If Bolívar has been pulled in different directions, his figure each time partially erased as his interpreters go though and around him to produce their particular iteration, we need a usable narrative against which to begin to make sense of how he has been deployed in critical discourse. The choice of beginnings and endings for constructing such a narrative is not an innocent one, but in the interest of providing an account of the most important spaces to which his interpreters go, always elaborating them anew, let us start with his family origins, racial descent, and early life, not because that is where we ourselves are starting or others have always, but rather because it is a space of representation just as all other elements of his life are, his biography worked and reworked on the national and hemispheric stages.
Bolívar came from a wealthy Caracas family with slaves and plantations. He lost his parents when he was young. With regard to his racial background and physical appearance, he is commonly represented as white, but there is also disagreement about his racial heritage. The Bolívar family, which came from the Basque region in Spain, dates back generations in the Americas and includes, some argue, a union between a male forbear who was Basque-descended and a female slave of African-descent. John Lynch approaches the matter from different perspectives. Using the physical description of Simón Bolívar provided by his first biographer, his loyal aide-de-camp Daniel Florencio O’Leary, who is silent on the matter of race, Lynch writes in his 1973 work that Simón’s “ancestors had bequeathed to him a trace of Negro blood, seen perhaps in his dark complexion and thick lips.”1
In his 2006 biography, however, Lynch comes to a different conclusion on the matter of O’Leary’s description, attributing Bolívar’s dark complexion so familiar in classic portraits to “fifteen years of travel and campaigns”2 under the sun and leaving aside the matter of the appearance of his lips, which he had racialized, to speak of Bolívar’s and his family’s heritage through means other than Bolívar’s physical appearance.3 We see this in the first pages of Lynch’s 2006 book, where he addresses Venezuela’s racially-defined caste society of the colonial period. Locating the debate there instead of in Bolívar’s body, Lynch speaks of the colonial records documenting the lineage of the Bolívars, a crucial source of knowledge production at a time when such knowledge defined the place of families in society:
The family lineage had been scoured for signs of race mixture in a society of whites, Indians, and blacks, where neighbors were sensitive to the slightest variant. But in spite of dubious evidence dating from 1673, the Bolívars were always white.4
With this, Lynch closes the question by displacing it from Bolívar himself to his family lineage, while allowing the reader to peer into a sordid reality defined by the brutality of racism with upper-class families seeking to maintain their credentials showing them to be white.
There are Bolívar’s two tutors, one Simón Rodríguez, the other Andrés Bello, the first who would become famous through Bolívar, the latter who achieved his place on the world stage independent of him. Also commonly represented are the three trips Bolívar made to Europe during his youth. The first was to Spain (1799–1803) where he met María Teresa del Toro Alayza who would be his wife. The second came soon after. Bolívar had returned to Venezuela with his bride only to see her die of malaria after a year of marriage. In mourning, he went back to Europe, this time to France (1804–1806). But in Paris, his life would take a new turn as he entered into a much spoken-of affair with a married woman said to be a distant cousin, Fanny du Villars.5 She would become just one of his many dalliances and connections that began in Paris, including his important relationship with Ecuadorian Manuela Sáenz from 1822 to 1830, all referenced in different ways by his interpreters according to the necessities of their own renderings.
Love was not all Bolívar found in Paris. It is said that when he was in Paris he became intrigued by Napoleon who famously had himself crowned emperor at Notre Dame in one of the great spectacles of modern propaganda.6 He also met the famous German naturalist Alexander Humboldt at the salon of Fanny du Villars.7 Humboldt had just returned from the Americas where he had studied and recorded the biogeography, years of work that he would write up in 21 volumes. During this time, Bolívar as we said earlier, apparently stood on one of the Montes Sacros of Rome , the Aventino Hill, and in the presence of his former teacher Simón Rodríguez, made his oath to liberate the Americas. Rodríguez had gone to Paris after being pursued by Spanish authorities for his political views in Venezuela, and there, as the story goes, the two happen upon each other, and journey by foot to Rome. A written document called “El Juramento de Roma,” “The Oath of Rome” exists, but some say that document was fabricated after Bolívar’s passing. In Arvelo’s 2013 film, Libertador , Rodríguez is made to play the role of Bolívar’s moral conscience, reminding him of his responsibilities to Venezuela and America both during the 1804–1806 period in Paris, then later in 1830, when he appears to tell Bolívar after the Admirable Congress that he must reclaim the continent.
The third trip to Europe was to London. He led a delegation representing the 1810 Junta Suprema that had declared loyalty to Fernando VII. The purpose of that delegation, which included Andrés Bello, was to seek military assistance from the British who were at war with Napoleon, and after the 1808 Napoleonic invasion, aligned with Spain whose storied armada it had defeated at the Battle of Trafalgar, Spain having been a client state of Bourbon and Napoleonic France. For Bolívar, it was particularly important to bring back the famous Venezuelan military leader and intellectual Francisco de Miranda, who for years had resided in London with a pension from the British and who had previously sought to liberate Venezuela.
Bolívar has been made to stand for 1810, but he was hardly the most significant leader at that time. Nor was the date the revolutionary beginning that it has been made to seem by some prominent interpreters. Venezuela did not declare the Junta Suprema until July 5, 1811. The confederation that was formed consisted of a triumvirate, but soon after, when Spanish general Juan Domingo de Monteverde was assembling forces to take the city back, Miranda was appointed supreme general and dictator as well as president of the republic. Miranda was not successful, plagued by desertions. The final blow to the confederation was Colonel Bolívar’s loss of the armory in 1812 at Puerto Cabello to royalists who, held there, had bribed one of the soldiers under Bolívar’s command. Miranda negotiated surrender along with an agreement for himself to return to London. Bolívar’s loss of the strategic location is the reason many historians, including Lynch, give for Miranda’s decision, but Rodríguez O. and Adelman both argue, though in different ways, that that event should be seen in a larger context, the confederation already coming apart on account of Miranda’s position on slavery.
Bolívar fled to Cartagena. As he resituated himself, popular resistance was alive in Spain, as Rodríguez O. underlines, with assemblies and military units established across the country, and the Cortes, in coordination with the British, moved finally within the region of southwestern Spain, where they had been called, to Cádiz. In New Granada (Colombia) secession from Spain occurred according to the model of the city-state as well as that of the territory-defined republic. The city of Cartagena declared independence on November 11, 1811, and Tunja declared itself a republic with authority over the entirety of New Granada on November 27, 1811. Cartagena was a crucial site for Bolívar, allowing him the possibility of establishing both an intellectual and military course. In his Cartagena Manifesto he looks backward to set a path for the future, identifying as the reasons for the failure of the confederation not the position taken by it on the question of slavery, but: its decision to locate executive authority in a triumvirate rather than a single person—a flimsy basis for a republic; its decision not to form a professional army—the idea of using citizens in a country with a culture not characterized by discipline as foolhardy and the model for that decision Rousseau’s citizen-soldier; and the decision of the leaders of the republic to adopt the principles of a federalist government with power located in regions—principles in accordance with the US Constitution but entirely unsuitable for the Venezuelan reality.
From Cartagena, where he was now in the employ of the city-state, Bolívar launched his march across the Andes into Venezuela to retake Caracas. In the process of doing so he disobeyed orders not to enter Venezuelan territory. This was the Campaña Admirable that brought him his fame as the Libertador and in which he declared his Guerra a Muerte (War to the Death), seen by some, like Elliott, as justifiable, by others as so much evidence of a violent Bolívar. Entering Caracas, he founded the Second Republic, placing himself as military dictator. But the Libertador, as he was officially named on October 14, 1813 by the mayor of Caracas, was only able to hold the city from August 6, 1813 to July 6, 1814 suffering major defeats at La Puerta on February 3, 1814 and June 15, 1814, at the hands of a royalist Spanish immigrant from Asturias who was semi-independent, taking orders only when it suited him from Captain General Juan Manuel Cajigal, who had replaced Juan Domingo de Monteverde in 1814.
Tomás Boves was a former ship pilot who had served time in prison for smuggling and who later became a livestock trader. Recruiting among the rural population to which his new work had drawn him near, he was able to offer those he rallied—the majority mix-raced or pardo and indigenous peoples—the promise of revenge against the mantuanos , the white aristocratic class of the cities and towns of Venezuela of which Bolívar formed part. To slaves he could offer freedom. With forces numbering 20,000, Boves struck fear into the mantuanos. Where the Guerra a Muerte began and where it ended is not clear. In response to the February 3 loss at La Puerta, Bolívar ordered the execution of 1200 Spanish prisoners in Caracas on February 8, 1814, certain that he would not be able to hold them in the face of the military assault he expected after Boves’s February 3 victory. Boves avenged this act months later, executing the elites in Valencia upon taking the city and later doing the same in Caracas, though thousands had fled by the time of his arrival. He died in battle in December of that year.
Fernando VII returned to Madrid on February 2, 1814, several months after the British and Spanish resistance pushed a France severely weakened by defeats in Russia from the peninsula. Bolívar, having fled Caracas, was by the end of 1814 already back in New Granada to liberate Bogotá from the Spanish. He’d been appointed military leader by the aspiring country that was the United Provinces of New Granada, 1811–1816. He took Bogotá, then on instructions from the United Provinces laid siege to the famous Fort at Cartagena from March to May, charged to tear it away from the Cartagena independentists to obtain arms for the purpose of going east to drive out the Spanish from Santa Marta, their last bastion on the coast. Unable to remove the command from the fort and facing the prospect of the arrival of Pablo Morillo and his forces sent by Fernando VII as part of his reconquest campaign, Bolívar left for the West Indies, going to Kingston, Jamaica, where he wrote his famous Jamaica Letter . From Jamaica he went on to Port-au-Prince, where he would receive military support from Alexandre Pétion, the first president of the Republic of Haiti, support that permitted him to return to the mainland to reclaim his leadership of the struggle in 1817.
For Rodríguez and Adelman, among others, Fernando VII’s acts, by pushing loyalists to the cause of independence, permitted Bolívar to gain authority anew in a more comprehensive manner. But he had to vie with others for leadership of the independence process, particularly regional leaders or caudillos who in the area of northeastern Venezuela had made important advances resisting the counter-revolution, Santiago Mariño and Manuel Píar. He eventually ordered the imprisonment of Mariño, though this never came to pass as Mariño gave up his command. Bolívar had promoted Píar to General en Jefe (General in Chief) in May for the decisive role he was playing in the attempt at taking Angostura, an important small town on the Orinoco River that would serve as the base of operations for what we know as the decisive Third Republic. He had led the Batalla de Angostura (Battle of Angostura) on January 18. But after May of that year Píar, who was pardo, refused to obey orders from Bolívar, seeking to reestablish an alliance with Mariño and recruiting soldiers. Bolívar executed him on October 16, 1817, after a military tribunal sentenced him.8
The execution occurred after Bolívar had secured Angostura, on July 18. Two weeks after the execution, on October 30, he issued a decree to organize a Consejo de Estado (Council of State). It called for the Council to be made up of three divisions: State and Treasury; Navy and Army; Interior and Justice. There was a Superior War Council, a Government Council, a Trade Council, and a High Court of Justice, in addition to an office for land sequestration. The Correo del Orinoco (Orinoco Post) commenced on June 27, 1818, to counter the monarchist Caracas Gazette.
There are many moments in Bolívar’s life and career that have acquired particular symbolic importance, interpreters taking a position on their meaning while at the same time using them for political advantage. The War to the Death is one such moment. So is the execution of Píar, interpreted and used like the War to the Death in multiple ways over the decades in the context of state formation, race, and community. Among its most recent interpreters, Aline Helg, professor of History at University of Geneva, describes the act as a clear indication of Bolívar’s years-long goal of holding back the pardo community, as Manuel Píar was a leader who had a vision for an independent pardo state.9
Rodríguez O. views the act differently, not as necessarily showing Bolívar’s determination to prevent a competing Afro-descended polity from emerging, but as having no more than the simple but brutal objective of sending a clear message to his rivals, contenders like Santiago Mariño, an ally of Píar, precisely that he was the one in control.10
Finally, Adelman does not speak of the execution, thereby not casting judgment on Bolívar, but he does elevate Píar to statesman, comparing him to Frei Caneca in Brazil and José Artigas in the Banda Oriental—the future Uruguay. For Adelman, Píar is the author of a vision of a federalist republic that “did not map so coherently onto the centralized state-nations championed by unitarians.”11
We need to take note of this use of the word federalist. In certain key republics in Latin America in the nineteenth century, federalism became identified with regional rights more so than with the idea of a centralized government to which regions are subordinated. In these contexts, the words “unitarianism” and “centralism” came to be used instead of federalism to designate the idea of a state that is a single government with authority over partially self-governing regions. Adelman is placing Píar against unitarianism in the space of Latin America’s nineteenth-century tradition of regionalist or federalist government.
Bolívar delivered his address to the Congress of Angostura (February 15–July 31, 1821) on its first day. Months later, in what is his most legendary expedition, he crossed the Andes into New Granada together with the leader who hailed from that region, Francisco de Paula Santander, taking the Spanish by surprise at Boyacá on August 7. Control of New Granada was quickly established. Not missing an opportunity to promote the cause of independence, with New Granada now declared independent before the world, the congress established the Gran Colombia on December 17, 1819, rendering the Venezuelan Constitution it had had written and approved in the summer void. Venezuela and Ecuador, then, still remained in Spain’s hands, but the congress with this act was announcing to the world that at the helm of the patriot cause was a rational, republican leadership that was confident in its ability to produce a state in the process of liberating territory. Santander had remained in Bogotá to govern, and Bolívar had returned to Venezuela both to continue the war campaign and to attend the congress, which elected Francisco Antonio Zea—former president of the congressional body—vice president, and him president.
As this was transpiring—the seizure of territory from royalist control, the formation of the Gran Colombia, and the continuing military struggle—the Liberal revolutions of 1820 were sweeping through southern Europe, beginning in Spain. On January 1, 1820, Major Rafael de Riego proclaimed the 1812 constitution in Seville, refusing to take his troops assembled in Cádiz to Buenos Aires. Riego, who had returned to Spain in 1814 after six years of captivity in Napoleonic France, was going against the orders of Fernando VII, who wanted to attack an independent but defenseless Argentina, its troops in Peru, to reverse the momentum of independence throughout South America. His revolt triggered other military revolts in Spain, resulting in the king restoring the constitution on March 10. Spain’s military revolts by Liberal leaders were not new, having occurred in almost every year subsequent to Wellington’s decision to restore Fernando VII. Now, successful, they sparked insurrections against absolute rule in Portugal and Naples. In Naples, King Ferdinand I was forced to accept a constitution modeled on Spain’s.
The Cortes lasted for three years, 1820–1823, though Liberals lost their initial unity, divided between those who were loyal to the 1812 constitution and those who wanted to establish a new, more progressive one. Not surprisingly, among the changes they instituted were protocols on how to prosecute the war. Riego, in his declaration, had denounced the living conditions his troops had been forced to tolerate, speaking of how a whole year had gone by and conditions had become dire. But he also criticized the war more broadly, stating that it had impoverished Spaniards.12
Acting upon these concerns and seeking to resume the project cut short by Fernando VII, the new Spain of the Cortes declared the 1812 constitution in the Venezuelan territory it still controlled and sued for peace with Bolívar. Bolívar and the Spanish general Pablo Morillo met, but the armistice did not last long. The fighting resumed. Bolívar and José Antonio Páez, who in 1818 had joined forces in what was the most significant alliance in the war efforts, defeated the Spanish leader Miguel de la Torre on June 24, 1821 at the Battle of Carabobo. This was an enormous blow to the Spanish. For with the defeat at Carabobo, Spain had now lost not only New Granada, but also much of Venezuela.
Spanish Liberals now turned to the diplomatic front, seeking to convince the United States—with which Fernando VII had in 1819 negotiated the sale of Florida—not to recognize the independence of the colonies, insisting that the United States was in its debt and should act accordingly.13
The United States was not persuaded. In 1822 President James Monroe recognized the Gran Colombia, La Plata, Chile, Peru, and Mexico, a move that forced Spain to turn its attention to another diplomatic front. This was the Concert of Powers or the Quintuple Alliance—Russia, Austria, Prussia, France, and the United Kingdom. Hoping to dissuade the Concert of Powers from following the example of Monroe, Spain, as US historian William Spence Robertson brilliantly explains, proffered a number of arguments, all based on the idea of states working in unison under the umbrella of the 1815 Treaty of Vienna. One argument had its basis in the logic of cause and effect as applied to the law.
If what had produced the conditions for the independence movement, the Napoleonic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, could be described as an act of illegality, then it followed that anything resulting from that act was ill-gotten and had to be recovered. But which power would restore the world to its legal order? Spain insisted she would, poised as it purportedly was, to regain control of the colonies. A second argument was that, ideologically, it was not in the interest of the European monarchies to allow revolution across the oceans, disorder abroad certain to have effects on them. A third was directly about the ethic of neutrality, which was respected in the old world, but not in the new. Playing on the new world/old world dichotomy, and determined to achieve moral authority, Spain submitted that the United Kingdom had followed that ethic, remaining neutral during the long years of Spain’s colonial crises, the fact that it allowed 7000 of its citizens to travel to Angostura, Venezuela to serve under Bolívar overlooked. In contrast, an upstart United States had not. After finally getting what it wanted—Florida—it ignored the lesson of the mother country, thereby deviating from how a civilized state should act. And a fourth argument had to do with the world economy. The Cortes warned that the United States, as seen in the plan already proposed by US Senator Henry Clay, was seeking to establish a hemispheric economic system that would exclude all of Europe from the advantages of commerce, a system that the American states, furthermore, would prefer to the European, the US government being more like theirs.14 Some of these arguments would have appealed to the Concert of Powers, but the Cortes was in for a surprise from Restoration Europe.
On April 7, 1823, France sent 60,000 troops into Spain, freeing Fernando VII from what had been a virtual house arrest and occupying the country until 1828. Earlier, at the Congress of Verona, the last meeting of the Quintuple Alliance, the states of the Holy Alliance had concluded that the so-called revolution in Spain had gone on for long enough, authorizing France to invade. The Holy Alliance had been formed in 1815 at the urging of Russia to defend absolute monarchy. With the exception of the United Kingdom, its members were the same as those of the Quadruple Alliance, the formal military pact established in 1815 at the Treaty of Vienna whose purpose was to contain France. In 1818 Bourbon France joined both alliances. Wellington, who was the British representative at the Congress of Verona, abstained from taking part in the discussion. The United Kingdom, though, did respond to the decision. George Canning, the foreign secretary, communicated to the French Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Jules de Polignac, that the United Kingdom would attack France’s naval vessels if they were sent to the Americas.15 Canning was acting on concern already expressed by the British about the overarching ideological purview of the Holy Alliance. But he was also giving a diplomatic form to Britain’s decades-old practice of trading with colonial merchants outside the boundaries of Spain’s state-controlled market, which practice is a major part of the context for the story told by Adelman.
Britain was now going its own way, though the reactionary terms of the peace established after the defeat of Napoleon would hold in Europe until 1830. Finally, James Monroe, whose recognition of the independence of the five republics in 1822 had sent the Spanish Cortes into action in Europe and who now had before him the example of a European Alliance that was occupying Spain in the name of absolute monarchy and European prerogative, delivered what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine in a speech before the congress on December 2, 1823, proclaiming that the United States would not allow any territory in the Americas to be taken by a European power. The battle lines over commerce, territorial jurisdiction, and empire had been drawn. Canning would take credit for Latin American independence when it came at the end of 1824 and the beginning of 1825, claiming to have created a barrier between the European Restoration and the colonies. The United States would also seek to take credit by making a show of having stood up to the Holy Alliance.
Elected head of state a second time under the US-inspired constitution produced for the Gran Colombia at the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821, Bolívar held that position from 1821 to 1830. In the early years of the Gran Colombia there were several vice presidents who, except for Venezuelan Juan Germán Roscío, hailed from New Granada where they had been leaders of the United Provinces of New Granada. They were Francisco Antonio Zea, Antonio Nariño y Alvarez, and José María del Castillo, each holding the position briefly between 1819 and 1821. New Granadan Francisco de Paula Santander, the military leader who joined forces with Bolívar in 1818, the same year José Antonio Páez also joined, was vice president from 1821 to 1827. The state included not only Venezuela, New Granada (now Colombia), and the District of the South or of Quito (now Ecuador), but also northern Peru, Guyana, and part of northwestern Brazil and was recognized by the United Kingdom and the United States. Its capital was the mostly white Bogotá, chosen for this reason, according to John Lynch, by a race-conscious Bolívar who preferred it to Caracas, which was predominantly black and pardo .16 Others say the decision was made at the 1821 Cúcuta Congress. The Gran Colombia, though, was not identified with Bolívar alone, but also with Santander who led it as acting president during the years Bolívar went with his troops to the south to liberate Quito, Guayaquil, Peru, and Alto Peru, 1822–1826.
The southern expedition represented a new endeavor with different actors, Páez remaining in Venezuela and Santander in New Granada. His new lieutenant was Antonio José de Sucre, who led his forces to Guayaquil and then to Quito, while Bolívar directed his through the south, winning difficult battles at Bomboná (April 7, 1822) and at Riobamba (April 21, 1822). In Quito the two won a major battle in the foothills of the Pichincha Volcano (May 24, 1822). Two months later, in Guayaquil, Bolívar met with San Martín, who had traveled from Peru and who after their famous conversation of which there is no clear, non-contested textual documentation mysteriously resigned his position as protector of Peru, eventually leaving South America and retiring to France.
Much ink, particularly in Argentina, as we shall see in the course of this book, has been spilled over what exactly was said at the July 26–27 meeting. But subsequent to San Martín’s resignation, Bolívar was invited by Peru to bring his troops into the country, with the newly established legislature twice appointing him dictator, once before he brought to completion the liberation of the colony, for centuries the center of Spanish power, and a second time subsequent to his having done so, after the December 9, 1824, Battle of Ayacucho, led by Sucre, marked the moment of definitive victory. As for Upper Peru, following Ayacucho, Sucre, at the request of the region’s creole elites, led his Colombian forces there to liberate it from royalist holdouts. Bolívar would not arrive from his headquarters in Lima until August 12, 1825, but the Deliberative Assembly that Sucre helped establish in February of 1825 named the new country after him (August 6, 1825, as República de Bolívar, two months later as Bolivia), with the city of Chuquisaca (formerly La Plata from 1559 to 1809) designated the capital and renamed Sucre in 1839, and also appointed Bolívar president. By these measures celebrating Bolívar, the Deliberative Assembly, arguably, hoped to obtain and ensure its sovereignty in the face of the new republics of Peru and the United Provinces of Río de la Plata, the successor states of the viceroyalties to which the region belonged at different times under colonial rule (Peru, 1542–1776; Río de la Plata, 1776–1810).
With the achievement of liberation, Bolívar gave free rein to his supraregional, centralist dreams. He conceived of the Federation of the Andes, which he explains in a letter dated May 12, 1826, to Sucre. This was to be a massive state incorporating Peru, of which he was dictator; Bolivia; as well as the territories of the Gran Colombia, of which he was president in absentia. When he wrote to Sucre, he had just completed the Bolivian Constitution, which the Bolivian legislature had asked him to produce. Bolívar was not shy about communicating how pleased he was with his own work, citing the effusive praise for it that had been expressed by José María Pando, a Spanish-Peruvian who had served as secretary of state of Spain during its constitutional monarchy of 1820–1823 and who after the French invasion had returned to Peru to serve under Bolívar. Joyous about his achievement, Bolívar spoke of how he had reconciled opposites by merging into one political system the competing political models of the moment:
All will receive this constitution like the arc of an alliance and like the reconciliation of Europe and America, of the army and the people, of democracy and aristocracy, and of empire and the republic. Everyone tells me that my constitution will be the great inducement for our social reform.17
The idea was for the constitution to be adopted first by Bolivia and Peru, which both shortly did, and for the two republics to merge into a federation, thereby establishing a model for the regions of the Gran Colombia, which would also adopt the constitution. The constitution called for a president for life in the executive branch with the vice president appointed by the president and then succeeding him, a legislature with a chamber of censors, a judiciary, an electoral college to take the place of a direct vote, and the abolition of slavery.
Once the distinct regions of the Gran Colombia adopted the constitution, a structure would be put in place to unify them, with the office of the president for life transferring to the larger multiregional state and with the Liberator, who would be the first head of state, traveling from region to region to ensure legal coherence and stability. For the constitution and for the large state, he provided several justifications. One was the threat of the Holy Alliance with its goal of keeping monarchies in place. Not only had Spain been returned to an absolute monarchy, with a continuing French occupation force of 40,000, but also Fernando VII had taken revenge on Liberals, executing over 20,000, including Riego, who was hanged in Madrid. Other reasons were disorder, instability, and dissension in the regions of the Gran Colombia, including in Quito. As for the idea of a president for life, Bolívar in his May 25, 1826 address to the Peruvian Congress used the example of state formation in Haiti to present the concept as the New World democratic model. Power was successfully transferred from one president for life to another, from Pétion to Jeanne-Pierre Boyer.
But the idea of a federation met with opposition, causing a rift between Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander, though the new model was of interest to Páez and Venezuelan elites, who provided one of the main motivations to Bolívar for conceiving of the constitution and the federation in the first place. They had asked him to consider transforming the Gran Colombia into a monarchy, which would preserve their autonomy from the Republic’s capital in Bogotá. Venezuela’s independence movement from the Gran Colombia, led by Páez, erupted in Valencia on April 30, 1826, and is known as La Cosiata (That Strange Thing) or la Revolución de los Morrocoyes (the Turtle Revolution).18
As for Santander, he opposed the federation all the more vehemently after he learned that Bolívar had in effect already set Venezuelan autonomy in motion by not backing the order given by him and the congress of the Gran Colombia for Páez to stand trial for refusing to send Venezuelan men to Bogotá for service in the military. Add to this that Bolívar then named Páez supreme civil and military commander of Venezuela on January 1, 1827, doing this to keep his state from disintegrating. In a situation in which Bolívar was undermining Santander’s authority while creating new fissures in the idea of a centralized Gran Colombia, Santander stood his ground, opposing Bolívar’s call for a constitutional convention and arguing that, legally, such a meeting could not take place until 1831, ten years from the date of the Cúcuta Constitution, as stipulated by its writers.
Bolívar’s plan for a new state that would be a federation faced significant obstacles within the political minefield of the Gran Colombia. But what sealed its fate were events on the ground in the new regions liberated. Sucre, president of Bolivia, having been appointed to that role by Bolívar, then reappointed as such by the Deliberative Assembly under the constitution Bolívar wrote for it, was pushed out of the country by a military uprising in April 1828. Peru and the Gran Colombia, the former no longer administered by Bolívar who had resigned from his appointment as dictator and returned to the north, fell into a border war on June 3, 1828, a war that continued until February 28, 1829.
Bolívar, during these years, also conceived of the Congreso de Panamá, a diplomatic organization he charged with representing all the new nations, except for Haiti, in their dealings with extra-hemispheric powers. They met only once in Panama City in 1826, with a few states sending delegates. The location made sense as Panama belonged to the Gran Colombia, having joined the union in 1821 when it declared independence from Spain, a relationship that would not change until 1903 when in the context of the US canal project the province seceded to become an independent nation.
But the crucial moment with regard to his final years came on August 27, 1828, when, months after his delegates and those of Santander failed to come to an agreement on a new constitution at the Ocaña Constitutional Congress of April 9–June 10, in which Santander in the end agreed to participate, but to which he was able to send more delegates than Bolívar, causing those of the latter to leave so that there would not be a quorum, Bolívar declared a provisional dictatorship in the Gran Colombia. In the weeks ahead with military power clearly serving as the basis of his authority, New Granadan liberals—who opposed the dictatorship and were said to have been inspired by Santander—attempted an assassination of him. Bolívar had many of his would-be assassins executed, but he exiled Santander after commuting the death sentence handed down by a military tribunal. Challenging his state were other forces as well, as by this time not only was Venezuela engaged in discussions on secession, but so was Ecuador. In response to all this, as David Bushnell explains, Bolívar contemplated a number of authoritarian possibilities to hold the Gran Colombia together, though in the end he rejected all of them, leaving some of his pro-monarchy ministers frustrated. They included securing the United Kingdom as the protector of the Gran Colombia. Bolívar knew that the only way he could count on British support would be by achieving for the region the status of a protectorate. They also included, in what would have been an absolute sea change with regard to his view of European powers other than the United Kingdom, securing a prince from one of the monarchies of the Holy Alliance. Indeed, this was a different Bolívar, who having narrowly escaped assassination had reversed himself with regard to the politics he had pursued during his long military career. Now, he cultivated the Catholic Church and the landowning elite while banning from the universities in Bogotá the writings of the British secular moralist Jeremy Bentham.
He had met Bentham in London in 1810 and had received letters from him in 1822 and one in 1825 telling him he had sent several books of his to him, including Constitutional Code and Codification Proposal, books, though, that never arrived.19 The thought of a prince from France, Prussia, Russia, and Austria—monarchies that he had despised for holding the position they did—was conceivable at this moment when he sought an alliance with the Brazilian monarchy.20
During this time, the assassination attempt on his life weighing on him and political disorder in other regions of the Americas apparent—in Mexico, Central America, and Argentina—he wrote sometime in the spring of 1829 a report that was intended for publication in a newspaper, “Una mirada sobre la América española” (“A Look at Spanish America”).21 Just as he had in the Jamaica Letter, he cast a wide net, speaking of many of the postindependence republics and the instability and violence that characterized them. He wondered as he had in his 1828 letter to Páez whether liberation had been worthwhile. He critiqued the military and political leader Vicente Guerrero in Mexico for overthrowing the government on April 1, 1829. He described the insurgent war hero and politician as barbaric and violent, using racist terminology to refer to him as African and Indian descended. Bolívar disapproved of the decision in which Guerrero had participated to execute the former leader Agustín de Iturbide, whose son was part of Bolívar’s staff.
Ultimately, though, Bolívar convened the constituent congress at the beginning of 1830—the Congreso Admirable or the Bogotá Congress—as he promised he would, tasking it with writing a new constitution and electing a president. As Bushnell also tells us, Bolívar saw to it that as many pro-Bolívar delegates as possible were voted to attend it, engineering delegates in the way he believed Santander did for the 1828 constitutional congress of Ocaña.22 These were the final moments in the life of the Gran Colombia, reduced, as indicated in Chap. 1, to an apparatus governing no more than the territorial limits of present-day Colombia in addition to Panama. The Admirable Congress appointed Joaquín Mosquera president, and ordered that Bolívar leave the country, this being the condition set by Venezuela. Bolívar’s army disbanded, having not been paid for some time, returning to Venezuela. Bolívar left for the coast.
In our discussion of how Bolívar’s interpreters have positioned him over time, and have drawn different conclusions about the merits and meanings of his intellectual figure the following becomes clear: Bolívar was a prolific writer and serious political thinker, inspired by the French Enlightenment and the Greco-Roman tradition as well as by British constitutionalism. He used his literary and intellectual talent to frame the cause of liberation as a colonial struggle; to offer visions of a new American identity; to advocate for the abolition of slavery; to contribute to the making of one constitution; and to conceive a constitution that was entirely his own. We have already spoken of the 1812 Cartagena Manifesto in connection to Ángel Rama and Augusto Mijares, the one adopting Bolívar’s reading of the 1811 constitution presented therein, the latter slyly refuting that reading; and the 1826 Bolivian Constitution, briefly adopted by Peru and Bolivia. But let us consider, before we go on, two other major texts of Bolívar’s that have already been mentioned, the Jamaica Letter (1815) and the Angostura Address (1819).
The first, now one of the most recognizable works in the Latin American canon, was produced in a moment of crisis to promote the independence movement. Interestingly, it did not find its way into print in Spanish until 1833, with its influence during Bolívar’s lifetime limited to references made to it by Bolívar in published writings, and through an English translation of 1818.23 The second, the Angostura Address, was formulated in a moment of triumph and political consolidation of the patriot forces in southeastern Venezuela. The four documents have appeared in multiple ways, whether together or separately, and/or are framed by other documents authored by Bolívar. Those other documents include a letter of 1816 in which he speaks on race relations, civil war, and Haiti, documents of importance, as we have said, for the work of Aline Helg who also studies the racial hierarchy that comes into being in northern new Granada in the 1820s with Venezuelan white generals like Carlos Soublette being given important posts. Others are from the 1820s. Serving in many cases the purpose of defining his so-called last chapter, they range from his 1822 poem, “My Delirium atop the Chimborazo,” said by some to be fabricated;24 to his words in a letter to Juan José Flores just a month before his death that speak of a future of little tyrants of all colors and races, of an America that is ungovernable, and of those who have served the revolution having plowed the sea. With regard to his words about plowing the sea, they are often cited. The exact ones written by Bolívar and that he purportedly repeated on his deathbed are “El que sirve la revolución ara en el mar” (“He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea”).25 In addition, there are purported words of his cited in a newspaper article from 1850 alleged to have been found in the Venezuelan archive by German-born historian Gerhard Masur. Bolívar says that he dreams of creating a large American state, uniting north and south. The text is perhaps of dubious origin, but it rises to the level of an invaluable archival discovery for Masur. To be sure, Bolívar’s statements on social order, anarchy, and race cut both ways. They have been cited by those who wish to disqualify him as a state leader and those who, desiring to do just the opposite, use his figure to justify their authoritarian top-down visions.
The September 6, 1815 Jamaica Letter was a response to a letter written to Bolívar by a British resident of Jamaica, Henry Cullen. Bolívar penned it at the lowest moment of the struggle for independence, when he found himself on the British-controlled Island, having fled the mainland in the face of the overwhelming forces of the Spanish under the command of Pablo Morillo. In the letter he appeals to the British, which together with Russia, Austria, and Prussia had just defeated Napoleon. He asks for military assistance against the Spanish, using a slew of elements from the arsenal of French Enlightenment rhetoric and discourse to argue that Latin American independence is deserving of being supported. The elements from that arsenal that he weaves into the letter include the emblem of light and darkness, the binary of civilization and barbarism, the idea of a single humanity (though for Bolívar humanity in Latin America has its own historical reality, being in its infancy), the critical category of universal reason, the project of education, the concept of free international commerce, contract and political theory, and names of the thinkers who created these new categories and lines of inquiry, including Montesquieu and Rousseau, the former whose Spirit of Laws, the premier text of the new political theory of the age, he draws upon to offer a reflection on the political forms that the liberated regions of Latin America will take.
Deploying these elements, he puts on quite a performance. For starters, he asserts that the independence movement is still alive and that victory is inevitable, destined to be achieved either by his generation or by a subsequent one, the consciousness awakened in him and others certain to take hold again should there be failure. He also submits that creoles leading the independence movement are a social class with legitimate claims to power going back to what he states, using Spanish political contract theory of the 1500s, that of Bartolomé de Las Casas as well as of Guerra, was a contract established between emperor Charles V (Carlos I of Spain) and the conquerors and first colonizers; that Spain is a barbaric empire that has prevented its colonies from developing, with the colonies, therefore, needing assistance to gain the footing denied them by centuries of neglect; that independentists will prevail over royalists despite the fact that they have just been defeated; that independence offers to the world the possibility of new markets consisting of rich Latin American primary resources, markets that will occupy an important place in enlightened commerce, with Latin America serving both as a complement to Europe and as a center of commerce between east and west; and, to give a last example appearing early in the letter, that just as happened in Europe where nations came into being after the break-up of the Roman Empire, nations would emerge from the collapse of Spain. In the parallel he draws, Spain is like the Roman Empire in decline, but the resemblance stops there: it is not the indigenous communities of Latin America—the structural equivalent of the tribes of Europe conquered by the Romans, the Gauls, or the Visigoths, for instance—who will be the new subjects of history. Rather, in a formulation that will be fraught, it is individuals of Spanish descent born in the Americas, creoles, who will occupy that position, wedged between the Spanish conquerors and the indigenous, the latter long ago dispossessed of their lands, rightful owners though the indigenous are, as he famously states, underlining with this the historical violence that has led to creole subjectivity. What is Bolívar up to? He is explaining to Europeans what the creole class is, a class distinct from the Spanish and the indigenous, and he is also explaining, in a situation in which divisions among creoles have been much reported, that independentist creoles, a minority compared to royalist, will prevail.
A little less than four years elapsed between the Jamaica Letter and the Angostura Address. The beginning of that period saw Bolívar in December of 1815 leave Jamaica for Haiti in search of support from the country’s president Alexandre Pétion, and to join other Venezuelan exiles in Les Cayes. Before leaving, however, he penned another letter to a different British correspondent—the letter of which we spoke above in connection to Aline Helg—making the same plea for British assistance only now with the explicit goal of demonstrating to the British that racial discord was not the issue in the way it had been in pre-revolutionary Haiti. He explains that the numerically small creole class was especially qualified for its leadership role, that the racial violence that had occurred was contingent, the result of the Spanish promising African slaves the property of their creole masters in the case they leave them to join their military ranks, that the relationship between creole masters and slaves is a harmonious one, and that the indigenous represent a stabilizing force, desiring only to remain in their communities. With his arrival in Haiti and his meeting with Pétion on January 2, 1816, Bolívar’s position on slavery in relationship to white hegemony was about to change. Pétion offered to provide ships and provisions to Bolívar provided he vow to abolish the institution once independence was achieved. Bolívar accepted the condition, with Pétion supporting a first voyage that failed, then a second that was successful.
Without Pétion, it is not clear how Latin American independence would have come about, nor when, if ever, Bolívar would have changed his views to favor abolition, though other leaders could have emerged at this time in response to the polarization created by Fernando VII. Interestingly, as we have said, historian Jeremy Adelman does not speak of Bolívar’s exile, concerned as he is with understanding the process of the military struggle as the result of complex forces including Fernando VII’s counter-revolution, which, he underlines, is what permitted Bolívar to gain authority, and with seeing the initiative to end slavery as the result of the racial politics of the war struggle, not of Bolívar’s relationship with Pétion.26
But if Haiti played a crucial role in allowing Bolívar another day to lead, with Bolívar moving to assume the position of abolitionist as he promised he would to Pétion, so would Britain, though not as called for by Bolívar in his missives. Instead of the British fleet, assistance came in the form of non-state actors. As Bolívar returned to the mainland in 1816, established his authority as leader of the independence movement, and founded the Third Republic in Angostura on the Orinoco River in 1817, soldiers and officials recruited by an agent of Bolívar in London, where Bolívar also had a representative of the independence movement in the highly regarded intellectual Andrés Bello, began to stream into the region to serve under his command. Many were from Britain’s unemployed Napoleonic armies, with some who had never seen military service, but as Matthew Brown explains in his 2006 Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies, the seven thousand who traveled across the Atlantic between 1816 and 1825 were a mix of mercenaries, idealists, and adventurers. Some, then, were inspired by the promise of payment for duties rendered, others by the opportunity to defend the concepts of liberty and freedom, having just successfully done so in Spain against Napoleon. Others were interested in settling territories that promised to be new republics, new utopias to contribute to.27
Bolívar delivered the Angostura Address on February 15, 1819, bolstered by his army with which he would cross the Andes into New Granada, an army incorporating thousands of plainsmen of different races, former black slaves who had gained their liberty by joining the military fighting in years past, and European soldiers. Everything had changed. In contrast to the Jamaica Letter where a defeated Bolívar speaks in the name of an elite economic class and of a Latin America ready to be incorporated into the British world system, in the Angostura Address he presents himself as the citizen/leader of a new state: the Gran Colombia with the territorial limits we already know. He and his army were poised to bring into existence, through military action, a state in which, true to his pledge to Pétion, slavery would be abolished. Former slaves were now to be citizens, and his soldiers would be rewarded with lands and celebrated as fathers of the republic in the Order of the Liberators, the highest distinction for service to the country that was created by Bolívar in 1813. In the body of the address, previous to these statements, which come as a list at the end, he outlines for the assembled leaders from the Venezuelan economic and military elites the British-inspired political system he conceives of, one with a president rather than a king and with stress on the division of powers. He offers that system as a blueprint for the constitution to be drawn up for the Gran Colombia, one in which through Rousseau, as Lynch tells us, Bolívar defends the principle of equality, arguing that the state has the responsibility to correct the inequalities that define human beings in their natural state—individuals all having different talents and aptitudes—and to give expression to peoples who are racially diverse. Europeans had mixed with the indigenous and Africans, and Africans with the indigenous and Europeans, all offspring of the same mother, as he puts it, but with fathers of dissimilar origins and races, fathers who were foreigners with different epidermises.28
Presenting his constitution as continuing and correcting that of 1811, he develops a hermeneutic based on what Montesquieu, inspired by Plato, presents as the twin dangers of direct democracy and tyranny, the former leading to the latter. His government will not fall into this pattern, promoting as it will education and strong government privileging executive authority and calling for a hereditary senate to be made up of experts in the law and who will see the republic through difficult times.
Bolívar was threading a needle, making the 1811 constitution stand for Montesquieu’s absolute democracy and arguing for the need to bring to that constitution protections and limitations that elevated the principle of moral and responsible leadership above governmental system itself. He also conceived of a fourth branch of government, the Moral Branch, of which we have spoken and that he modeled on the Athenian Areopagus and Roman censors, also derived from the writings of Montesquieu. This body would oversee not only education, but also the behavior of citizens and public officials, authorized to censure or remove the latter for violations and to reprimand those among the former who were not sufficiently active. Indeed, moral behavior had become all-important for Bolívar, with a Rome different from that of the Jamaica Letter taking center stage.
He now describes the colonial legacy of which he speaks in the Jamaica Letter not only in relationship to the exclusion of the creoles from the administration of the colony, but also in connection to the idea of moral perversion, a condition that had resulted from centuries of colonization and that they needed to overcome. Rome would provide a model for the institutionalization of virtue. At the same time, Bolívar advised that legislators should look not only to France and England, but also to the United States, though not to its federal system, which he stood against throughout his career, a straw man of a kind for his top-down or aristocratic republican vision of governance. Judging by what he proposes in regard to the executive, he is referring to the concept of checks and balances, so important in the US Constitution, but which as we have said, he would have gotten from Montesquieu and from the United Kingdom, the latter serving as an inspiration to the French thinker. In justifying increased authority for his single executive that would take the place of the triumvirate of the 1811 constitution, he speaks of how the president’s council was to act as a check on the president, its members desirous of protecting the virtue of the office lest their own reputations be besmirched.
How, in dialogue with one another, interpreters have constructed Bolívar’s figure using the story of his personal, military, and political life—including the texts he authored, the figures of whom he spoke and whom he met (some perhaps only according to legend), the traditions in which he worked: classicism, the French Enlightenment (Montesquieu and Rousseau) , British constitutionalism and others in which he has been placed—is the central subject of this book. Bolívar, who comes to us always either paired with another or placed in a larger group, has been made to stand as the foundation for so many projects of a national and/or hemispheric stamp, the way he is presented the key to unlocking struggles and debates across the Americas.