Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

But Bolívar hardly had a chance to respond to the insolence. He was unwell when Córdova had seen him in Pasto six months before, and Córdova had noted the striking deterioration. Bolívar had been sick again upon arrival in Quito: so weak, and so emotionally overcome by the sight of Sucre that he could hardly speak; he cried like a baby. Bolívar continued the backbreaking schedule, nevertheless: dictating scores of letters at a time, managing the republic, negotiating with Peru, moving restively from one trouble spot to another. He was determined to broker a sturdy peace. He knew that Peruvians expected him to invade and be the warmonger they made him out to be; he wanted to prove them wrong. Shortly after his arrival in Guayaquil at the end of July, however, the Liberator fell into an illness far graver than any he had experienced. He was delirious, bird-thin, incapacitated, spitting black. He reported that it was a passing incidence of black bile—gastric in nature—but anyone could see that it was a desperate battle for survival, and all too clearly in his lungs.

  We know now that the slightest frailty can admit dormant tuberculosis in its fiercest form; once the sparks of disease ignite, it can rage through a body like consuming wildfire. As soon as Bolívar’s illness began to devour him, even he couldn’t refute that something was deeply wrong. But he didn’t allow himself to rest until peace with Peru had been established. Forced to spend twelve feverish days in bed, he continued to dictate letters and give orders, even as he floated in and out of delirium. The equatorial heat was relentless, the humid, pestilential climate ruinous to his delicate condition, and yet he could claim considerable progress: Guayaquil had been retaken easily; the Peruvians had simply slipped away, too distracted by their own reversals to oppose him. In Lima, the government had crumbled in a surgical coup; President La Mar had been deported to Guatemala at bayonet point, in shackles. The new chief of state, Antonio de La Fuente, had always been well disposed toward Bolívar—and was willing to talk peace. La Fuente would last only months at Peru’s helm, giving way to the Machiavellian hand of General Agustín Gamarra and his power-hungry, bellicose wife, but for the time being, in the beastly heat of the Guayas River, it seemed as if Bolívar’s peace would last.

  All the same, by September, when Bolívar had recovered enough to take in the situation around him, he understood the extent of betrayal that had been mounted against him by the brave and beloved General Córdova. It had been one thing to be attacked by Santander’s lawyers and city “liberals”; it was something else entirely to be despised by a trusted general. The wound this betrayal inflicted on the Liberator was lasting and deep, and, although he tried to dismiss it, he rose from his sickbed to a dark night of the spirit. His correspondence in the next months exhibits a level of torment—an almost pathological frustration—that was completely unlike the vigorous, determined Liberator who had marched into Bogotá only a year before. Bolívar wrote to O’Leary: “My strength is almost entirely gone. You wouldn’t believe the state I’m in. . . . My spirit and body have suffered so much that I have no energy for the slightest task, and I feel powerless to rekindle it.”

  A mere five years earlier, after the fateful victory at Ayacucho, he had called America the hope of the universe, the long desired promised land. Now, the revolution seemed little more than a chimera; its heritors, madmen. As far as Bolívar was concerned, all the colonies had been duped by their illusions, like a flock of foolish children. “We have tried everything under the sun,” he wrote to Urdaneta, “and nothing has worked. Mexico has fallen. Guatemala is in ruins. There are new troubles in Chile. In Buenos Aires they have killed a president. In Bolivia, three presidents took power in the course of two days, and two of them have been murdered.” His America, like his body, was riddled with maladies.

  It was during this time that he learned just how far his star had fallen: in France, the renowned thinker Benjamin Constant denounced Bolívar as an outright despot. In England, George Flinter, a British officer in Venezuela, published a blistering letter to King George IV, warning against issuing support for Simón Bolívar, “who has murdered thousands in cold blood and swindled the British nation out of millions.” In New York, Luis Ducoudray, the French mercenary who had served Bolívar in Angostura, released a lacerating memoir, prompting a British reviewer to conclude that Bolívar was less a lion of liberty than a snake. In Washington, William Henry Harrison’s condemnations were being heard by Congress and disseminated by the press. In Chile, the outcast Riva Agüero—who still called himself president of Peru—was claiming that the Liberator was a despicable Negro and that his long-dead wife, María Teresa del Toro, had been the illegitimate daughter of a cook.

  “I’m being accused of an inferno of abominations,” Bolívar confessed. At the end of his tether, he wrote to General O’Leary insisting that someone else be president and that O’Leary should promote that idea in Bogotá. At best, Bolívar told his old aide, a liberator might be a gadfly to goad the machinery of government—not run it. He was too weary to go on as head of state.

  Was he being calculating, as some historians have claimed? Spaniards, Argentines, Peruvians—all with good reasons for their antipathy to Bolívar—have argued that he was an unabashed autocrat, a crypto-monarchist whose goals became more and more twisted with each victory. He refused laurels, those critics say, because he knew they would be offered again. He rejected power only to accept it anew in an hour of crisis, at which point he could apply it with abandon. To some extent, these accusations were true: he had turned down the presidency numerous times, resigned outright, before being persuaded to take it again. He was suspect in this. He had said that he wanted to please, serve, unify. But, since the liberation of Peru, he had come to believe that he could do none of these without wielding absolute control. In order to preserve liberties, in other words, he had assumed a dictatorship, under which—as he himself had said—all talk of liberty was impossible. Now, in this strange echo chamber of will and intent, his loyalists (as well as his enemies) wondered whether he was insisting that he wanted to leave precisely because he wanted to stay.

  He continued to work. He drew up a treaty with Peru, although it wasn’t clear that it would last. He oversaw an ingenious plan to finance Colombia’s crippling deficit with vigorous exports of Venezuelan tobacco. He signed off on improvements in universities, schools, courts. He sent military reinforcements to Panama to protect it against the Spanish presence in Cuba. He congratulated the army on its efforts to put down Córdova’s rebellion. And always—always—he found the strength to dictate a multitude of letters to his officers, relying on the power of the word. But the correspondence in which he was engaged was largely bureaucratic. He no longer had an aide whom he could trust enough to dictate his most private thoughts. “I have no one to write for me,” he lamented in one of his missives; and he certainly didn’t have the energy to do it himself. Worse, few of his correspondents were informing him about sensitive matters—as Santander had done so masterfully in happier days. He felt out of reach, out of touch.

  Hoping for a bit of clarity, Bolívar published a circular that asked Colombians to state exactly what they wanted from government, but his enemies recalled that Napoleon, too, had ordered a plebiscite just before making himself emperor. Bolívar, they insisted, was no patriot sounding the public will, but a manipulator plotting his coronation. Bolívar threw up his hands. “There is no such thing as good faith in America,” he concluded. “Treaties are worth little more than the paper they’re printed on; constitutions are pamphlets; elections, an excuse for war; liberty has dissolved into anarchy; and for me life has become a torment.” Forces against him were too strong now. Years of serial abandonment by officers who had once been loyal—Santander, Páez, Padilla, Obando, Córdova—had had their cumulative effect. “I hope you haven’t forgotten what I told you,” he wrote O’Leary. He was less coy with Mosquera, who visited him on an emerald isle just south of Guayaquil where he had gone to recuperate. He wanted to leave, he told his old friend bluntly, travel to Europe, live out his days in peace, taki
ng nothing more from America than his memories. He was determined to step down at last.

  IN JULY OF 1829, SANTANDER, whom Bolívar could neither abide nor safely destroy, was released from Bocachica dungeon and set on a journey that would ultimately take him to Hamburg. His first stop would be Venezuela, where he would be held until he was allowed to board a foreign vessel in Puerto Cabello. It must have been sobering for Bolívar when he heard of it. Santander had been friend and foe; collaborator and saboteur. Bolívar had always known that having a Granadan in the vice presidency was good cement for the republic—the only way Bogotá would accept a Venezuelan in the presidency. Santander was hardworking, ambitious, detail-oriented, and he had served Bolívar loyally for many years. But the fundamental distrust between Granadans and Venezuelans had been there from the start, and, for all their effort to overcome it, they couldn’t rid themselves of a sick germ of suspicion.

  The germ had been planted long before, when they had faced off as young men on the border between New Granada and Venezuela, at the start of the Admirable Campaign. Bolívar, head of the consolidated army, had ordered Santander to continue his march into Venezuela, and Santander had refused, unwilling to fight someone else’s war. “March at once!” Bolívar had barked at him. “You have no choice in the matter! March! Either you shoot me or, by God, I will certainly shoot you.” Eventually, Santander obeyed him; indeed, as the revolution unfolded, he obeyed the Liberator with utter dedication. Bolívar had every reason to make him his trusted colleague. In time, their correspondence revealed an alliance unparalleled in South American history. Now, after years of mounting bitterness, Santander was being ejected from the fatherland he had served all his life, and it spoke volumes about the inherent fissures in Greater Colombia. A deep, fratricidal impulse had crept into Spain’s disgruntled children. Nowhere was this more apparent—and more polarizing—than in the relationship of these two men.

  Although Bolívar had saved Santander from the firing squad and commuted his sentence to exile, the former vice president had been made to suffer a seven-month internment in the dank, grimy dungeons of Bocachica. This was not without its logic: Bolívar’s council of ministers had feared Santander might seek revenge, join Peru, and march against the Liberator. Manuela Sáenz, too, had a deep, unshakable distrust of the man; so much so that she engaged a spy to ferret out whatever information he could about Santander’s intentions. But Santander, desperate to free himself from the miseries of internment, denied he had any such reprisals in mind. He wrote an impassioned plea to Bolívar, promising he would not go to Peru or anywhere else in Latin America for that matter. He swore that he had opposed the would-be assassins with tears in his eyes, beseeched Carujo not to carry out his nefarious plot against the Liberator. Santander even went so far as to beg protection from Andrew Jackson, a fellow Freemason who had just been elected president of the United States; he told Jackson that he, too, had once been a head of state, reduced now to wretched prisoner of fortune. He needed a powerful champion to plead his case.

  President Jackson never responded to Santander’s plea. But the former vice president turned out to have plenty of champions in Colombia itself. Sucre and Mosquera, Bolívar’s most loyal henchmen, had long respected Santander and had both corresponded with him in jail. They now began to entreat Bolívar to grant him his freedom. Even Páez, Santander’s archenemy, seemed to take pity on the man. When the captive of Bocachica—reduced to illness and terror—was finally taken from his dungeon cell, shipped to Puerto Cabello, and forced to look out at the very bay from which Miranda had started his voyage to ignominious death, he made a heartfelt appeal for Páez’s mercy. The Lion of the Apure assured Santander that he would be given safe passage. He was as good as his word and had reason to be: no one agreed with Páez more than Francisco Santander. For all the acrimony that had passed between them, for all their conspicuous attempts to foil one another, Páez and Santander concurred single-mindedly on one thing: secession. They both sought to disband the republic; they both yearned to reduce their nations to manageable regions they could command freely. As one historian put it, they wanted fiefdoms equivalent to their aspirations—Cundinamarca for Santander, the Apure for Páez—provincial patches with little influence in a larger world. It was not magnanimity but unbridled ambition that led Páez to allow Santander to sail off into the Caribbean.

  As Santander floated out to sea, Bolívar proceeded north toward Bogotá, racked not only by disease but by the small-mindedness of his generals, who prepared to carve up the republic just as Alexander the Great’s generals had done when Alexander lay dying. Stopping in Quito to catch his breath, Bolívar published his deeply pessimistic “Panoramic View of Spanish America,” in which he described the rampant lawlessness that prevailed from Mexico to Argentina. But his own land was most on his mind, and his despair about it was evident; he claimed he had been as good as assassinated: “Colombians,” he grieved,

  The second man to head the Republic has assassinated the first; the Third Division invaded the south; Pasto rebelled against the Republic; Peru laid waste to her liberator’s homeland; and there is hardly a province that has not exceeded its powers and prerogatives. Throughout this ill-fated time there has been nothing but blood, chaos, and destruction. There is nothing left for you to do but muster your spiritual strength and establish a government vigorous enough to curb ambition and safeguard freedom. Otherwise, you will become the laughingstock of the world and the victims of your own undoing.

  The constitutional congress scheduled for January was only two months away and, as far as Bolívar was concerned, it couldn’t come soon enough. He called on Colombians to rise to their better natures and prepare for it.

  Páez knew well that he needed to make a move before congress convened and, seeing an advantage now that Santander was out of the way, dispatched a letter to Bolívar via personal messenger. It reached him in Popayán in the early days of November. Páez’s missive was respectful, querying Bolívar about the monarchical plan, the health of the republic, the succession. But anyone could read his meaning between the lines: he would preserve the union only if he could rule it. He had suffered indignities visited on him by Santander; he had stood by for almost a decade while his nemesis had run Greater Colombia. It was his turn now.

  Bolívar rallied all the diplomacy he could muster and answered Páez in the clearest terms: a monarchy was out of the question; he had always fought against it, and he was fighting against it now. Moreover, he was leaving the presidency for good. “I give you my word of honor,” he told his old comrade, “I will happily put myself at your orders if you are elected our chief of state, and I’d like you to make me the same promise if someone else is chosen to lead us.”

  From Popayán, he also wrote an unequivocal response to his council of ministers, scolding them for going too far with the monarchical nonsense. Everything he had heard to date had been mere rumor and insinuation, but in Popayán hard evidence of efforts to make him king awaited in the form of official documents.

  “You will now suspend completely all negotiations with the governments of France and England,” he wrote back in high dudgeon. To Urdaneta, he was gentler: “Just leave congress to do its duty,” he urged Urdaneta; “it will be easier for them to appoint a president than a prince.” This dressing-down was not taken lightly in Bogotá. Ministers proffered their resignations, claiming they had only followed orders. His orders had not been vague: he had directed his diplomats to seek European protection, which he saw as essential to the fledgling status of the republic; by no stretch of the imagination had he meant them to seek a European prince. He had been too much on the move, too plagued by illness, too busy battling the Hydra of chaos to see the damage a monarchical smear might inflict on him. Both Páez and Santander, though ardent enemies, had tarred Bolívar with an imperial brush. If he had been more decisive on the question—clipped back suspicion at the very start—history might have played out differently. But history, as we know, is impossible t
o foresee.

  Being South America’s roving defender of liberty, he now admitted, had exacted a punishing price. For all the laurels and dictatorial authority he had garnered, he had no power to speak of. He had left it behind at every turn, relinquished control to deputies who simply didn’t understand or endorse his vision. Ruling from a remove had proved impossible in a republic whose cities were separated by jungles, savannas, a towering cordillera. Information about statecraft had been scant, slow; by the time it arrived, the political landscape had changed, the national mind-set shifted. Improvisation, so crucial in war, was proving to be deadly when it came to government.

  BY THE TIME BOLÍVAR REACHED Popayán, there was more to engage him than a stack of pressing dispatches. An uprising had come and gone in Colombia, rattling through like a row of collapsing cards. Córdova’s rebellion had reached a fever pitch, growing more in renown, perhaps, than in strength of numbers. But it tumbled as quickly as it rose, and then it shocked everyone with its terrible, final resolution.

  As Córdova galloped through the lush valleys of Medellín, Páez realized that this could well be the opening he had waited for. Circumstances couldn’t have been more ideal. Santander was at sea, well removed from the competition, and Córdova’s pugnacity seemed to serve Páez’s purpose. Like Páez, the feisty young general was unwilling to bow to a European prince; and, also like Páez, he wanted to separate Venezuela from New Granada. But it was Bolívar himself who gave Páez the most felicitous opportunity of all, the plebiscite in which he had asked citizens to stand forth and say what they truly wanted from government. The wily plainsman seized that opportunity with two fists. Even before he received Bolívar’s reply to the letter he had sent by messenger, he began rallying politicians to respond to Bolívar’s call. He sent his agents out into the provinces, insisting on signatures for three demands: total rejection of any union with New Granada, Páez’s elevation to president of the independent nation, “and down with Don Simón. Everybody must ask for this or be treated as an enemy.” Soon Páez had the support of some of Bolívar’s most loyal generals, fervid Venezuelans all: Arismendi, who had joined the revolution in its earliest days; Bermúdez, the intrepid hero of Cumaná; Soublette, who had fought alongside the Liberator since the Admirable Campaign; Mariño, who after years of sparring with Bolívar for control of the east, had become his trusty defender. On November 25, in the convent of San Francisco, the old, venerable church where Bolívar had been named Liberator sixteen years before, Páez announced what it was that the citizens of Venezuela truly wanted. Total independence. From Bolívar, from Colombia, and from the impossible gossamer dream of Latin American unity.