Jose de San Martin was born in what is now eastern Argentina in 1788 and learned his military trade as a Spanish army officer 1808-1811 in the brutal war against Napoleon. Deciding his talents could be better used fighting Spanish oppression at home after Argentina had declared its independence, he returned to Buenos Aires in 1812, where he became commander of the army. Realising that Argentina would not be secure unless Spanish rule ended all over South America, he took an army across the Andes to liberate Chile (with Bernardo O’Higgins), founded the Chile navy (with Thomas Cochrane) and became the ‘Protector’ (first President) of Peru not long before meeting Bolivar.
The Venezuelan Simon Bolivar had also been a busy man to the north, becoming temporary dictator of Venezuela in 1813. Bolivar was a ruthless man with a vicious temper; unlike San Martin, Bolivar was a dictator by nature.
San Martin was the liberator of the south, Bolivar the liberator of the north. The meeting – a secret one behind closed doors – was held in Ecuador at a time when they had Spain’s mighty armies for the taking, and the purpose of the meeting was to plan the final strategy for the inevitable victory. The course of the meeting is still debated, but from what we know of what was said, it is difficult to view the great revolutionary Bolivar in anything but a bad light. San Martin offered at first to share the leadership: when Bolivar refused – on the grounds that his forces were the strongest . San Martin offered to step down. This noble offer, alas. also seems to have offended Bolivar, who probably at this point just wanted San Martin to have never existed. San Martin, realising that Bolivar’s intransigence was implacable, decide to turn over command to Bolivar, left South America for good and returned to Europe, dying in France in 1850.
What Happened Next
Bolivar went on to defeat the Spanish. Northern Peru was renamed Bolivia in his honour, but the ideal of a federation of all Spanish-speaking Americans never came to fruition and was probably never achievable, as he recognised on his deathbed in 1830, saying that the sole benefit of his work had been achieving independence from Spain, but at the cost of all other forms of civilized life. Life had become a torment, laws just bits of paper, and the future of South America would be one of governance by petty tyrants. Bolivar’s unhappy prophecy was pretty much fulfilled. In the 1860s/1870s a Chile-Peru alliance went to war with Spain, and later with Bolivia, over bird shit, in the Guano Pacific war. Also in the 1860s, Paraguay fought one of the most disastrous wars in history, fighting Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay at the same time (50-70% of Paraguay’s population died). It is often suggested that much of the post-independence strife in Latin America could have been avoided if the meeting between San Martin and Bolivar had not been a failure.