by John Lynch
Bolívar considered Sucre the only man capable and worthy of exercising the life–presidency. But Sucre did not want the presidency for life and when, in 1826, the Bolivian congress adopted the constitution and elected Sucre to the office (28 October), he undertook to hold it only until 1828. His dearest wish was to return to Quito and marry his betrothed, Mariana Carcelán y Larrea, marquesa de Solanda. Instead, he stuck to his task and made his regime in Bolivia a model of enlightened absolutism, a quest for economic development and social reform that was a mirror image of Bolívar’s ideas. Such at least was his policy, if not achievement. The obstacles to change were many and powerful, and Bolívar himself had encountered them in other parts of South America. The creoles were conservative, their economic horizons bounded by stagnant haciendas, rentier values and public office; their habits indifferent to entrepreneurial activities; their social outlook wedded to a profound and immobile inequality. Dominating congress they modified some of the ecclesiastical and electoral details of the constitution in an illiberal sense. Warfare had dealt another blow to an already defective economy, and flight of Indian labour and white capital had brought mining and agriculture almost to a standstill. To construct a national economy Sucre had to lay his hands on more revenue, so his first task was to devise a more equitable and productive tax system. In 1826 congress abolished the alcabala and reduced other taxes on vital consumer goods. This was self–interest. The real test was direct taxation. Bolívar himself abolished the Indian tribute by decree of 22 December 1825. It was replaced by an income tax and property tax, a revolutionary departure from the fiscal privilege long enjoyed by whites and assimilated mestizos. These interests stubbornly resisted the new policy and fought an unscrupulous campaign to revive the colonial tax system. In Cochabamba census officials were harassed by el pueblo bajo, who locked their doors long enough to enable the occupants to escape out the back.28 In July 1826 the Indian tribute was restored, and the income and property taxes were abolished in December. Within a year, therefore, the country had returned to the colonial tax structure with its built–in discrimination and inequality. As Sucre pointed out, the oppressed classes were themselves divided against each other: ‘The cholos do not wish to be classed as Indians, and even the Indians have distinctions among themselves.’29
Yet Bolivia had one asset, its silver, if only this could be realized. The industry needed large injections of capital to expand operations, procure machinery and undertake drainage. For this it had to look abroad, which meant looking to the London money market, where the El Dorado of Potosí stirred the imagination and blunted the mind. By decree of 2 August 1825 Bolívar ordered that all abandoned and unworked mines revert to the state for renting out or auction. The British consul estimated that mines to the value of five million pesos thus became public property.30 The new law, operating in peacetime conditions, was sufficient to produce a modest rise in silver production from 1825, and coin production also improved. General Miller, prefect of the department of Potosí, reported that from 1810 to 1825 the mint coined an annual average of no more than half a million dollars; but during the first five months after liberation it coined upwards of a million.31
More spectacular results were anticipated from foreign investment. In London a mania of speculation led to the formation of twenty–six mining associations in 1824–5 for exploiting Spanish American mines.32 Of these the Potosí, La Paz and Peruvian Mining Association assembled the most capital and attracted most support; it had six members of parliament on its board and James Paroissien as its agent. The company’s representatives were welcomed in Bolivia and authorized to purchase mines and associated installations, with full protection of the law and many fiscal privileges. But in London ignorant and improvident speculation was followed by a resounding crash; when, in December 1825, the money market collapsed, the vital flow of capital was cut and the company was unable to meet its obligations in South America. This brought mining operations to an abrupt halt; an official embargo was placed on machinery, equipment and supplies at the port of Arica; and the company was forced into liquidation, the victim of inadequate capital, extravagance of the company’s agents, lack of skilled labour, and inferior technology. Basically the English expected too much for too little.33 The collapse of the Potosí Mining Association ended prospects of major improvement in Bolivian silver production. The government was thus starved of revenue for investment in economic and social reforms, in roads, public works and schools. The country was desperately bankrupt, without the basic necessity for development: a port of entry and exit independent of other powers. The government unsuccessfully tried to buy Arica from Peru. It then sought to make a viable port of Cobija, renamed by Bolívar Puerto de La Mar. But in spite of possessing competitive tariffs, this was an unlikely outlet for overseas trade: it was five hundred miles from Potosí, on the edge of the Atacama desert, and lacked roads, people and water.34
Like their counterparts in Peru, the Bolivian aristocracy monopolized the few assets the country possessed, and they continued to exert an inexorable control over land and labour. The Indians of Bolivia formed 80 per cent of the population at the beginning of the nineteenth century.35 On the eve of independence they were still subject to the mita, repartimiento, tribute, parish charges and tithes, pongueaje and other personal services, and agricultural labour on the land of the whites. Community Indians were perhaps even worse off than those of the haciendas, for they were forced to give personal services to a multiplicity of authorities and officials. Independence brought some improvement of status. The mita was abolished and, unlike the tribute, it did not reappear. In August 1825 at La Paz, Bolívar proclaimed the policy which he had already attempted to apply in Peru. He abolished personal service, declaring equality among all citizens. But the creoles did not cooperate, and the Indians were slow to respond, distrusting these measures as traps set by the cruel whites to ensnare them still more. Results were therefore negligible. ‘Prejudices and timidity on their own part, and the interest of those who still keep up the delusion, in order to profit by the gratuitous labours of others, will combine to counteract the most benevolent views of the patriotic government.’36 The Indians of Bolivia continued to be exploited by whites, contrary to the spirit of the new laws, and more and more became dependent on the hacendados for plots of land, the rent of which had to be paid in services on the master’s estate and in his house.
Bolívar decreed a measure of agrarian change in 1825: the object was to distribute state land in Bolivia, preferably among ‘the natives and those who have offered and suffered much for the cause of independence’.37 But as rural misery was even worse in Bolivia than in Colombia, the scene of his first experiment, he decreed that land should be distributed to everyone in need, not simply to army veterans: ‘Every individual without discrimination of age or sex shall receive a fanegada of land in the fertile areas and two fanegadas in the poorer land which lacks irrigation’, the only condition being that the recipients should begin cultivation within a year. But these reforms were sabotaged by the Bolivian ruling class, who regarded a free and landed peasantry as a threat to their dependent labour supply. On 20 September 1827 the Bolivian congress issued a law suspending the Bolivarian decrees concerning distribution of land to the Indians ‘until the prefects of the departments concerned report on the number of Indians and the amounts of lands remaining over, in order that each one can be assigned what he needs according to the locality’. This was another way of saying no, the official word of Bolivia’s rulers on agrarian change.
Bolívar’s anti–slavery policy was also unpopular. In 1825 the general assembly of Bolivia voted Bolívar a million dollars as a reward for his services; he accepted the grant ‘only upon condition that the money should be employed in purchasing the liberty of about one thousand black slaves existing in Bolivia’.38 The response was negative. But in 1826 he returned to the attack in his constitution that declared Bolivians to be ‘all those who until now have been slaves and who are thereby in
fact freed by the publication of this constitution; a special law shall determine the amount to be paid as indemnity to their former owners’. The deputies pretended to comply, but in fact they substantially modified Bolívar’s text; the new version declared former slaves free citizens ‘but they cannot abandon the house of their former owners except in the form which a special law will determine’.39 The principal objects of concern were labour and recompense, for although large–scale plantation agriculture was not practised in Bolivia, slaves were used on estates and in domestic service, principally in the region of La Paz, and they represented an investment that owners were not prepared to lose. ‘The only indemnity they seek,’ reported Sucre, ‘is that slaves should be forced to work in their existing haciendas as peons.’ He seemed to think that this was ‘muy generoso’, not a sentiment that Bolívar would have shared.40 The contrivance was characteristic of abolition throughout Spanish America; slavery was replaced not by freedom but by servile labour.
The attempt by Bolívar and Sucre to transform Bolivia into a liberal and prosperous state failed. Bolívar’s utopia of political literacy also vanished. Education was an opportunity but also a problem. The Liberator decreed the establishment of primary schools and orphanages and diverted clerical revenues obtained through his ecclesiastical reforms for their funding. But he also appointed Simón Rodríguez, the former teacher for whom he still retained an unaccountable admiration, as director of public education and supervisor of charitable institutions. Sucre, pining all the while for his fiancée in Quito, found that in addition to other duties he had inherited a mad professor and his crazy projects. Soon he was groaning at the folly of Don Samuel, as he called him, who was appointing hordes of teachers without the means to pay them, and establishing shelters for beggars with more officials than inmates. Rodríguez claimed independence to do what he liked, insulting locals as ignorant brutes, throwing his weight around and stirring up trouble. Sucre, though wary of offending Bolívar, was eventually relieved to accept the resignation of this loose cannon. Sucre was conscious of the defects of what he called the ‘colonial education’ they had received, which left Americans inexpert in the art of government and at a disadvantage in dealing with Europeans. His own policy of school expansion was not entirely fruitless, but education still suffered from a shortfall in funding and a shortage of teachers and books.41
Bolivia brought out the flaws in Bolivarian modernization. The attack on ecclesiastical privilege and the egalitarian direction of tax reform directly threatened the main interest groups of traditional society, the clergy and the landowners, which the new state simply did not have the power to confront.42 The result was fiscal failure and another obstacle to economic growth. The experiment proved that the prospects of this new Andean republic, without assets of man or nature, were as bleak as the landscape of its windswept altiplano. But its rulers were determined to keep what little they had, and if this was nationalism then Sucre soon felt its impact. The continued presence of Colombian troops brought to the surface latent passions against foreigners, passions which resentful Argentines and Peruvians, deprived of what they regarded as their colonial inheritance, did their utmost to inflame. Sucre reported to Bolívar: ‘The porteños and the Peruvians are very active in stirring up resentment in the country against the Colombian troops.’ And Bolívar eventually advised him: ‘If I were you I would not remain in the south, because in the final analysis we suffer from the defect of being Venezuelans, just as we have been Colombians in Peru.’43 Anxious still to re–annex these provinces, Peru lost no opportunity of exploiting anti–Colombian feelings, and in 1827–8 combined subversion within and attack from without. On 18 April 1828 a rebellion in Chuquisaca led by an Argentine sergeant and two Peruvians, seconded by an invasion from Peru, was the beginning of the end for the Bolivarian enlightenment in Bolivia. Sucre was severely wounded in the right arm confronting the first rebels, and on 7 July the government was forced to sign an agreement for the expulsion of all foreigners from the Bolivian army and the immediate withdrawal of Colombian troops. The irony did not escape Sucre: a survivor of the war, he was now a casualty of the peace.44 He resigned the presidency, pessimistic of Bolivia’s capacity to become a viable nation, and in August he left for home, anxious to be with his new wife who had married him by proxy in Quito on 20 April while he was lying wounded in Chuquisaca. In Bolivia he left a companion, Rosalía Cortés, and a two–year–old son.
The Lost Purity of his Principles
The euphoria of liberation did not endure. It was galling for Peruvians to witness Chileans and Argentines enter their country in the guise of liberators, and Colombians too outstayed their welcome. During the war the Indian guerrilla leader Ninavilca described the Colombians as a ‘mob of thieves’, despoilers of Peruvian resources, and they were no more popular now than then.45 Peruvians came to detest Bolívar’s dictatorship, and they did not respond favourably to his idea of a confederation of the Andes.
Bolívar felt the full force of Peruvian nationalism after his return from the south in 1826, though he did not give it credit for what it was, attributing opposition to selfish interests hurt by his radical reforms of the administration.46 The capitulation of Callao on 23 January 1826 completed his work as liberator and he could now glory in the fact that, of its once great American empire, Spain retained only the two islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico. He had earned some leave and was now free to return to Colombia with his army. Yet he stayed. The government was headed first by General La Mar, then by General Santa Cruz, but Bolívar continued to be the power behind the administration. Peruvians were increasingly restless at his presence and he became the target of conspiratorial attack, congressional opposition and widespread criticism in the country. The conspiracy he crushed, congress he browbeat, and criticism he brushed off, confident of his Colombian troops.
But he could do little about economic or social life. The traditional prop of the economy and Peru’s major exportable assets, gold and silver, were suffering from post–war depression; mining production was hit by disruption of communications and by severe shortage of labour, mercury, mules and capital. The Commercial Code of 6 June 1826, though prefaced by liberal clichés, was in fact highly restrictive.47 It suppressed internal customs and reduced alcabalas, but it placed a basic 30 per cent duty on all foreign imports, and imports such as liquor, certain texiles, sugar and other items competing with national production bore an 80 per cent protective tariff, subsequently raised to 90 per cent. Peru did not possess institutions capable of enforcing these excessive duties along its extensive coastline. The tariff, therefore, fulfilled neither its revenue nor protection functions; the treasury suffered from contraband, the economy from stagnation, and foreign merchants from bureaucratic corruption and delay.
The allocation of scarce national resources was conducted according to the values and structures inherited from colonial society. The social structure underwent only marginal change. Those Spaniards who survived independence and remained were integrated into the Peruvian oligarchy to form an upper class of land and office, monopolists of wealth, power and privilege. The mestizos and free pardos of the coast were confined to the service sector and local workshops, and advancement was a slow process. Bolívar’s experience in Peru convinced him that ‘many of the higher classes had imbibed the prejudices and vices of their late Spanish rulers, and had followed their example in oppressing the lower orders’.48 In a world of greed and inequality that he was powerless to change, the Liberator remained incorruptible. By 1826 he was paying fifteen thousand pesos a year out of his own presidential salary to worthy causes and needy people, in his mind an argument for retaining the presidency of Colombia and also for curtailing government extravagance that threatened his income.49
Slavery was reduced but not abolished.50 San Martín had confirmed the abolition of the slave trade and attempted to abolish slavery itself through a policy of compensation to owners and in return for military service. But slave owners opposed even this
moderate programme; for them slaves were an investment as well as a work force and slavery survived independence virtually intact, just as the rest of their property did, and the gap between the plantations of the coast and Indian labour in the sierra remained unbridgeable. When Bolívar’s constitution was adopted in Peru in 1826 the clause emancipating the slaves was omitted, the government regarding it as unrealistic: ‘The grounds for this belief are that the manumission of the slaves who are the only cultivators of the soil, would be followed by their desertion from the estates on which they were employed; and that the landholders would hence be exposed to have their lands left waste, as it has been found impossible heretofore to induce the natives to leave the mountainous district for the purpose of working as labourers in the low lands.’51 The policy of the two liberators sprang from liberal minds and humanitarian convictions, but was also evidence of the constraints operating in a society dominated by a landowning elite. In theory Bolívar was a dictator in Peru but he could not do as he pleased and this was not his country. Where property was concerned he had to leave many decisions to the local ruling class. It was 1855 before Peru abolished slavery.