by John Lynch
Bolivarian Society
Bolívar conceived the American revolution as more than a struggle for political independence. He saw it also as a great social movement, which would improve as well as liberate, and would respond to the radical as well as the liberal demands of the age. He sought strong government as an instrument of reform, capable of improving people’s lives. Bolivarian reformism operated within existing structures and did not attempt to advance beyond what was politically possible. Nevertheless it set new goals for post–colonial society.
Bolívar was an abolitionist, though he was not the first in Venezuela. The republican conspiracy of Gual and España in 1797 proposed that ‘slavery be immediately abolished as contrary to humanity’, while linking abolition with service in the revolutionary militia and employment by the old master. The support of the Enlightenment was purely theoretical. From Montesquieu onwards the philosophes denounced slavery as useless and uneconomical as well as evil, but they did not make a crusade of abolition. No doubt Bolívar was also aware of contemporary movements in England and France, inspired as they were by humanitarian ideals and religious convictions. But his prime inspiration seems to have been an innate sense of justice. He regarded it as ‘madness that a revolution for liberty should try to maintain slavery’. Yet his attempts to obtain legislation enforcing the absolute abolition of slavery throughout Colombia were not successful. He liberated his own slaves, first on condition of military service in 1814, when about fifteen accepted, then unconditionally in 1821 when over a hundred profited.17 Few hacendados followed his example.
Bolívar continued to argue that the creole rulers and property–owners must accept the implications of the revolution, that the example of freedom was ‘insistent and compelling’, and that the republicans ‘must triumph by the road of revolution and no other.’18 But the delegates at Angostura were afraid to release ill–prepared slaves into free society, and contented themselves with a pious declaration on behalf of freedom for slaves while leaving the means to a future congress.19 The policy of freedom in return for military service continued, but after 1819 proprietors tended to abandon wartime manumission, small though this had been. Yet the problem would not go away, and Bolívar realized that it was impossible to return to pre–war conditions, that it could no longer be a question of resisting slave expectations but of controlling and directing them. In 1820, when he was reinforcing the army after Boyacá, Bolívar ordered a reluctant Santander to recruit five thousand slaves in western New Granada. Santander argued that in Choco and Antioquia the slaves belonged not to the royalists but to ‘familias afectas al sistema’, and that the mines depended on slave labour. Bolívar insisted: as president he had the power to call up slaves, who thereby gained their freedom; slaves were needed to fill the ranks and were fit for combat conditions. Invoking Montesquieu on the essential link between political liberty and civil liberty, he argued that left in a free society without freedom for themselves, the slaves would be dangerous and prone to rebellion:
It is a political maxim drawn from history that any free government that commits the absurdity of maintaining slavery is punished by rebellion and in some cases by extermination, as in Haiti:… What is more appropriate or just in the acquisition of liberty than to fight for it? Is it right that only free men should die for the emancipation of the slaves? Is it not expedient that the slaves should acquire their rights on the battlefield, and that their dangerous numbers should be reduced by a process that is both effective and legitimate? In Venezuela we have seen the free population die and the slaves survive. I do not know whether this is politic, but I do know that unless we recruit slaves in Cundinamarca the same thing will happen again.20
Santander grudgingly complied, though there was opposition from mine–owners and agriculturalists in Cauca. Bolívar’s stark statement subsequently disturbed liberal opinion, but he chose his words carefully and based his policy on existing law, which he himself had introduced for the benefit of slaves, and whose political philosophy he derived from Montesquieu. The Liberator was not a slave–driver and never a racist.
The congress of Cúcuta passed a complex law of manumission (21 July 1821), allowing for liberation of adult slaves, but it lacked teeth and depended for its operation on compensation financed from taxes, including death duties, levied on property–owners. These proved difficult to collect.21 The Cúcuta law also provided for the freeing of all children subsequently born to slaves, on condition that each child worked for his mother’s owner until the age of eighteen, thus postponing any real abolition; all slaves born after 1821 had to wait eighteen years to obtain freedom, a period extended to twenty–one years by the Venezuelan congress in 1830. And it soon emerged that even slaves opting for military service gained freedom only if their owners were indemnified from the manumission funds. Thus was Bolívar’s vision mocked and liberation thwarted by fear of economic and social consequences, and by laws weighted in favour of proprietors. o’Leary observed that the law of 1821 ‘did not satisfy Bolívar, who at all times pleaded for the absolute and unconditional abolition of slavery’. He cited his message (14 July 1821) urging congress to go further: children henceforth born of slaves should be free and congress, ‘authorized by its own laws, should decree the absolute freedom of all Colombians’.22 But Bolívar alone could not realistically overcome the obstacles to abolition. His decree of 28 June 1827 reorganized the administration of the law and included humanitarian measures on behalf of slaves, but it did not basically improve the situation or bring abolition nearer. Some observers believed that in 1827 Bolívar came to an agreement with Venezuela’s rulers not to insist on abolition.23 But the last word of Bolívar on slavery is to be found not in a decree but in a constitution, that constitution which he regarded as Spanish America’s last hope for peace and stability. The Bolivian Constitution declared the slaves free, and although in Bolivia itself the slave owners contrived to evade his intentions, his commitment to absolute abolition was uncompromising. Slavery, he declared, was the negation of all law, a violation of human dignity and of the sacred doctrine of equality, and an outrage to reason as well as to justice.24 This was a policy based on values and more advanced than that of Páez and the landowners of Venezuela, where slavery was not abolished until 1854.
The Indians of Colombia and Peru, unlike the blacks and pardos, were not central to Bolívar’s preoccupations, but he was affected by their condition and determined to improve it. His view of Indians in Venezuela was pragmatic, to say the least. He regarded them as good material for military recruitment. ‘The more savage the Indians are the less they are missed for agriculture, industry, and so for society, yet their savagery does not prevent them making good soldiers…. In general the natives contribute nothing to production and this race has suffered less from the war than others.’25 In most respects, however, his Indian policy conformed closely to the principles of contemporary liberalism, designed as it was to hispanicize Indians and individualize community land. But there was an element of improvisation in Bolívar’s Indian policy which is difficult to reconcile with particular doctrines. The congress of Cúcuta issued a law (11 October 1821) abolishing the tribute and all unpaid labour services, and making the Indians subject to the same taxes as other citizens. Application of the law was delayed in Ecuador, for tribute from the Indian majority was regarded as too important for the war effort in Peru to be relinquished. In any case, Andean Indians did not automatically volunteer to relinquish the tribute or welcome its abolition. They often saw payment of tribute as proof of entitlement to land and a historic defence against attacks on their agrarian property, the yield of which enabled them to pay the tribute. This was not always understood in government circles: a complacent report from Ecuador in 1825 believed that ‘the stupidity and degradation of the Indians has reached the point that they regard it as a mark of honour to pay tribute’.26
Bolívar decreed (20 May 1820) the restoration of all resguardo (reservation) land in Cundinamarca to the Indians and
the distribution to each family of ‘as much land as it can easily cultivate’; surplus land was to be leased out by auction and the income applied to payment of tribute and teachers’ salaries. Indians were not to be employed without a formal wage, and priests in particular were warned to stop demanding parish fees, from which Indians were exempt, and other ‘scandalous practices contrary to the spirit of religion’. In the following months he received a series of complaints from Indians that, far from benefiting from the decree, they were defrauded of their rightful property and banished to marginal lands. By a further decree of 12 February 1821, Bolívar confirmed his previous order, insisting on the restoration of resguardos to the Indians and the distribution to them of ‘the richest and most fertile land’.27 After that he could only rely on legislators and hope for the best. The Cúcuta law of 11 October 1821 ordered the liquidation of the resguardo system; it declared the Indians ‘restored’ to their rights, and assigned resguardo land hitherto held in common to individual families in full ownership; this was to be done within five years.28 It was hoped that the Indians would become good property–owners, agriculturalists and taxpayers. But the state did not have the means or the will to supply the infrastructure of agrarian reform, and it succeeded only in disrupting Indian community labour and organization that had depended on communal ownership, and soon the resguardos came to be irretrievably alienated. The losers from this legislation were the Indians. The winners were the great landowners of the valleys of Caracas and Aragua, and those of New Granada, who managed to acquire much of this land for their own estates.
Bolívar sought to use his power in Peru from 1823 to inject further social and agrarian content into the revolution. His object here, as in Colombia, was to abolish the system of community landholding and to distribute the land to the Indians in individual ownership. There was a previous model for such legislation in a scheme inspired by the Spanish Cortes of 1812 and formulated by Viceroy Abascal in 1814.29 The plan was not put into effect, but it was evidently drawn from the same stock of liberal thinking that animated Bolívar ten years later. His decree of 8 April 1824, issued in Trujillo, was intended primarily to promote agricultural production and raise revenue, but it also had social implications, for it assumed that production benefited from extension of private property. The decree ordered that all state lands be offered for sale at one third of the price of their real value. These were not to include lands in the possession of Indians, who were to be declared proprietors, with right to sell or alienate their lands in any way they wished. The Indian community lands were to be distributed among the landless occupants, especially to families, who were to be entitled to full legal ownership of their portions. Bolívar insisted that ‘no Indian should remain without his own land’.
This attempt to turn the Indian peasantry into independent farmers was frustrated by landlords, caciques and officials, and in the following year at Cuzco Bolívar was obliged to issue a further decree (4 July 1825), reaffirming and clarifying the first. This restored Indian land, confiscated after the anti–colonial rebellion of 1814, ordered the distribution of community lands, regulated the method of distribution to include irrigation rights, and declared that the right freely to alienate their lands should not be exercised until after 1850, presumably in the belief that by then the Indians would have made sufficient progress to enable them to defend their interests.30 Bolívar supplemented these decrees with other measures designed, in the name of equality, to free the Indians from longstanding discrimination and ill treatment at the hands of officials, caciques, parish priests and landowners, and in particular from labour services and domestic duties imposed without a free contract for paid labour.31 He also abolished the tribute, but this was not uniformly observed, some arguing that this took from the Indian a traditional protection, others that the Indians lost by fiscal equality. Curiously, when Bolívar restored the Indian tribute by decree of 15 October 1828 he explained that ‘the indigenous people themselves prefer and many have requested to be allowed to make a personal contribution, exempting them from the charges and fees levied on other citizens’.32
The Indian decrees of Bolívar were limited in scope and misguided in intent. As the great haciendas already occupied most of the best land in Peru, these measures simply made the Indians more vulnerable, for to give them land without capital, equipment and protection was to invite them to become indebted to more powerful landowners, to surrender their land in payment, and to end up in debt peonage. And as the communities crumbled, the haciendas were waiting to sweep up the fragments of Indian society: the new policy gave them an added supply of cheap labour, while the colonial labour and tenancy forms, perpetuated by the republican regime, guaranteed Indian society’s subordination. Bolívar’s policy was not informed by deep understanding of Indian problems, only by what he saw as an outside observer infused with liberal ideals and passionate sympathy. ‘The poor Indians are truly in a state of lamentable depression. I intend to help them all I can, first as a matter of humanity, second because it is their right, and finally because doing good costs nothing and is worth much.’33 But doing good was not enough, or not well defined, and the humanitarian instincts of the revolution were not in themselves beneficial to Andean communities.
Citizen Soldiers
If the war of independence was a struggle for power it was also a dispute over resources. Creoles and caudillos fought for land as well as liberty. Bolívar was the first to acknowledge this and to provide economic incentive as well as political access. It was also necessary to find a substitute for a salary. His decree of 3 September 1817 ordered the confiscation by the state of all property and land of the enemy, Americans as well as Spaniards, to be sold in public auction to the highest bidder or, failing that, to be rented out on behalf of the national treasury. The property was used not only as an immediate income for the patriot government, but also as a source of land grants to officers and soldiers of the republic according to rank, promotion being regarded as a gauge of service. The decree of 10 October 1817 ordered land grants ranging in value from 25,000 pesos for a general–in–chief to 500 for an ordinary soldier.34 The intention, as Bolívar put it, was ‘to make of every soldier a property–owning citizen’. In his Angostura Address he reminded legislators that this was one of his principal priorities, to reward ‘those who have experienced the depths of cruelty in a terrible war, who have suffered the most painful deprivations and the most bitter torments’ and asked congress to confirm his policy.35
The caudillos and the higher officers were the first to benefit. One of the earliest grants, by special request of Bolívar to the National Land Commission, was that to General Cedeño, to enable him to establish a hacienda in the sabanas of Palmar.36 Even those out of favour were among the first recipients. The congress of Angostura in December 1819 confirmed the award of cacao haciendas in Güiria and Yaguarapo to Mariño and Arismendi. These were properties confiscated from Spaniards. The government also granted certain old properties belonging to Spaniards to Urdaneta, Bermúdez, Soublette and others, most of whom had entered the war of independence without any kind of property. From 1821 the caudillos were pressing their claims for specific haciendas and lands directly on to the executive, which usually preferred to pass the requests on to the land tribunals. According to Soublette, now vice–president of Venezuela, ‘The military are among the strongest and most insistent claimants to confiscated property. They have fought successfully and undergone horrific deprivation … and it will be impossible to ignore them much longer.’37
Bolívar’s plans for the troops, however, were blatantly ignored when not actively frustrated by the combined action of legislators and officers. Congress decreed that soldiers be paid not in actual land but in vales, vouchers entitling the holder to receive national land at a vague post–war date. Ignorant and impoverished soldiers were easy prey: the vouchers were bought up by officers and civilian speculators at minimal prices, sometimes at less than 5 per cent of the legal amount; and in this way m
ost of the soldiers were defrauded of their right to land. Bolívar protested that his intentions were being mocked and demanded that congress should implement the original law by assigning the troops not vouchers but land.38 Slowly and with great reluctance the congress of Cúcuta took measures to end the practice of issuing vouchers instead of land grants but, to Bolívar’s fury, insisted on extending the scheme to officials. The llaneros in particular remained unsatisfied, ‘humiliated and frustrated and without hope of gathering the fruit of what they have won by their lances’.39 In mid–1821 they were put on indefinite unpaid leave. Soon there was robbery and unrest in the Apure, while the successful landowners began to organize and extend their interests.
Páez was the most successful of all the caudillos. Yet Páez had used land as a medium of mobilization very early in the campaign. ‘When General Páez occupied Apure in 1816 he found himself alone in enemy territory, without help or prospects and without even the support of public opinion. He was therefore forced to offer his troops a free share in the properties belonging to the government of Apure. This was one of the most effective ways of retaining the support of the troops and attracting new recruits, as they all stood the same chance of gaining.’40 This policy did not materialize, for Páez proved to be more interested in his own acquisitions than in those of his men.
Even before the end of the war in Venezuela, Bolívar delegated to Páez ‘the right to redistribute national properties’, which he himself had received from congress as president of the republic, though as exercised by Páez it was confined to the army of Apure and the territory under his jurisdiction. These special prerogatives were delegated by Bolívar out of frustration over the failure of previous attempts to redistribute land among the military.41 Before distribution, however, Páez acquired the best properties for himself. His holdings were not restricted to the llanos, but extended into the centre–north, the region of valuable commercial plantations and homeland of the traditional oligarchy, where he began to acquire a number of prime properties. In 1825 he made an overtly generous offer to the vice–president of Colombia to sell the government his own estates in Apure, together with their cattle and horses, so that the troops could be granted the land they had been promised in lieu of wages.42 But this gesture was purely demagogic: it was designed to improve his reputation as a patrón and retain the loyalty of his troops, while reserving the right to buy back the debt vouchers, which were the first – and often the only – stage of a land grant. Congress rejected the offer and Páez himself was criticized for building a private fortune by ‘scandalous speculation’ in the land vouchers of his officers and men.43 These were the tactics of many caudillos, who offered the troops sums of money (sometimes fifty or sixty pesos for vouchers worth a thousand) in exchange for these land certificates, a notorious abuse that extended throughout Venezuela and New Granada.