by John Lynch
Venezuela lay on the southeastern rim of the Caribbean and was the closest to Europe of all Spain’s mainland colonies. Bolívar never tired of advising his countrymen to let nature, not theory, be their guide and to cherish the endowments of their native land: ‘You will find valuable guidance,’ he told the constituent congress of 1830, ‘in the very nature of our country, which stretches from the highlands of the Andes to the torrid banks of the Orinoco. Survey the whole extent of this land and you will learn from nature, the infallible teacher of men, what laws the congress must decree.’6 Travellers approaching Venezuela by sea from Europe first passed Macuro, where in 1498 Columbus encountered mainland America, the Isla de Gracia as he called it, white beaches and lush vegetation with steep jungle slopes behind. Skirting the island of Margarita where prolific pearl fisheries once flourished, they saw further ravishing coastline with clumps of coconut trees, tall palms and shores populated with pelicans and flamingos, and in the dusty ground around Cumaná the tunales densely planted with giant cacti and further inland beautiful tamarind trees. Inland in the distant south lay the River Orinoco and Angostura, the pride of Spanish Guayana. Westwards along the Caribbean coast, to the port of La Guaira, the jungle came right down to the beach and mangroves grew on the seashore. At La Guaira sunstroke, yellow fever and sharks were all a hazard before the traveller reached the high plateau inland and the relative safety of Caracas.
Along the west coast, beyond the inland cities of Maracay and Valencia, Coro came into view with its ancient cathedral and vast sand dunes. Regions of great beauty then spread south from the coastal range of mountains into valleys, lakes and rivers, the home of plantations of sugar cane, coffee, cotton and, above all, of cacao. Tropical paradise gave way to the savannahs, or llanos, of the east and centre whose vast grasslands were crossed by numerous rivers and subject to relentless droughts and floods, and then in the far west the traveller reached the Segovia highlands with their plateaus, valleys and semi–deserts, and beyond these Lake Maracaibo, where Indian dwellings on stilts gave the Spanish discoverers an illusion of Venice and the country its name. The Venezuelan Andes, running south–west from Trujillo, were topped by Mérida, the roof of Venezuela, recently convulsed by a revolt of the common people against Bourbon exactions.
The German scientist and traveller Alexander von Humboldt, who visited Venezuela in 1799–1800, was overawed by the vastness of the llanos: ‘The infinite monotony of the llanos; the extreme rarity of inhabitants; the difficulties of travelling in such heat and in an atmosphere darkened by dust; the perspective of the horizon, which constantly retreats before the traveller; the few scattered palms that are so similar that one despairs of ever reaching them, and confuses them with others further afield; all these aspects together make the stranger looking at the llanos think they are far larger than they are.’7 The native population of whites and pardos were joined in the late eighteenth century by rebel Indians, fugitive slaves, outlaws and rustlers, rejects of white society, making the llanos, in Humboldt’s view, ‘the refuge of criminals’. The llaneros, so remote from the culture of the young Bolívar, were to move nearer the centre of his life in the wars to come; they were the army’s lancers, ‘obstinate and ignorant’ with low self–esteem, but always treated with consideration by their general. His first horizons, however, were those of Caracas. Of Venezuela’s 800,000 inhabitants, a mobile population apparently in constant transit, over half (455,000) lived in the province of Caracas, which was the prime region of cacao production and of the two new growth exports of indigo and coffee.8
The capital city of Caracas was set in a fertile valley between two mountain ranges some forty miles and a day’s journey by the colonial road, in places little more than a mule track, which wound its way inland from the coast and the port of La Guaira. At three thousand feet above sea level the city enjoyed a warm but more temperate climate than the tropical coast. Central Caracas was well built around one main square and two smaller ones, with straight, gridlike streets, many of them paved, and low buildings appropriate to a land of earthquakes, some of brick, most of adobe. Here the Bolívars owned a number of properties: in addition to the family house in the Plaza San Jacinto, Simón inherited from his wealthy uncle Juan Félix Aristeguieta y Bolívar a house on the main square between the Cathedral and the bishop’s palace. Houses of this kind were decently constructed with spacious patios and gardens watered by canals fed from the River Catuche, and growing a variety of tropical fruits and flowers. Gracious living included a distinct, if modest, social and cultural life, and many homes had libraries they could be proud of. The University of Caracas began its academic life in 1725 and, while innovation struggled with tradition, the students were able to study most disciplines of the time and had access to European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Spinoza, Locke and Newton.9
Humboldt was impressed by the cultural standards of many creoles (American–born whites), particularly by their exposure to European culture and knowledge of political matters affecting colonies and metropolis, which he attributed to ‘the numerous communications with commercial Europe and the West Indies’.10 He detected among the creole elite of Caracas two tendencies, which he identified with two generations: an older one attached to the past, protective of its privileges and rigid in abhorrence of enlightenment, and a younger one less preoccupied by the present than by the future, attracted to new ways and ideas, firmly attached to reason and enlightenment, and drawn in some cases to a rejection of Spanish culture and a risky connection with foreigners. Bolívar was born into the first group and graduated into the second.
Venezuela was no longer the forgotten colony of Habsburg times, a staging post on the way to the prized viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru. The real history of Venezuela began not with the first conquest but with the second, in the eighteenth century, when Spain reordered the political and economic life of the country and gave it new institutions. The instrument of economic reconquest was the Caracas Company, a Basque–based enterprise that was given a monopoly of trade with Venezuela and soon provided a new impulse to production and export, and a new market for Spain. Bourbon modernization took Venezuela out of the viceroyalty of New Granada and in 1776 gave it an intendant of its own for fiscal and economic administration, and in 1777 a captain–general for political and military control, officials responsible directly to the central government in Madrid and not to an adjacent viceroy. An audiencia, or high court of justice, was located in Caracas in 1786 and a consulado, or merchant guild, in 1793; Venezuela’s legal and commercial business was now its own business and not administered by other Spanish colonies. These institutions did not empower Venezuela: they represented imperial rather than local interests, and Venezuelans were still subject to a distant metropolis. Nevertheless their country now had an identity of its own and was beginning to be conscious of its own interests. It may not have been the heart of the Spanish empire, or the centrepiece of the revolution to come, but as the colonial world receded and Venezuela advanced into a new age, it gave birth to three giants of Spanish American Independence: Francisco de Miranda, the Precursor, Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, and Andrés Bello, the Intellectual.
The Spanish empire was becoming more imperialist. This was not always so. Like all great empires, Spain had the capacity to absorb its colonial peoples. The Habsburg empire had been governed by compromise and consensus, seen first in the growing participation of creoles in the colonial bureaucracy and the law courts, and in the recognition by the crown that colonial societies had identities and interests that it was wise to respect and even to represent. But the years after 1750 saw a de–Americanization of colonial government, the advance of the Bourbon state, the end of compromise politics and creole participation. Bourbon policy was personified in a Spanish intendant, a professional bureaucrat, a generator of resources and collector of revenue. Creoles were no longer co–opted, they were coerced, and they were acutely conscious of the shift. Juan Pablo Viscardo, the Jesu
it émigré and advocate of independence, had been a direct observer of policy trends in Peru and bore witness to the fact that the Bourbons moved from consensus to confrontation, alienated the creole elite, and eventually drove them towards independence. ‘From the seventeenth century creoles were appointed to important positions as churchmen, officials, and military, both in Spain and America.’ But now Spain had reverted to a policy of preference for peninsular Spaniards ‘to the permanent exclusion of those who alone know their own country, whose individual interest is closely bound to it, and who have a sublime and unique right to guard its welfare’.11 This ‘spanish reaction’ was felt throughout America, and not least in Venezuela. Bolívar himself was to complain of the exclusion of Americans from civil, ecclesiastical and financial office, ‘perhaps to a greater extent than ever before’.12 No Venezuelan was appointed to the audiencia of Caracas in the period 1786–1810, when ten Spaniards and four colonials held office.13
Creoles were aware of their condition, constantly reminded that their country existed for Spain and that their prospects depended upon others. Bolívar himself never forgave or forgot the extreme underdevelopment to which his country was confined, forbidden to compete with the agriculture, industry and commerce of Spain, such as it was, its people forced ‘to cultivate fields of indigo, grain, coffee, sugar cane, cacao, and cotton, to raise cattle on the empty plains; to hunt wild beasts in the wilderness; to mine the earth for gold to satisfy the insatiable greed of Spain’.14 Yet creoles like Bolívar belonged to a colonial elite, well above the mestizos, mulattos and slaves toiling at the bottom of society, and as long as their expectations were not too high, with a country estate and a house in Caracas, they could enjoy a life of ease and security under Spanish rule. Few of them were ready to overturn their world.
In Venezuela cacao production and export created a working economy and a regional elite, which in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were largely ignored by the crown and found their economic lifelines in the Americas rather than Spain. From about 1730, however, the crown began to look more closely at Venezuela as a source of revenue for Spain and cacao for Europe. The agent of change was the Caracas Company, a Basque enterprise that was given a monopoly of trade and, indirectly, of administration. Aggressive and novel trading policies, allowing fewer returns for struggling immigrants and even for the traditional planters, outraged local interests and provoked a popular rebellion in 1749. This was quickly crushed and Caracas then had to endure a series of military governors, increased taxation and a greater imperial presence than it had previously experienced. The highest in society were offered capital stock in the reformed Caracas Company, a palliative to secure their collaboration and detach them from popular causes. Thus the new imperialism of the Bourbons, the move from consensus to confrontation, had its trial run in Venezuela. The Caracas experience of regional growth, elite autonomy and royal reaction was early evidence of the great divide in colonial history between the Creole state and the Bourbon state, between compromise and authority. As a leading Bourbon minister observed, colonial peoples will perhaps learn to live without the fruits of freedoms they have never had, but once they have acquired some as of right and enjoyed the taste, they are not going to have them taken away.15 Bolívar was born into a colony ruled not by consent and devolution but by centralism and absolutism. His parents’ generation accepted the innovations in Bourbon government and the loss of traditional creole influence without resistance. The next generation would not be so docile.16
Family, Friends and Neighbours
The early life of Bolívar was at once privileged and deprived. He lost his parents while he was young; he had no memory of his father, who died of tuberculosis when he was two and a half; his mother died, also of tuberculosis, when he was nine, and from that point he was left to the tender mercies of uncles of varying qualifications. His father, Juan Vicente Bolívar, had been well known to Caracas society. He followed the family tradition as a colonel in the militia but not apparently in his political views. These revealed divided loyalties, not necessarily between king and independence but between Spaniards and Americans. In 1782 he wrote jointly with two other Caracas grandees a letter to Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan officer and dissident who was also wavering in his allegiance, complaining of the ‘tyrannical measures’ and insults coming from the intendant and his supporters and from every Spaniard, and backed by that ‘damned minister Gálvez’. The intendant treated ‘all Americans, no matter their class, rank or circumstances, as if they were vile slaves’. They looked to Miranda to help them resist this infamous oppression, for ‘you are the first–born son of whom the motherland expects this important service’. But they preferred to await Miranda’s advice, for they did not wish to suffer the fate of Santa Fe de Bogotá and Cuzco.17 Here is an example, if it is true, of political speculation and even of dissidence in the Bolívar family, in thought if not in deed.
Juan Vicente assembled a library of eighteenth–century culture but in other respects he was not a model for his children. A notorious womanizer, ‘he was held in fear by women, whites and Indians, maidens and wives’. No girl in his household was safe, as two sisters testified; one, Margarita, had to resist being dragged into a bedroom for sex, and the other, María Jacinta, complained to the bishop of Caracas that ‘the wolf, Don Juan Vicente Bolívar, has been importuning me for days to make me sin with him … and he sent my husband to the Llanos to [herd] cattle, so as to remain the freer to carry out his evil plans…. Do help me for God’s sake, for I am on the brink of falling.’ But the bishop hushed it all up, more concerned to avoid scandal than to confront the culprit, whom he advised to deny everything.18 The tactics seem to have succeeded and the serial seducer was able to make a respectable marriage some years later, in December 1773, at the age of forty–six; his bride, Concepción Palacios y Blanco, was an attractive young girl, some thirty years his junior, from a family as distinguished as his own.
Well connected from his parents, Bolívar also had a wealthy cousin, the priest who baptized him, Juan Félix Jerez Aristeguieta y Bolívar, who left him a fortune and various property rights in entail on condition that he remained loyal to God and King. The bequest was additional to his paternal inheritance. The orphan Bolívar, therefore, faced the future more confidently than most Venezuelans, and was less stressed by work, for his income arrived thanks to the labour of others who administered his investments and worked for their yields in various sectors of the Venezuelan economy.
Venezuela was part plantation, part ranch and part commercial market. People and production were concentrated in the valleys of the coast and the llanos of the south. Dispersed among the great plains of the interior and the western shores of Lake Maracaibo, hundreds of thousands of cattle, horses, mules and sheep formed one of the country’s permanent assets and provided immediate exports in the form of hides and other animal extracts. The commercial plantations produced a variety of export crops: tobacco from Barinas, cotton from the valleys of Aragua, indigo from the Tuy valley and coffee from the Andean provinces. In the 1790s, after a century of economic expansion, these products accounted for over 30 per cent of Venezuela’s exports. But the mainstay of the economy was cacao; produced in the valleys and mountain sides of the central coastal zone, cacao expanded until it came to form over 60 per cent of total exports, though vulnerable to competition from Guayaquil.19 This was the world of the great estates, whose labour was supplied by an ever–expanding slave trade and by tied peons who were often manumitted slaves. Venezuela was a classical colonial economy, low in productivity and in consumption.
Humboldt observed that the Venezuelan aristocracy were averse to independence, because ‘they see in revolutions only the loss of their slaves’, and he argued that ‘they would prefer even a foreign yoke to the exercise of authority by the Americans of an inferior class’.20 Race prejudice was ingrained in the upper ranks of colonial society. The Miranda family was one of its targets. Sebastián de Miranda Ravelo, fath
er of the Precursor, was a merchant from the Canary Islands. He was appointed, in 1764, captain of the Sixth Company of Fusiliers of the Battalion of White Isleños of Caracas. This provoked a strong reaction from the local oligarchy who branded Miranda a mulatto and trader, ‘a low occupation unsuitable for white people’; now he could ‘wear in the streets the same uniform as men of superior status and pure blood’.21 The cabildo of Caracas, stronghold of the creole oligarchy and guardian of its values, prohibited him ‘the use of the uniform and baton of the new battalion, with a warning that if he continued to use them he would be imprisoned in the public gaol for two months’. In the event Miranda was vindicated by the governor and received the support of the colonial authorities, usually more tolerant than the local ruling class. But at a time when pardos were striving to improve their legal status, including the right to marry whites and to receive holy orders, the Venezuelan elites continued to identify Canarians as pardos, and to impute a racial inferiority to the isleños. In 1810 the reservations held by the leaders of Venezuelan Independence towards Francisco de Miranda, the son of a Canarian merchant, were not unaffected by social prejudice against his plebeian origins.