Bolivar: American Liberator
Page 47
On the first order of business, both sides were in unanimous agreement: the old constitution needed to be overhauled. But beyond that, as delegates began to pull tedious drafts of a new charter from their pockets, debates quickly degenerated into long windy harangues or shouting matches, freighted with personal animus. Bolívar’s followers were accused of being tyrants; Santander’s, cunning conspirators. In time, a rumor began to spread that Santander had ordered one of his men to steal out to Bucaramanga and assassinate the president. Immediately, Bolívar’s retinue tightened the security around him. But nothing came of it; and the Liberator, apprised of these machinations, dismissed them as entirely ridiculous.
By the end of May, Santander’s front had made real headway in the deliberations. Azuero, the journalist who had issued the most scathing condemnations of Bolívar, put forward the group’s recommendations for a new constitution: They would abolish the law that allowed Bolívar emergency dictatorial powers. They would curb the president’s power in general, dismember the republic, federalize the nation into twenty provinces, and give congress broad powers over the executive. It was Bolívar’s nightmare. Fully aware of this, his followers demanded that the Liberator be allowed to go to Ocaña and present his side. But Santander took the floor and argued vehemently against it. No, the vice president insisted, he cannot come. “For if he does, there will be no will, no ideas other than his own!” The assembly roundly agreed.
Castillo sensed the reins slipping out of his control. He considered boycotting the proceedings—walking out with just enough members to prevent a legitimate vote. When Bolívar heard of it, he was appalled. Had it come to this? Had one bully so stalled the democratic process that men of principle would be forced to walk away? Had the convention, his great hope for the republic, been so futile? But Azuero’s proposals for the nation were worse. “Do what you must,” Bolívar told his delegates, “and I will do my duty.”
The more he thought about it, the more determined he became. In idler days, he had fantasized going home to join his retired, war-battered cohort in Venezuela. Now, he was incapable of abandoning the fight. “My doctor often has told me,” he wrote Briceño Méndez, “that for my flesh to be strong, my spirit needs to feed on danger. This is so true that when God brought me into this world, he brought a storm of revolutions for me to feed on. . . . I am a genius of the storm.”
On the 10th of June, nineteen conventioneers walked out of the proceedings at Ocaña, leaving fifty-four delegates in the room—one person short of a quorum. The Great Constitutional Convention was over. By then, Bolívar was on his way to the capital. “The bull is in the arena,” he wrote his minister of foreign affairs, “and now we’ll see who’s got guts.” As he rode on, he got word that Bogotá’s ministers were demanding that he take supreme dictatorial powers. He didn’t know it yet, but one of his generals, Pedro Herrán, had summoned the people of Bogotá to the main square. The constitution, Herrán had told them, was in tatters; the convention, a failure; the country, verging on chaos. Bolívar was riding back to renounce his presidency, Herrán said, and a bloody civil war would surely follow. Was that what they wanted? With eight hundred of Herrán’s armed soldiers just beyond the square, there was considerable weight to the question. The council of ministers did not hesitate. They voted to disregard all decisions at Ocaña, suspend elected officials, and confer unlimited power on Bolívar. When the Liberator entered the city on June 24, he was welcomed euphorically as the savior of the republic.
It was a genuine torrent of gratitude. The citizens of Bogotá sensed they had peered into a maw of anarchy and pulled back, just in time. Bolívar may have had enemies in the halls of government—Santander had elevated them, made them appear mightier than they truly were—but on the streets, among ordinary people, there was no doubt who was the nation’s leader. For many, Bolívar represented freedom itself: the polestar of a new identity. As he rode into view on that warm summer’s day, they roared with wild approval.
Two months later, in a ceremony that formalized Colombia’s “Organic Decree,” Bolívar was pronounced president-liberator. His acceptance address was puzzling, odd, filled with a rare ambivalence: “Colombians,” he said in closing, “I won’t even utter the word ‘liberty,’ for, if I am good on my promises, you will be more than liberated, you will be obeyed. Moreover, under a dictatorship, how can we speak of liberty? On this then let us agree: Pity the nation that obeys one man as we should pity the man who holds all power.”
He was that man; he held absolute power; and his uneasy romance with authority would come to define a continent. A few days later, José Padilla was put behind bars. Francisco de Paula Santander was stripped of all command. The office of vice president was abolished. In a pale show of national appreciation, Bolívar offered Santander an ambassadorship in Washington. But it was clear that if the failed general didn’t accept, he would be setting sail all the same. “Santander will leave the country,” Bolívar announced, “one way or another.”
In the end, Santander would go for an entirely different reason.
WHILE BOLÍVAR WAS IN BUCARAMANGA awaiting news of the convention, Manuela Sáenz was coming and going freely from La Quinta, his house overlooking Bogotá. She was ever bolder in her eccentricities, her predilection for dressing like a man, her lavish parties with naughty skits and dances. Among her guests at those ribald affairs were some of Bolívar’s closest friends—including an emerald magnate named Pepe París and a jolly Englishman named Colonel John Illingworth. They were captivated by Manuela’s warmth, her raffish wit and humor, but they were drawn, too, by her closeness to the Liberator. She was La Presidenta, La Libertadora: a door to his intimate circle. That she adored him was patently obvious; that she despised anyone who didn’t was amusing. “Paula, Padilla, Páez!” she had complained to Bolívar, “all those P’s! . . . God, let them all die! It will be a great day for Colombia when they do.” She had—as South Americans like to say—no hair on her tongue. “We adored her,” one of his friends confessed. “She would receive visitors in the morning, dressed in a fetching robe. She tried covering her arms, but essentially they were bare; and, embroidering away, with possibly the prettiest fingers in the world, she spoke little, smoked fetchingly . . . and shared the most interesting news of the day. Later on, she would ride out in an officer’s uniform.”
A month after his return, on Monday, July 28, Manuela held an extravagant party in La Quinta to celebrate Bolívar’s forty-fifth birthday. The festivities were open to the public and held on the sloping meadows that surrounded the house. La Quinta itself was hung in patriotic bunting. Outside, a military band did the honors, soldiers performed drill formations, revelers danced or splashed in the river, and an abundance of food and drink was offered: grilled meats, fresh bread, countless barrels of chicha. Inside the house, where the Liberator’s personal friends were received, the fare was more elegant. Bolívar, as chance would have it, was in town, busy, and could not attend, but his generals and old cronies filled the rooms, toasting his name with champagne. As the evening wore on, tributes grew uninhibited and vinous, until—in the wee hours of morning—someone mentioned the name of Santander. It was like holding a match to gunpowder: Someone else proposed that they hold a mock trial and hang the irksome ex–vice president in effigy. Off they went, clapping and hooting, to fashion Santander from a sack of grain, a three-cornered hat, long black stockings, and a sign that read: “F.P.S. dies, Traitor.” An officer improvised a firing squad, a priest gave last rites, and—to the apparent delight of all—the puppet was pounded with gunshot.
It was a disgrace, a scandal—and all of it in public. Some claimed that Manuela Sáenz was to blame. That, at least, was the opinion of General José María Córdova, a young officer in Bolívar’s service, who had despised her since the ship’s voyage he had taken with Manuela after the harried evacuation of Peru. We don’t know whether the cause for that animus was a heated argument or, as some popular historians claim, a failed flirtation. Bu
t to Córdova, the Libertadora was obstreperous, spiteful, a meddler in government affairs; she was corrosive to the very fiber of the country. In high dudgeon, he told the Liberator that he would do well to be rid of her.
“I know you’re angry with me,” Sáenz wrote her lover just after the scandal broke, “but I’m not at fault.” According to her, others had been responsible. She hadn’t seen it; she’d been fast asleep—all of which may or may not have been true. She offered to lie low in her own house for a while. “The best thing now, sir, may be for me to stay away, unless you want to see me.”
Bolívar was furious, knowing that even though he hadn’t been present, he would be blamed for the whole affair. He tried to dismiss it as a prank, an instance of too much mirth and drink—unfortunate, but ultimately harmless. But he knew he had to respond. “I’ll suspend the commanding officer,” he told Córdova. “As for the lovable madwoman, what can I say? I’ve tried my best to be rid of her, but she’s impossible to resist. . . . Even so, once we’re past this, I think I’ll send her back to her country, or wherever she wants to go.”
He would do nothing of the kind. She was indispensable to him. Other than his manservant, José Palacios, who had served him for years and kept a close catalog of every penny he spent and every well-worn, earthly scrap in his possession, Manuela was the most intimate companion Bolívar had ever known. She was the only other human being who worried over him, tended to his every need, kept a keen eye on his entourage, and said what no one else had the courage to say.
What few had the courage to say was that whispers of an impending coup were beginning to be heard in the capital. Manuela, who had her ear well to the ground, became suspicious of just such a plot in early August, as the council of ministers readied itself to grant absolute power to Bolívar. A cabal of young intellectuals loyal to Santander began to speak openly of “tyrannicide” as the only way to save the republic. Although the people and the army were firmly on Bolívar’s side, these youths were adamantly not. They were a motley alliance with one thing in common: they had spent their short lives in the shadow of revolution and, as far as they were concerned, the country needed to move on. Bolívar was of their parents’ generation: a throwback, a warmonger, a diehard of the old guard. As far as they were concerned, in suspending the law and usurping power, Bolívar had committed high treason. He was little more than a common criminal. “Off with the Tyrant’s head!” became the rallying cry. To any casual observer, the young liberals were only quoting literature. But the tight cabal was plotting the president’s assassination.
Among the conspirators was Florentino González, a young editor who had taken over Azuero’s newspaper and married Bernardina Ibañez, the stubborn young beauty with whom Bolívar had been so infatuated a decade before. González was pale, volcanic, gifted with words; and, like Azuero, he despised Bolívar with a passion. His conspirators were Pedro Carujo, a young artillery officer with literary pretensions, who had always harbored royalist sympathies; Agustín Horment, a French liberal, suspected of being a Spanish spy; Luis Vargas Tejada, whom Santander had chosen to be his secretary in his pending ambassadorship to the United States; and, finally, Colonel Ramón Guerra, chief officer of the city’s garrison, whom no one would have suspected of being involved in the skullduggery.
The first plan was to kill Bolívar at a masked ball to be held at the Coliseum Theater on August 10, the tenth anniversary of the historic Battle of Boyacá. The mayor had approved the festivities with one proviso: guests had to wear costumes that corresponded to their gender. To enforce it, he stood near the door as guests filed into the ball. One by one, he peered behind their masks. Among the early arrivals was a partygoer dressed as a hussar. When the mayor asked him to lift his mask, he refused. Barred admission, the hussar whispered she was Manuela Sáenz, but the mayor was firm: not even the Liberator’s mistress would be admitted dressed as a man. Manuela, who feared precisely what the conspirators had planned—a swarm of assassins, dispatching their Caesar with a battery of well-aimed daggers—did what she had come to do. She raised an earsplitting ruckus. She shouted, screamed, argued frantically, until there could be no doubt who was at the door, trying to gain entry. Bolívar, already inside and in sure danger, was so thoroughly embarrassed that he excused himself and left. Manuela had been disgraceful yet again, but she had made sure Bolívar would leave alive.
The second plan to murder him came on September 21, three weeks after the “Organic Decree” granted him absolute power. It was Sunday—a crisp, cool day—and Bolívar had decided to take a long walk to Soacha, a pretty little suburb five miles from the city’s center. His companions, as the conspirators had learned, were to be few—one friend, one aide—and the stroll would be on a country road: the ideal scenario for a murder. Carujo prepared six assassins for the task, but the conspirators were called off at the last minute by Santander, who told them emphatically that the public wasn’t ready to be rid of Bolívar. It was best to wait, to use legal arguments where possible; and in any case he wanted to be as far away as possible when the moment came “so that no one will say I had anything to do with the intrigue.” The new date was set for late October, when Santander, as the newly appointed ambassador to the United States, would be on a ship and long gone from the capital.
By now the scheme to kill Bolívar involved more than 150 collaborators, the great majority of whom were soldiers in Colonel Guerra’s barracks, a short walk from the presidential palace. The leaders worked actively to coordinate the assault, aware that with so many in their ranks they ran a high risk of exposure. Their plan was to storm the palace in full force and dispatch Bolívar along with two of his most loyal generals—Urdaneta and Castillo. Florentino González had been elected to sound out Santander: was Santander ready and willing to assume the presidency? He responded vaguely that, if the “criminals” were out of the way, he would serve his country. All was set, then. It was a matter of time.
Time ran out, however, on the 25th of September, when the head of the garrison, Colonel Guerra, alerted his fellow conspirators that they were in danger of being discovered. An army captain had just reported to him that a revolution was afoot, that Bolívar’s life was in peril, and that a number of soldiers in Guerra’s garrison were involved. The informant had not imagined that such a high-ranking officer as Guerra would be part of the nefarious plan. It was late in the afternoon when González, Carujo, and Horment received Guerra’s message, but they understood immediately that there was no choice but to act that night, before any details leaked to Bolívar. Indeed, rumors of a pending coup were so widespread by then in Bogotá that a woman had been emboldened to go directly to the palace and report what she had heard to Manuela Sáenz. When Manuela fretted about it to Bolívar, he consulted his entourage, but nothing came of it. The men had a good laugh and concluded that it was like women to imagine things.
Wasting no time now, the chief conspirators gathered at seven that night in the house of Santander’s deputy, Luis Vargas Tejada. Methodically, they began to send word to all 150 collaborators that they were about to execute the plan. Call it cowardice, call it change of heart: the majority failed to respond. Even Colonel Guerra decided to play it safe by visiting one of Bolívar’s ministers that night to play a friendly game of cards. Nevertheless, by half past ten, the group in Vargas Tejada’s house had formed a tight fist of committed assassins. They left for the palace at about half past eleven: ten armed citizens under the command of Horment; sixteen seasoned soldiers under Carujo. It was a typical September night in Bogotá—a brisk rain had drenched the city and left streets slick with mud—but the moon was bright and full.
THAT NIGHT, EVERYONE IN BOLÍVAR’S circle was ailing. The palace had been reduced to a clinic. Bolívar was sick with fever. José Palacios was confined to bed, severely ill. Two aides were suffering from bad colds, Colonel Ferguson so much so that he had gone off with a burning throat to be treated at the army hospital, and Colonel Andrés Ibarra was suffering his infirmities in
his room. Even Fernando Bolívar, the Liberator’s nephew, freshly arrived from school in Virginia, was unwell and indisposed. Seldom had Bolívar been more unattended.
At six o’clock, he sent a message to Manuela’s house and asked her to come and accompany him, but Manuela demurred. She, too, had a terrible head cold and didn’t want to venture out in the inclement weather. But Bolívar insisted that she was far better off than he. He was achy, feverish, in need of her tender ministrations. Yielding to his entreaties, she put on her galoshes and hurried to him through the damp night.
When she arrived, he was in the tub, giving himself a cooling bath to ease the fever. He seemed melancholy—understandably so. He was a sick man in a sick house, with much to trouble him: the Peruvian navy had just attacked Colombia in Guayaquil; the president of Peru, General La Mar, had marched north to take command of the offensive; and the wounded General Sucre, who had lost Bolivia to Peruvian generals, was about to disembark in Guayaquil and face the hostilities. All in all, he said to Manuela—with a heavy dose of gallows humor—it’s time for a palace coup. She scoffed. “Ten coups could be in the offing right now, for all the attention you pay!”