by John Lynch
Bolívar’s revolution did not resemble revolutionary movements in Europe or the Atlantic world. These reflected conditions and claims which were appropriate to themselves but had only limited application to the political, social and economic problems of America. The European Enlightenment and its liberal aftermath, well known to Bolívar, were too self–absorbed to offer political ideas or services to colonial peoples. The economic interests of industrial Europe, being those of a metropolis, involved some opportunities for primary producers but also disadvantages, and if industrialization was a medium of social change in western Europe, it played no such role in early nineteenth–century Spanish America, whose concern was to strengthen the traditional export sector – and with it the landed oligarchy – in order to import manufactures made by others. For these reasons Bolívar, who in many respects had a deep affinity with the age of revolution, could not imitate its intellectual and political leaders, even had he wished to do so. While the Enlightenment confirmed his attachment to reason and inspired his struggle for liberty and equality, he had to employ his own intellectual resources to fashion a theory of colonial emancipation, and then to find the appropriate limits for liberty and equality, and in the process we can see traces of enlightened absolutism as well as democratic revolution. Democratic forms in Europe and North America evoked his respect, but he insisted on writing his own constitutions, designed to conform to Spanish American conditions, not to outside models. These conditions, especially in the post–war period, when social and racial divisions, lack of consensus and absence of political traditions placed liberal constitutions under severe strain and brought the new republics to the edge of anarchy, caused serious problems for Bolívar. Now we see the realistic Bolívar – his democratic ideals tempered by experience of popular protest, race conflict, and elite factionalism – the man who declared Spanish America to be ungovernable.
The Bolivarian model of government, designed around the life presidency, appealed to the military but otherwise made few friends: it excluded too many vested interests from political life and decisions to gain wide acceptance. The civilian elites preferred more liberal constitutions, though even these and their authors were affected by that bias towards authority and centralism that was a feature of the republican as it had been of the colonial state. Most Venezuelan constitutions allowed the president extraordinary powers of intervention in time of crisis or rebellion, and most defined the political nation in the narrowest of terms, establishing property and literacy qualifications for those entitled to stand for election and even to vote. Bolívar had nothing to be ashamed of in any comparison of his constitutional principles with those of his liberal enemies. Historians have suggested that he abandoned the search for liberty, or at least postponed it in favour of order and security. But the evidence shows that his principles in 1828–30 were not basically different from those he had developed from 1812 onwards, that his insistence on liberty and equality was always accompanied by a search for strong government.
Bolívar conceived the American revolution as more than a fight for political independence. He also thought of it as a social movement, which would improve as well as liberate, and would respond to both the radical and liberal demands of the age. For him a free government had to be an active government, moving beyond dispensing privileges and patronage into the more positive work of giving Americans a better life. Strong government was essential for the new states if they were to impose reforms, an incomprehensible synthesis for the liberals of his day, but better understood by later generations of Latin Americans. Many of them came to believe that powerful presidential government and one–party states were suitable, or at least inevitable, constitutional forms for new nations in formation. Bolivarian absolutism, therefore, was not an end in itself. The bias towards strong government, in the interests of reform as well as of order, and as a necessary framework for post–colonial development, was a quality rather than a flaw in Bolívar’s policy, and endows him with a modernity beyond the confines of the age of revolution.
The Realist of the Revolution
Bolívar did not promote a social revolution, and never claimed to do so. Land distribution, racial equality, abolition of slavery, pro–Indian decrees, were policies of a reformist – not a revolutionary – character. He was too much of a realist to believe that he could change the social structure of America by legislation or by imposing policies unacceptable to the major interest groups. In the age of democratic revolution, no other regime in the Atlantic world had accomplished a social revolution. The possible exception was Haiti, and for Bolívar, as for many North Americans, Haiti was a warning, not a model, a clear lesson in the consequences of recklessly dismantling strong institutions and unleashing slaves into a fool’s paradise.15 The Spanish American revolution was ambiguous on slavery, prepared to abolish the slave trade but reluctant to release slaves into a free society, where they might not conform to creole rules on law and order and would leave their masters without labour in mines and plantations. This was not Bolívar’s position. The Liberator, with a firmer moral instinct than Thomas Jefferson, thought it ‘madness that a revolution for liberty should seek to maintain slavery’.16 He freed his own slaves, first for service in the army of liberation, for it was right that slaves too should be prepared to die for liberty, then unconditionally as an absolute right to freedom. He then sought to write abolition into law but in practice he did not succeed, either in Colombia or Bolivia, for the landed oligarchies in both countries were too strongly rooted in social and economic life to be coerced by mere legislation. Bolívar never had the power to do as he pleased. At the very time he was being denounced as a ‘tyrant’ by his liberal enemies, the limits on his power were only too obvious, when the oligarchies, from which his enemies also came, rejected his liberal social policies. The chronology of abolition was determined in practice by the number of slaves in a country, by their importance to its economy, and sometimes by arguments over compensation. Freedom for Venezuela’s forty thousand slaves waited until 1854, when landowners appreciated that slaves were expensive and uneconomical workers, and that a cheaper labour force could be obtained by turning them into ‘free’ peons tied to estates by laws against vagrancy or by a coercive agrarian regime. Colombia and Peru also delayed abolition until the 1850s.
Liberal sentiments gave way to rational calculation in matters of race. The opposite was true in his Indian policy. Basically the Indians were losers from independence. In a formal sense, enshrined in Bolivarian legislation, they were emancipated, for they were now free citizens and released from payment of tribute and the obligation of forced labour. But Indians in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia did not automatically welcome abolition of tribute in exchange for paying the same taxes as other citizens – for they saw tribute as a legal proof of their landholdings, from the surplus of which they paid their dues. And their land was now under threat. The liberals of post–independence regarded the Indians as an obstacle to national development, and believed that the autonomy they had inherited from the colonial regime should be ended by integrating them into the nation. In Colombia and Peru the new legislators sought to destroy corporate entities in order to release Indian lands and mobilize Indian labour. The policy involved the division of communal lands among individual owners, theoretically among the Indians themselves, but in practice among their more powerful neighbours. Bolívar legislated along these lines when he was in Cuzco and ordered that community land be distributed, and each Indian, ‘ofwhatever sex or age’, be given a topo of land in the best places.17 But the Andean agrarian structure did not allow for benevolence and legislative enactments were not enough to change it. The Indians, it is true, had their own mechanisms of survival and could not be legislated out of existence. But their community lands were left without protection and eventually became one of the victims of land concentration and the export economy.
The revolution failed to reach out to Indians and slaves, even as it also stopped short of the mixed races. Since t
he middle of the eighteenth century the hopes of the pardos for advance had rested with the metropolis. It was Spanish policy that had first introduced a degree of social mobility against the protest and resistance of the creoles. Now the creoles were in power, it was the same families who had denounced the opening of doors to the pardos in the university, the Church, and civil and military office. For the mass of the pardos independence was, if anything, a regression. Political mobilization ended with the end of the war, and social mobility was thwarted by plutocratic prejudice and their own poverty. Yet their claims to education, office and political rights could not be ignored, for in numbers alone they were indispensable to the whites in the wars of independence. In the army they qualified for promotion up to officer of middle rank. Finally they obtained legal equality – the new republican constitutions abolished all outward signs of racial discrimination and made everyone equal before the law. But this was the limit of equality, as many agencies of social mobility remained closed to pardos. In Venezuela the rules of university entrance were still restrictive: a certificate of limpieza (purity of blood) was demanded until 1822; after that, proof of legitimacy, relatively high entrance fees, and de facto discrimination all placed higher education beyond the reach of the majority of people.18
The popular sectors in general were the outcasts of the revolution. In rural occupations they were subject to greater pressures, from land concentration, liberal legislation in favour of private property, and the renewed attack on vagrancy. In towns no doubt the retail and service sectors expanded with the expansion of international trade. But local industry suffered, or failed to develop. In Venezuela and Colombia local industry declined, except in regional markets; in the Andean countries it survived only for local consumption. Artisans remained an unemployed or underemployed group; together with the rural poor, they were regarded as outside the political nation. Bolívar was absolutely committed to racial equality; his political thought and constitutional enactments were clear that whites, mestizos, blacks, pardos and Indians were equal before the law, and in practice too he appointed and promoted officials and military regardless of their racial origin. But he could not change the structure of society and he was well aware that there were masses of poor blacks and pardos on the fringes of social and economic life and resentful of practical discrimination by their wealthier neighbours – not only whites.
The pardos wanted more than equality before the law. ‘Equality before the law,’ he warned, ‘is not enough for the people in their present mood. They want absolute equality as a public and a social right. Next they will demand pardocracia, that they, the pardos, should rule. This is a very natural inclination which will ultimately lead to the extermination of the privileged class.’19 He was ruthless towards any attempt to exploit racial divisions and acted promptly to suppress black rebellion and incipient race war. The execution of Piar and Padilla weighed on his conscience, but as he looked at the racial composition of Venezuela and Colombia he believed that they were victims of their own extremism and that existing society could not withstand black rebellion. In the pessimism of his final years he feared that only excesses could result from granting any political powers to pardos. The threat of pardocracia haunted him: he considered it as abhorrent as the albocracia, or white rule, which was ‘absolute dogma’ in the south. On race the idealist had to give way to the realist. He knew that he could not carry the oligarchy with him in any excess of social liberalism, and any attempt to force the issue would risk the advances he had already made. The ruling classes of Venezuela and Colombia, the alliance of landowners, merchants, officials and lawyers, far from facing ‘extermination’, were more than capable of withstanding social rebellion and preserving power for themselves, as they proved in the course of the nineteenth century and beyond.
While it may be agreed that Bolívar did not promote a social revolution, Germán Carrera Damas goes further and argues that Bolívar’s policy was in effect a variation of that of the creole elite. The argument is subtle. The creole elite were driven by an overriding objective: to preserve the internal power structure in Venezuela, namely the predominant power of the white propertied classes, formed in the colony and now threatened by the social convulsions unleashed by the war. To preserve their power amidst these tensions, and to confront the demand of the slaves for freedom and the pardos for social equality, the creoles were prepared to make minimum concessions, to abolish the slave trade and to declare legal equality of all citizens. But this controlled and peaceful change was brutally broken by the rising of the slaves in 1812 and 1814, the rebellion of the pardos in 1811,1812 and 1814, the war to the death, and the near destruction of the white dominant class. Carrera Damas argues that Bolívar shared these objectives, but not the policies to achieve them. Fearing the risk of social war turning into racial war, he became permanently committed to absolute abolition of slavery. Abolition would remove the threat posed by the struggle of the slaves for freedom and enable him to reconstruct and preserve the internal power structure. But there remained another danger, the unsatisfied demands of the pardos. He confronted this through the centralist and aristocratic character of his constitutional projects, those of Angostura and the Bolivian Constitution, and in his partiality towards monarchy at the end of his life, all designed to restore the structure of internal power. As for republican forms, they threatened to become vehicles of pardoc–racia; from 1821 he criticized the effectiveness of republican institutions and democratic liberalism, and saw them as obstacles to the restoration of order in Venezuela, that is, ‘the re–establishment of the internal structure of power’. The argument concludes by underlining the contrast in Bolívar’s career: his failure to produce a project for the organization of Venezuelan society of the same order of creativity as he had demonstrated in his formulation of the theory of independence.20
Nevertheless, another interpretation is possible. Bolívar was an exception to the theory of the internal power structure. The reason is that from a position of leadership he had to struggle with events and conditions, and he had to make decisions while subject to intolerable pressure from conflicting demands. He could overcome adverse circumstances, and thus he fought the Spaniards to a standstill and won independence. But he could not be expected to win a completely new order in society and economy, for these were founded on long–term conditions rooted in history, environment and people, and not easily changed by mere legislation, much less in a short period often to fifteen years. To describe society as an internal power structure, moreover, cannot ignore the details of social and economic life. Bolívar presided over some racial mobility and in practice admitted pardos to new opportunities in the army and the administration. What he refused to countenance was pardoc–racia, rule by pardos, overturning in two decades three centuries of Venezuela’s history. The question to ask is not why did he say no to pardocracia, but would pardocracia have given Venezuela better government and greater peace and stability? The lesson from Haiti was not reassuring.
Bolívar was also subject to another condition, recently highlighted as the ‘chaos of the revolution’. Bolívar was caught in a constant struggle against chaos, a chaos unleashed by a long and violent war and by the simultaneous upheaval in social relations. The chaos theory argues that Bolívar succeeded as a military leader because he was able to direct his armed forces through this chaos and reach his goals, but that he failed as a post–revolutionary leader because he could no longer survive in a chaotic world.21 The second part of this argument is less convincing than the first, for again it introduces, or restates, the notion of failure. Bolívar, credited with superhuman achievements, is also expected to have superhuman qualities. The problem with all concepts of failure is that no person, party or government ever produces a perfect model of society, and all solutions depend on the willingness of people to collaborate in their own salvation.
To criticize Bolívar, as he was criticized in his own time and since, for not being a liberal democrat rather than a conservative a
bsolutist, is to leave conditions out of the argument. He once protested to those who wanted to make him a monarch, ‘I am not Napoleon, and Colombia is not France.’ He could equally have said to his liberal critics, ‘I am not Washington and Colombia is not the United States.’ North Americans had already travelled the road of independence and made progress towards a democratic and egalitarian society where education, literacy and the suffrage were more advanced than anything so far achieved in Colombia. But Bolívar had won independence by mobilizing an army of pardos, blacks, and former slaves, all with post–war expectations.22 This was not the homogeneous society of the North, but a multiracial people, each race with its own interest and its own intolerance. He could not satisfy every interest and he was not so idealist as to destroy the historic Colombia in a vain search for equality. His political revolution, therefore, was accompanied by social reform and no more.