorous.” Privately, he complained that it was “absurd, a dangerous novelty.” Within months, he was assailing the constitution openly in Bogotá’s Gaceta.

  In Lima, Bolívar’s cabal of enemies only grew, fed mightily by this new evidence of his appetite for power. Nevertheless, the secretary of state’s firm pressure on the outlying electoral colleges worked. Peru became the first country to adopt the constitution—not one patriot publicly objected—although time and circumstance eventually prevented the charter from ever being put to full use.

  The Bolivian congress, on the other hand, didn’t approve the constitution right away, and when it did, it did so with great caution. Bolívar had left Bolivia in Sucre’s capable hands, urging him to take on the presidency of the republic. Initially, Sucre had demurred: he was a military man, he insisted, not a politician. Furthermore, he ardently hoped to return to Colombia to marry his fiancée, the beautiful Marquesa de Solanda. He was tired of governing and had tendered his resignation repeatedly, but Bolívar had always refused to accept it. “We need to take up the w
ork of founding and fostering nations,” Bolívar had said. “We will show Europe that America has men every equal of the heroes of the ancient world.” Months later, when the new constitution was adopted in Bolivia along with its provision for a president for life, Sucre was elected to the position, but he agreed to hold office for only two years.

  Historians have long pointed to the Bolivian constitution as proof of Bolívar’s inordinate love of power. Some have gone so far as to claim that it was the first glimmer of a spiraling madness. There is little doubt that its presidential clause was a blunder of colossal proportions. Just as San Martín had made the error of introducing a monarch into his liberating plan, Bolívar was now introducing a lifelong ruler. But Bolívar did not aspire to wear a crown. He despised hereditary power and had expressly forbidden his family to seek political office. All the same, he adored being called Liberator and longed to be remembered as the founder of his America, the alchemist of its freedom, a living arc of enlightenment. He had made it plain that although he enjoyed a ruler’s esteem, he was averse to the quotidian business that attended it.

  It is also fair to say that he didn’t want the responsibility of ruling over any one nation because he wanted something far larger. He yearned to be the father of a federation of nations and said so very plainly to Santander. You rule Colombia, Bolívar told him, “so that I may be permitted to govern all South America.” It was why he would apply himself so vigorously to organizing the Congress of Panama.

  He knew this would not be easy. He had always made it clear that the continent could not function as a single, integrated country; the landmass was too sprawling, the population too diverse. To complicate matters, Spain had never encouraged camaraderie among its colonies—travel and commerce had been forbidden and punished by death—and so for three hundred years the colonies had answered to Madrid as spokes to a hub, with no contact whatsoever among them. They did not know one another well enough to be fellow citizens. But Bolívar saw the Spanish-speaking nations of America as potential brothers in a grand fraternity, bound by common laws and protected by a single military. In this, he had some fundamental rules: peace would be kept, the slave trade stopped, international relations encouraged, a coherent system of cooperation established. It was a visionary scheme with vaulting ambition and, soon enough, he saw that it presented overwhelming challenges. Urged on by his advisors, he began to think such a construct might be more appropriate for the countries he himself had liberated. He called this more focused version the Federation of the Andes, and it stretched from Panama to Potosí. Although each nation would remain a separate entity, there would be but one army, one code of racial equality, one face against the world. That face would be embodied in a shared constitution: his own. And to coax it through infancy, the federation would enjoy a special relationship—a protectorate of sorts—with England.

  Even as he was conjuring this idea of a tighter Andean federation, Bolívar continued with the Congress of Panama as he had initially conceived it. He had long since instructed Santander, who was managing the details, not to invite Haiti, Brazil, or the United States. They were derived from different nations and cultures, after all. But he also felt they would make awkward partners in the conversation. Haiti was too black, the United States too white, to accept the unconditional equality of races he would require. Moreover, it was evident that with the Monroe Doctrine the United States saw itself as master of the hemisphere; it would fight Bolívar’s vision of a robust South American union every step of the way. In this, Bolívar ironically agreed with Count Aranda, an advisor to the Spanish throne, who—long before, in the year of Bolívar’s birth—had said of the United States, “There will come a time when she is a giant, a colossus even, much to be feared in those vast regions. Then, she will forget the benefits she received from others and think only of aggrandizing herself.” No, Bolívar did not want the United States invited. As for Brazil, it was incompatible with republicanism by virtue of its monarchical tie to Portugal. Santander eventually defied Bolívar’s instructions and invited Brazil and the United States anyway, claiming it was in the interest of forging a larger hemispheric union. Bolívar took that insubordination in stride, but it was one more indication that he couldn’t trust his vice president.

  The conference was to take place on June 22, 1826, on the Isthmus of Panama—an echo, if only symbolic—of ancient Greece’s Amphictyonic League, which had met on the Isthmus of Corinth. Bolívar had decided not to attend the proceedings so that it couldn’t be said that he had influenced its outcome. But it was precisely to influence the outcome that the Peruvian delegation arrived six months early, hoping to lay the groundwork for its point of view. As deliberations opened, the nations represented were Peru, Greater Colombia (which now consisted of Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, and New Granada), Mexico, and the Federal Republic of Central America; that is to say, only four of the seven Latin American republics. The Argentines had declined outright, saying that they had “a horror of too early a union,” especially one advanced so unilaterally by Colombia. Chile had been too wrenched by internal conflagrations to participate; Bolivia had been willing, but its delegates arrived too late. The kingdom of Brazil, a monarchy with far stronger sympathies for Europe, had also refused, using its war with Argentina as an excuse. The United States, after passionate objection from its slaveholding states, sent two delegates, but one died on the way, the second reached the meeting hall only after the congress was over.

  When all was said and done, the congress was a resounding failure. Delegates gathering in the stuffy Franciscan monastery in Panama’s sweltering capital had been all too eager to be done with the debate. Some were ailing, others fearful of the pestilential climate; all were anxious about the motives. The proceedings, which had been meant to go for almost two months, lasted a mere three weeks. Only Colombia ratified the empty initiatives, and nothing was done to advance Bolívar’s concept of a league of nations. The only country that made progress worth recording was England, which attended as an observer and walked away with a passel of commercial contracts. Like Mexico, whose failures had become a boon to British financiers, the Congress of Panama became a marketplace for foreign mongers. Bolívar’s dream of a larger America had dispersed like a mist in the equatorial sun.

  CHAPTER 15

  Era of Blunders

  We have arrived at an era of blunders. In order to fix one, we commit fifty.

  —Pedro Briceño Méndez

  The Congress of Panama was a bitter disappointment to Bolívar.

  “The institution was admirable,” he wrote Páez, but it ended “like that mythic madman, perched on a rock in the open sea, thinking he could direct the ships’ traffic.” Just as warlords had plagued the revolution with small-minded ambitions, republics now threatened to undermine one another with toxic distrust.

  Little seemed to have gone well since Bolívar’s return to Lima. His enemies had grown in number; accusations flowed. Bolívar might have been a hero before he arrived, one Peruvian fumed, “but he is working with a randomness and immorality so thorough that the public has had to reevaluate its opinion.” They enumerated the transgressions: the “violent” occupation of Guayaquil; the ouster of its president; his arbitrary appropriation of power in Peru; the forced labor to which he had subjected the people of Trujillo; his summary expulsion of President Riva Agüero. In the end, one writer fretted, Bolívar’s resounding victory in Ayacucho had silenced all healthy discourse.

  The negative press had a powerful effect. It was as if Peru had forgotten that Bolívar’s armies—tattered and colored as they may have been—had won its freedom. As he traveled the countryside and the army of liberation lingered, the people of Lima began to grumble openly. Hadn’t the man promised he would throw off the ruler’s mantle and leave “without so much as a grain of sand” once the revolution was over? They resented the legions of dark-skinned aliens who remained among them, consuming their sparse supplies like a swarm of locusts. Nor had they forgotten Bol�
�var’s speech after the Battle of Ayacucho, in which he had said that for him to remain would be absurd, monstrous, disgraceful. “I am a foreigner,” he had told them, “I came to assist you as a warrior, not to rule over you as a politician. . . . If I were to accept the position your legislators are pressing on me, Peru would become a parasite nation, affixed to Colombia, where I am president and where I was born.” But a year and a half had passed since he had uttered those words, and still he was in Lima. Still ruling.

  In July of 1826, just as the Congress of Panama collapsed, his staff in Lima discovered a plot to assassinate him. The conspiracy had aimed to expel all Colombians, murder Bolívar, and return power to Peruvian hands. Its organizers, high-level ministers, were summarily deported or executed; Bolívar approved the sentences. But the distrust could not be disposed of so easily. In Lima, the white aristocracy had come to regard Bolívar as a mulatto who was trying to upend their carefully constructed world with ludicrous notions of racial egalitarianism. “Sambo,” they called him—Nigger—as if the black blood rumored to course in his veins explained all his harebrained ideals about equality. Yet many of those same aristocrats became genuinely alarmed when they heard Bolívar was finally contemplating a departure. Worried about the government’s ability to keep the peace, they streamed to his door to persuade him to stay. The specter of anarchy loomed large in that land of gold and slaves.

  But by August Bolívar had made up his mind. Too many troubles threatened his homeland. Páez had broken with Bogotá and, in a brazen coup, tried to assume a separate power in Venezuela. It was, at once, an act of treason and an expression of loyalty to the Liberator. Riding bareback from Valencia to Caracas, raising his rebellion, Páez had shouted for all to hear, “Viva Bolívar! Viva the Republic!” At first the Venezuelan people, frustrated with Bogotá, had responded to Páez’s call so enthusiastically that Santander—who had never been adept in the language of truculence—was at a loss as to how to respond. But he knew that he wanted to prevent a full-scale civil war. He begged Bolívar to return and defend the law. Páez, for his own part, begged Bolívar to return and support the military. Both used his name to argue rival positions. As far as they were concerned, only one man could broker the peace. There was no choice for either but to call him home.