The Liberator Simon Bolivar lived only 47 years, yet in that brief span his life was filled by events so momentous for his time and the future that it could be said that there was not one Bolivar but various great individual in one person.

A brief chronological summary of his life can superficially tell us why. He was born in Caracas on 24 th July 1783.  He was baptized Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios. His family was aristocratic and possessed great wealth in land and in copper and gold mines. By 1792 he was orphaned of both father and mother. He had the good fortune of having two exemplary tutors: Andres Bello, perhaps the greatest polymath in all of Spanish America at the time, and especially Simon Rodriguez, an enlightened educator whom Bolivar took to his heart. In 1799, Bolivar traveled, via México, to Spain, where his education continued and was vastly enhanced. He traveled in France and imbibed important political influences. In Madrid, he married Maria Teresa Rodriguez del Toro y Alaiza, a beautiful young Spaniard of Venezuelan descent. In 1802, he returned with her to Venezuela, where she died the following year, leaving Bolivar forlorn but avid for more and more ideas and goals. Towards the end of 1803, Bolivar returned to Europe, but this time he only passed through Cadiz and Madrid and established his residence in Paris, where he witnessed Napoleon’s coronation as emperor, an event that dampened his admiration for the French military genius. In 1805, Bolivar was joined by his teacher Rodriguez, with whom he crossed the Alps on foot and    traveled in Italy. By then Bolivar was determined to achieve the independence of his native land. In 1807, on his return to Venezuela, Bolivar visited the United States. From 1807 to 1810, Bolivar attended to his personal affairs but his thoughts were oriented towards the politics of independence.

When the Caracas municipal council refused to recognize Napoleon’s occupation of Spain and established an autonomous junta on 19th April 1810, Bolivar saw that the way was open for independence. He and those who shared that ideal invited Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan who had held the rank of general in the French revolutionary  army, to lead the country. On 5th July 1811, a national assembly, headed by Miranda and influenced by Bolivar’s exhortations, declared the full independence of Venezuela. There was a royalist reaction and the young First Venezuelan Republic fell in 1812. Miranda was taken to Cadiz and imprisoned for the rest of his life. Already with the rank of general, Bolivar escaped to Cartagena, in the viceroyalty of New Granada (today’s Colombia), where the patriots had displaced Spanish colonial authorities. In Cartagena, Bolivar made a public manifesto pleading for the unity of Spanish America against colonialism. In 1813, at the head of a small army of recruits, Bolivar sailed up the Magdalena river and then invaded Venezuela from the Colombian city of Cucuta. Bolivar liberated the Venezuelan Andes of Spanish control and in Trujillo emitted the controversial decree of “War to the Death”. In Caracas, he was acclaimed as Liberator. In 1814, another royalist reaction, led by the Spanish populist Jose Tomas Boves, swept from the interior plains of Venezuela and put and end to the Second Republic.

Bolivar sailed to Jamaica, where he once again called for Spanish American unity and even contemplated a Pan – American congress. In 1815, from Jamaica, Bolivar went to Haiti where he obtained the support of President Alexander Petion. After a failed expedition to Venezuela, Bolivar returned to Haiti and, again with Petion’s aid, he managed to land in the island of Margarita and from there, on the first of January of 1817, he reached continental Venezuela never again to depart from South America. By that time, the Venezuelan war of independence was raging between populist patriots, who had defeated and killed Boves in 1815, and the Spanish army led by Gen. Pablo Morillo, which was entrenched in Caracas and central Venezuela. Bolivar was acclaimed as the natural leader of the patriots, especially by Gen. Jose Antonio Paez, and he established The Third Venezuelan Republic in the city of Angostura (today ciudad Bolivar) on the Orinoco River, through which waterway the independence movement received foreign aid and volunteers. To break the stalemate, in 1819 Bolivar crossed the Andes to New Granada and defeated decisively royalist  forces in the battle of Boyacá. In 1820, Bolivar began the recovery of central Venezuela, which culminated in 1821, at the battle of Carabobo. Already the congress at Angostura had voted for the union of Venezuela and New Granada. The name of Great Colombia for the new state was adopted at the Congress of Cucuta. In 1822, troops under Bolivar marched into the colonial presidency of Quito (today’s Ecuador) and his most able military commander, Gen. Antonio Jose de Sucre, defeated the colonialist forces at the battle of Pichincha. Ecuador accepted to become part of Great Colombia.

Since 1810, there was another great liberation movement which began in Buenos Aires, then the capital of the viceroyalty of La Plata (today’s Argentina).  Gen. Jose de San Martin, another great Spanish American Liberator, had liquidated Spanish resistance in the interior of his country, from where he too crossed the Andes and concluded the independence of Chile in 1818, with the aid of the Chilean leader Bernardo O’Higgins, at the battles of Chacabuco and Maipú.  The Spanish vice-royalty of Peru, which was, with Mexico, the other crucial center of the Spanish American colonial empire, was still very much in existence. San Martin sailed to Pisco where he wrested Lima, the Peruvian capital, from royalists, although these were still entrenched in the Peruvian Andean interior.  Bolivar and San Martin meet in the Ecuadorian port of Guayaquil. The two Liberators agreed that Bolivar should finish the task of ending Spanish rule in Peru.  In 1823, Bolivar was in Lima where he was declared dictator.  In 1824, Sucre attacked and defeated the royalists at Junin and at the decisive battle of Ayacucho, considered the landmark victory in the process of de-colonization of South America and Panama.  Sucre went on to liberate Upper Peru, today’s Bolivia, of which he was president until 1826.  Bolivar endowed both Peru and Bolivia, which was named after him, with democratic, progressive constitutions.

Within Great Colombia, Paez had tried to separate Venezuela and this prompted Bolivar’s return to Bogota, the capital, in 1826.  Bolivar managed to impose a truce between the separatist factions who wanted to dismember Great Colombia.  Political intrigues forced him to assume dictatorial powers, but the centrifugal forces were too great to overcome and Bolivar resigned the presidency in 1830.  Intending to leave the country he had made and loved, Bolivar went to the port of Santa Marta, in Colombia, where he died of tuberculosis.

Now, I must provide you with the backgrounds which explain these events, in doing which I will attempt to make the greatness of Bolivar, and San Martin, emerge from the mere re-telling of their deeds.  You might well ask: why, if all of Spanish South America was part of one empire, spoke one language, and shared one religion, did it not become independent as one great nation?

The entere colonial period of all of South America, including now Brazil (but not the Guianas) can be considered as the gestations or formation of the proto-nations which later became the independent South American republics. Let me add that by “proto-nations” I mean simply that the colonial dependencies of Spain in America had all the characteristics of states except sovereignty. South America has an extension of 17,800,000 square kilometers. That is approximately six times the area of India, which shows how large territorially India itself is but also the vastness of the South American continent. It is often said that the Andes cordillera is the backbone of South America, and this is true if you consider that only Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay are outside the reach of the Andes.  But the Andes are not the same throughout their entire length.  The Andes only reach Venezuela as a relatively minor branch.  In some places, as in Bolivia, the Andes are mostly a plateau. The Andes are the barriers that separate Argentina and Chile with some of the highest peaks in the world. Argentina has the largest watershed area east of the Andes. Geologically, it is only partly an Andean country. The western watershed of the Andes varies from one country to another.  In Colombia and Ecuador it is jungle, but in Peru and northern Chile it constitutes one long desert. The Chilean central coast has a mild Mediterranean climate.  If the Andes are the backbone, the heart of South America is the biggest single tropical jungle in the world, with the Amazon river as its sinuous axis. All Andean countries, except Chile and Argentina, also include large slabs of this jungle.  Geographically, therefore, South America was a bad candidate for unification. But there is much more.

South American climates go from the extremely torrid to the temperate to the frigid.  The demography of South America varied from one region or province to another.  The fate of Amerindians was different.  In Argentina and Chile, they were forced to the south, but in countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, and Ecuador, they were so numerous that they constituted very large majorities of the populations of those countries.  The importation of black slaves was greater in Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela than in the rest of South America, were Amerindians did the work of slaves. The Spaniards that emigrated to South America came from different places. In Venezuela, as in the whole of the Caribbean basin, Europeans settlers came mostly from Andalusia and the Canary Islands.  The mixing of different ethnic backgrounds was the rule.  The Amerindians that were not assimilated in that manner retreated to the jungles that even today form a great part of the borders of Venezuela.  But in Colombia next door, Spaniards settled the highlands and slaves were concentrated in the tropical coastlines. Brazil received mostly Portuguese, but these were greatly outnumbered by slaves. Argentina was greatly, but not overwhelmingly, settled by Europeans.

The Spanish South American empire was organized ad hoc.  Lima and Mexico City were initially the two administrative poles as capitals of the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain respectively. But as provinces appeared or were formed, central control was precarious, in fact next to impossible the further a region or province was from the capitals of the two viceroyalties. The Spanish authorities recognized this inevitable de-centralization and improvised by creating either two viceroyalties, as in New Granada and La Plata, or endowing other provinces with central institutions.  Venezuela was the last provinces to acquire the tokens of autonomous administrations with the formation of the captaincy general in 1777. Given these geographical, demographical, and administrative circumstances, it was impossible for South America to evolve as a single political unit. What did evolve were the proto-nations I mentioned with the rough borders, different demographics, many ways of speaking Castilian, and great variety of particular social characteristics.  In some countries, like Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay Spanish was a language of minorities.

Some historians believe that it was Venezuela’s marginal situation within the Spanish colonialist system that let it to be the first of the proto-nations to declare its complete autonomy or self-rule from Spain, just short of independence. If this is indeed the case, you might wonder why the final realization of Venezuelan independence was so complicated and why, to achieve it, Bolivar suffered so many ups and downs? Like all of Spanish America, Venezuela was ruled from Spain through Spanish intermediaries. The local aristocracies were not given political authority and only minor military commands. In general it is valid to said that when Venezuela declared its independence what it did was to transfer authority from the Spanish legates to a tiny Spanish –descended ruling class with which the mass of Venezuelans, being under the subjection of this local class, had no sympathy.  It was thus that, starting in 1810 and until 1814, every Venezuelan thrust towards independence was countered by a royalist counter-thrust which counted with considerable though hardly total popular support.  One side to Bolivar’s genius was that, despite being aware of the forces that opposite him, he never failed to follow the thorny path he set himself.  Once embarked on the independence struggle, he gave up personal possessions (although this was not binding on his family) and he endured whatever difficulties adversity placed before him.  The extreme “Degree to the Death”, with threatened will execution all born and bred Spaniards who did not actively support  independence, was conceived not because Bolivar was ruthless of inclement, but because he wanted to put the mass of Venezuelans of his side even by such drastic means.  When this decree was abrogated, by the truce that Bolivar signed with Morillo en 1820, the majority of the Venezuelan, whatever their social situation, were for independence.

Again you might wonder: if Bolivar had his work cut out for him just in trying to emancipate Venezuela, why did he get tangled in Colombian affairs and even contemplated the remote possibility of a Spanish American union?  Like Miranda, whom Venezuelans call the Precursor, Bolivar never for one moment doubted that freeing one country would not lead the inevitable piecemeal independence for all of Spanish America.  Even if he had not had this conviction from the start, his military and political experience sufficed to prove to him that independence for Venezuela without New Granada was practically inconceivable.  When the First Republic fell, it was to New Granada that Bolivar went.  When Venezuela’s particular war for independence was in a stalemate due to the Spanish invasion led by Morillo, Bolivar had his strategic clear: defeat Spanish power in New Granada and you have the ideal base for finishing the war in Venezuela.  And that is precisely what happened.  If a royalist New Granada could be a threat to Venezuela, then Quito, and specially Peru, could be a threat to Great Colombia, and Great Colombia was Bolivar’s empowering dream and the creature of his mighty idealism.  Bolivar did not go to Quito because he needed or wanted laurels.  If any one, it was Sucre who gained military laurels in Ecuador. Bolivar went to Quito as par of his grand strategy for liberating Spanish South America. Great Colombia was being threatened by Pasto, a Spanish royalty bastion in southern New Granada, and this threat also came from Quito, which had been occupied by Spanish forces from Peru. Bolivar incorporated Quito into Great Colombia because under Spanish colonial arrangements the presidency of Quito had been made dependent on the viceroyalty of New Granada.   Except for his persistence on consolidating Great Colombia, Bolivar never tried to hinder the sovereign choices of any people and everywhere he campaigned he brought with him ideas for liberty, for education, for progress in general, which he embodied in constitutions that he wrote or oversaw.

If San Martin had already taken Lima from the Spaniards, why did he defer to Bolivar in the war for Peruvian independence? And what did these two Liberators talk about in secret at their meeting in Guayaquil?  This is a complex issue but it is not as obscure as it might seem.  Unlike Bolivar, San Martin did not feel comfortable in politics.  San Martin was a professional soldier with a distinguished career including during the war of Spanish against Napoleon, in which he participate in the battle of Bailen, the first important military reverse that Napoleon experience in Europe. The remarkable thing about these two great men is that they entirely coincided on the strategic necessity of  breaking Spanish power in Peru for the rest of independence Spanish South America to feel and to be secure.  Therefore, it is reasonable to presume that, on whatever issue they might have differed, they were completely agreement on the basics.

But there are other considerations to take into accounts. San Martin in Guayaquil was three times the distance to his base in Buenos Aires than Bolivar was to Bogota. The logistic are important. Bolivar could more easily obtain reinforcements that his Argentinean counterpart.  Military triumph in Peru required political maneuvering in Lima.  Just the formation of Great Colombia was political feat itself, and Bolivar had managed it.  Reason dictated that he was the man to urges policies on Lima and the whole of Peru. Some have said that San Martin wanted to stake a claim on Quito, but this can be safely discounted.  Quito had never been under the colonial sovereignty of Buenos Aires.  From its conquest by Spain, Quito had been a presidency, theoretically subservient to Lima but in practice administratively autonomous.  What is more likely is that San Martin might have wanted to remind Bolivar that Upper Peru had been a dependency of La Plata. This provably explains why Bolivar initially reprimanded Sucre, or appeared to do so, when the latter invade Upper Peru.  The solution, the independence of Bolivia, was Solomonic and a testimony on the political side of Bolivar’s genius, and be it said also as tribute to San Martin’s magnanimous political realism.  It would be other wise if Bolivar had tried to integrate Peru and Bolivia to Great Colombia, but by the time that he entered Lima Bolivar knew that his dream of a Pan-American union was unrealistic.  There remained his Great Colombia project and this he was prepared to defend to the bitter end.  However, in Bolivar’s absence the regional factions had been gathering such force that it should also have seemed also unrealistic to bring them to heel, as Bolivar tried to.  Can Bolivar be accused of having sacrificed Great Colombia for the personal glory that he gained in liberating Peru? This, as we so, is hardly the case.  The liberation of Peru was an absolute strategic necessity.  For the reasons we mentioned, political and military, Bolivar was in a better position than San Martin to engage the Spanish forces in Peru.  It might be possible to argue that Bolivar should have foreseen that Great Colombia could not work because its three components were already proto-nations when Bolivar tried to integrate them.  But this can only bee affirmed with hindsight.  Genius, precisely because it is genius, is not easy to analyze. Alexander the Great was a military genius who tried to build a bridge between   Europe and Asia.  He died at 33 and in his dream was shattered by his successors.  Abraham Lincoln was a political genius who fell at the age of 57 from a bullet of the forces of bigotry which he despised.  Arguably, genius is to have an ideal and to have credentials to pursue it. In this sense, and in any sense, Bolivar was a great genius.  He had a great ideal and he had gained his right to it.  It was in part the total selflessness with which he pursued it that in the end exhausted him to death.  But the ideal of greatness for Spanish America is alive and well.  It is one of the reasons why officially there is a country which proudly calls itself the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.