Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Bolívar had other reasons to return. He longed to keep his dream of a unified federation alive; he wanted to ensure that the countries he had liberated adopted his constitution. The Peruvian government, after much debate and, ironically, in order to keep him in Lima a while longer, had finally approved it, as had Bolivia. The Peruvians had gone on to proclaim him president for life. He declined and put the presidency in the hands of General Santa Cruz—a decision he would come to rue. He shipped off the lion’s share of the liberating army, leaving three hefty battalions to protect the capital. He then went about giving away every gift Peru had bestowed on him, save one: the jewel-encrusted gold sword given to him by the municipality of Lima. He was determined to leave Peru—as promised—without one grain of its sand, and indeed he left it an impoverished man. In order to liquidate his few debts, he had to borrow from aides. The one million dollars Peru had insisted on paying him after the Battle of Ayacucho—which he hoped would be sent to the poor of Venezuela—had never been produced. Ironically, the liberator to whom Peru would pay a life pension and all the tributes was San Martín, the man who left Lima before completing the task.

  Bolívar departed Peru believing all was in reasonably good order. His constitution was in place in Peru and Bolivia, and he was confident that Santa Cruz and Sucre would carry out his vision. He began to think that if he could get those two republics to unite under his constitution—then push through its approval in Colombia—he would have an amalgamated America of sorts. Larger was always better in Bolívar’s mind, and that dream seemed large enough for the moment. It wasn’t that he was after more power. As he had said many times: he was weary of responsibilities. He was prepared to leave them to Santander. Coalition became his sole purpose and aim.

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, BOLÍVAR BOARDED a boat for Guayaquil, leaving Manuela Sáenz in Lima. She had long since moved out of Thorne’s house and into her own in Magdalena so that she could be closer to her lover. There had been no more pretense, no effort to stand on ceremony. She had broken with her husband and refused all his money. She was known as the Libertadora now. In the company of her loyal black servants, the famously uninhibited Jonatás and Natán, she had come and gone from Bolívar’s villa freely.

  The romance had not been without its rocky moments. The nine months he had been away in Cuzco and La Paz had tested their love. At first, Bolívar thought it best to end the affair. He was well aware of the scandal Manuela had caused in Lima and the damage such a flagrant affair with a married woman had done to his reputation. It is possible, too, that Thorne persuaded him that it would be in her best interest to let her go. Bolívar wrote soon after his departure: “Dear beautiful and good Manuela, I think of you and your fate constantly. I see no way we can unite in innocence and honor. I see all too well the terrible predicament you’re in, having to rejoin someone you do not love (indeed, it makes me tremble); and mine, having to separate myself from someone I adore. . . . My determination to tear myself from your love has done this, and now eternity itself has come between us.”

  Within a few months, he wrote from Potosí, answering a letter in which she had described “the ill-treatment” to which she was being subjected; we do not know what misery Thorne was inflicting on her, but it was serious enough for Bolívar to suggest she leave Lima and take refuge with friends in Arequipa. The letter was cut-and-dried, hardly the passionate missive she was used to receiving from him. But Manuela proved hard to rebuff. A month later, he was writing again: “What you say about your husband is painful and funny all at once. . . . I don’t know how to reconcile our respective happiness with our respective duties; I don’t know how to cut a knot that even Alexander’s sword would only complicate; it’s not a matter of sword or strength, after all, but of pure against guilty love, duty against weakness.”

  He had had no shortage of affairs in between, and she was well aware of them. Women were always lavishing their attention on the Liberator; he found them impossible to resist. In Lima, before leaving on his travels, he had romanced the doe-eyed American Jeannette Hart, Commodore Isaac Hull’s sister-in-law, who had visited Lima with Hull and his wife. It is even said in some Connecticut circles that Bolívar proposed marriage to the brunette beauty, although it is more likely that he only hinted at it, as he was inclined to do when courting a woman.

  If legend is to be believed, Bolívar had a string of lovers as he toured Peru and Bolivia. Some were simply the nymphs who welcomed him from town to town; others were more serious entanglements—involving wives of high-placed officials—with lasting complications. One was the formidable and fetching Peruvian heroine Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, wife of the prefect of Cuzco, Agustín Gamarra. Little is known about her relationship to Bolívar, apart from two facts. It was she who was chosen to place a crown of laurel on his head when he entered Cuzco; and much later, when her husband was asked why he hated Bolívar even though the Liberator had been so generous to him, Gamarra replied, “He gave me many honors, it’s true, but he also took away my wife.”

  Gamarra’s wife, known to all as Doña Pancha or “the Marshalette,” was as fierce as she was beautiful. Accompanying her husband in battle, she was fearless, peremptory, taking command when officers grew weak-kneed. She was a consummate horsewoman, knew how to handle a gun, and loved a good cockfight. Like Páez, she was an epileptic and rose to such heights of fury during combat that she would fall to the ground to be trampled by horses and carried off for dead. But in the drawing rooms of Cuzco—and, later, Lima—she was a dazzling presence, as a contemporary recalled: “She had a long, slightly turned-up nose and a large but very expressive mouth; her face was long, with prominent cheekbones; her skin dark but full of vitality.” She made no secret of using her beauty and wiles to “exploit situations as the need arose.” She had been forged in the fires of revolution and, when Gamarra was elected president, would rise to be first lady of the land. If indeed Doña Pancha had a passing liaison with Bolívar, it was a union on equal terms.

  In Potosí, Bolivia, on the other hand, Bolívar had engaged in a dalliance with more lasting consequences. The young woman who placed a wreath on his head this time was María Joaquina Costas, whose Argentine husband was off fighting the war in Chile. She was graceful, elegant, with coal black eyes and a gentle smile. It is said that as Costas was laying her garland on Bolívar’s brow, she warned him of a royalist plot brewing against him. At once intrigued and smitten, he invited her to a tête-à-tête. The plot against him never materialized, but he and Costas entered into an ardent affair and, in due course—months after the Liberator was back in Lima—a child was born. That child, José Antonio Costas, would die claiming he was Bolívar’s son, but the Liberator never acknowledged him. An enigmatic exchange at a gathering of cronies two years after the child’s birth, however, led him to mention that he was hardly sterile, that he had living evidence to the contrary. It was probably wishful thinking.

  None of it would have come as a surprise to Manuela. She had long since reconciled herself to Bolívar’s philandering ways. He never hid his interest in women; he admired them publicly, kissed their hands, danced with them in her presence. But he always went back to Manuela. When he had returned to Lima from his tour of Cuzco and La Paz, he reunited with her once more. His notes to her en route were as urgent as any young suitor’s: “Wait for me at all costs, do you hear? Do you understand? If you don’t, you’re an ingrate, a traitor, even worse: an enemy.”

  Their love would not waver again.

  Through the years and during the course of her many travels with the army, Manuela had managed to forge lasting friendships with many of Bolívar’s men. She was devoted to his campaign, attentive to his soldiers’ petitions, and, most important as far as his troops were concerned, brave in extremely perilous circumstances. As a result, she had earned the respect of a number of his generals—Sucre, Heres, and others—and the Liberator’s British aides: all the men he loved best. She was, according to a diplomatic report to Secretary of State
Henry Clay, a remarkably handsome woman, “generous in the extreme” to officers and soldiers. She was always willing to give them the last dollar in her purse and exhibited “the most zealous humanity” to the sick or wounded. She had become known as the person to whom a desperate soldier could go to win Bolívar’s official attention.

  Manuela’s commitment to her lover’s cause was most in evidence when he left Peru and the soldiers of a division he had left behind rose up in a series of mutinies. They claimed that they hadn’t been paid full wages, that their rations had been curtailed, that they wanted a share of the fortune Peru had offered to pay Bolívar. As became clear, the insurrection had been concocted in Bogotá by those who, like Santander, wanted to cut short Colombia’s military presence in Peru and bring the costly troops home. On January 26, 1827, the 3rd Division expelled Bolívar’s generals, seized control of Lima’s government palace and the fortress of Callao, and began to make demands. Manuela put on her colonel’s uniform, rode out, and tried to win back the mutineers. Doling out money, she implored them to ignore their leader and form a new contingent.

  Days later, she was arrested in her home in Magdalena. Peruvian authorities stormed the house at midnight on February 7, detained her, and insisted she leave the country that very night. She pleaded illness. The next morning, she was cast into a cell in a Lima convent, where the abbess received her with open contempt. She tried to object, argue her rights, but all the force of Peruvian vitriol came down on her now. The minister of foreign relations, Manuel Vidaurre—one of Bolívar’s most rabid critics—accused her of being wanton, scandalous, “an insult to public honor and morals.” On April 11, she was shuffled onto a boat in Callao along with a dozen Colombian officers and 130 sick and wounded men. Without any further ado, they were shipped off to Guayaquil. By the time she arrived, Bolívar would be far away, in a more troubled corner of his new world.

  BOLÍVAR SAILED FROM LIMA ON September 3, 1826, promising to return. Indeed he hoped that once his Federation of the Andes was securely in place, he would come back on regular visits, overseeing the country’s fortunes. But he would never see Peru again.

  By September 13 he was in Guayaquil, where he was received as a hero. He was, in essence, without an army—he had sent the many thousands of Colombian troops in Peru to serve elsewhere—and it must have struck him as peculiar to be back on that hard-won soil without his trusty legions. “I come to you with an olive branch” were the first public words he uttered. That olive branch was his new constitution, but he did not say so right away. He went on to say all the things that Santander and his skittish legislators in Bogotá hoped to hear: He did not aspire to be a dictator; he did not care about political parties; he wanted only to bring harmony to Colombia’s troubled shores. “Once more, I offer you my services,” he said, “services of a brother. I don’t want to know who has been at fault here; I have never forgotten that we are blood brothers, comrades in arms. I come offering an embrace. . . . Here, in the depths of my very being will I carry you, Granadans and Venezuelans alike, the just along with the unjust, the entire liberating army and every last citizen of this great Republic.”

  But as he moved north, traveling through Quito and Pasto, he exercised every extraordinary faculty he had ever been granted. Technically, he was a returning general—without doubt, a very victorious one—but his presidency had been annulled more than a year before; it was not his place to govern until he reached Bogotá, was formally conferred the presidency, and officially took up the reins. All the same, he was troubled by what he saw. “Everywhere I look,” he wrote Santander, “I see only misery and disgust.” Citizens felt disconnected from their government; local institutions were in shambles. For all of Santander’s laws, the engine of Greater Colombia appeared to have stalled completely. The only way to solve it, as far as Bolívar was concerned, was to return power to the people, renew the social contract, give the outlying electoral colleges more control. To him, a citizen’s rights were far more important than any body of statutes.

  As he went, he tried to reassure the unhappy public by issuing government appointments, abrogating others. He commuted sentences, gave military promotions to officers who appealed to him, encouraged disgruntled citizens to come forward with protests against Bogotá’s laws. He chafed at his aide O’Leary for taking sides with Santander against Páez. And, in the end, he decided that what he needed was more power, not less. He wrote to the vice president, “A dictatorship would solve everything. . . . With constitutional laws you can do nothing about Páez. Authorized by the nation, I can do all.” Even as he publicly claimed to abhor the word “dictator,” he now privately worked toward being acclaimed one. As he proceeded north, it was precisely what came to pass. The people of Guayaquil and Quito, dismayed by Bogotá’s laws and irked by its ignorance about their needs, were only too happy to call Bolívar their dictator.

  Santander was furious. According to him, a dictatorship was beside the point, entirely unnecessary in a republic whose laws and institutions—if obeyed—did the work of governing. The established order did not need to change; the disorderly people did. It was true that he had begged Bolívar to come back and restore the peace, but he had meant for the Liberator to come as a figurehead, a symbol. If Bolívar was angling to install his presumptuous Bolivian constitution and upend all the laws put in place in the past five years, Santander wanted no part of it. He had already warned Bolívar to steer clear of governing, as it would only destroy a warrior’s glory. He decided to come out and meet the Liberator before Bolívar entered the capital and did any harm.

  Bolívar was well into Popayán—350 miles from Bogotá—before he knew how unwelcome he was in Santander’s country. It was there that he began to see newspapers out of the capital, filled with hostile editorials against him. It was there, too, that he began to hear that the majority of Granadans thought that the 1821 constitution was best; that they didn’t agree with his notions of Pan American unity and constitutional reform; that they were all for Santander’s laws and the primacy of Granadans over Venezuelans. They even seemed willing to go to war against Páez to prove it. Bolívar had told Santander months before that laws alone would not bring discipline to the turmoil. An obsession with laws was what had driven Páez to rebel in the first place. What the republic needed now was a strong military hand and every effort to preserve the union. He wrote to Santander again with an even firmer message, reprimanding him for feeding the burgeoning ill will: “I fear that Colombia is lost forever,” he lamented. “The old constitution and the laws have reduced the country to a Satan’s palace, ablaze in every corner.” He threatened to reject the presidency unless congress convened to decide the important questions. But there was no denying he was chastened by the disapproval. Less confident now, he wrote to Sucre and Santa Cruz, telling them to do what they thought best in Bolivia and Peru, even override him, if that was what the people wanted. But as he made his way through the vast, unfriendly republic, taking the grueling mountain route he had taken years before, suffering the pain of inflamed hemorrhoids, he couldn’t help but burn, too, with a consuming fury.

  Santander met Bolívar on the outskirts of the capital, before the Liberator began his final ascent to the plains of Bogotá. He was determined to disabuse Bolívar of any duplicity on his part or any bad faith on the part of the government. The meeting was genial, polite, with Santander’s every effort directed at personally reassuring his chief. For all intents and purposes, the vice president’s strategy worked. They agreed that when they reached Bogotá, Bolívar would resume the presidency under the old constitution—at least for the time being—and that he would take up the extraordinary faculties that the constitution provided in times of peril.

  But this rapprochement between Bolívar and his vice president was sorely tested when the Liberator actually made his entrance into the city on November 14. Instead of the wild, exultant acclamations he had received elsewhere for his attendant victories, Bolívar was met with only a few “Viv
as!” in his name. The welcome was surprisingly reserved—even grudging—and made largely by supporters of the vice president. The loudest cheers, to the Liberator’s dismay, were for the very old constitution of 1815—the charter that had formed the original republic of New Granada. There were no triumphal arches, no clamoring masses. The only plaudits were on billboards, and they screamed: Viva la constitución! As a chilling rain began to drizzle down, Bolívar found himself riding into the capital virtually alone. At the city limits, he was welcomed with a small ceremony in his honor. But when the presiding official whined on about how the army had violated the republic’s laws, Bolívar erupted. He cut off the speaker, ended the harangue, and insisted that patriots should be “celebrating the army’s glories, not nattering on about its violation of a few laws.” He was livid. When the heavens finally parted to release a drenching rain, all hopes of a triumphal reentry were dampened completely.

  The morning sun over Bogotá brought a brighter day. The civic, military, and religious leaders of Colombia greeted Bolívar warmly in the presidential palace and he reciprocated with generous words. Santander made a dazzling, conciliatory speech, in which he congratulated the Liberator, praised the army’s astonishing victories, and claimed to be the president’s loyal friend. It seemed, too, as conversation continued, that Bolívar’s vice president was not completely averse to his Federation of the Andes. Although he didn’t say it quite yet, Santander was all for dividing Greater Colombia into separate states, and as long as he ruled New Granada, he was willing to go along with the idea of some form of federal system. The blue sky of possibility seemed to gleam over them now. Vivas! for the Liberator rang throughout the capital, and there was talk of a bold, new day. By the end of it, the president and vice president were embracing warmly. It would be their last amicable exchange.