Simón Bolívar

Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco ;

On 17 July 1817, Angostura fell to Bolívar's forces, which gained control of the Orinoco River in early August. Angostura became the provisional Republican capital and in September, Bolívar began creating formal political and military structures for the republic. Following a meeting at San Juan de Payara on 30 January 1818, Páez recognized Bolívar as supreme leader. In February 1818, the Republicans moved north and took Calabozo, where , who had returned to Venezuela a year earlier after conquering Republican New Granada. Bolívar next advanced towards Caracas, but was defeated while en route at the on 16 March. He escaped assassination by Spanish infiltrators in April. Illness and additional Republican defeats obliged Bolívar to return to Angostura in May. For the rest of the year, he focused on administering the republic, rebuilding its armed forces, and organizing elections for a national congress that would meet in 1819.

Gran Colombia: 1819–1830

The congress met in Angostura on 15 February 1819. There, Bolívar gave a speech in which he advocated for a centralized government modeled on the British government and racial equality, and relinquished civil authority to the congress. On 16 February, the congress elected Bolívar as president and Zea as vice president. On 27 February, Bolívar left Angostura to rejoin Páez in the west and against Morillo, albeit ineffectively. In May, as the annual wet season was beginning in the Llanos, Bolívar met with his officers and revealed his intention to invade and liberate New Granada from Royalist occupation, which he had prepared for by sending Santander to build up Republican forces in Casanare Province in August 1818. On 27 May, Bolívar marched with more than 2,000 soldiers toward the Andes and left Páez, Mariño, Urdaneta, and Bermúdez to tie down Morillo's forces in Venezuela.

Bolívar entered Casanare Province with his army on 4 June 1819, then met up with Santander at Tame, Arauca, on 11 June. The combined Republican force reached the Eastern Range of the Andes on 22 June and began a grueling crossing. On 6 July, the Republicans descended the Andes from the Pisba moors and into the plains of New Granada. After a brief convalescence, the Republicans made rapid progress against the forces of Spanish colonel José María Barreiro Manjón until, on 7 August, the Royalists were routed at the Battle of Boyacá. On 10 August, Bolívar entered Bogotá, which the Spanish officials had hastily abandoned, and captured the viceregal treasury and armories. After sending forces to secure Republican control of central New Granada, Bolívar paraded through Bogotá on 18 September with Santander.

Desiring to merge New Granada and Venezuela into a "greater republic of Colombia", Bolívar first established a provisional government in Bogotá with Santander, and then left to resume campaigning against the Royalists in Venezuela on 20 September 1819. En route, he learned that Zea had been replaced as vice president in September 1819 by Arismendi, who was conspiring with Mariño against Urdaneta and Bermúdez. Bolívar arrived in Angostura on 11 December and, by being conciliatory, defused the plot. He then proposed the merging of New Granada and Venezuela to the congress on 14 December, which was approved. On 17 December, the congress issued a decree creating the Republic of Colombia, including the regions of Venezuela, New Granada, and the still Spanish-controlled Real Audiencia of Quito, and elected Bolívar and Zea president and vice president respectively.

After Christmas Day, 1819, Bolívar left Angostura to direct campaigns against Royalist forces along the Caribbean coasts of Venezuela and New Granada. He met with Santander in Bogotá in March 1820, then rode to Cúcuta and inspected Republican forces in northern Colombia over April and May 1820. Meanwhile, Morillo's military and political position was fatally undermined by , which forced Ferdinand VII to accept a liberal constitution in March. News of the mutiny and its consequences arrived in Colombia in March and was followed by orders from Spain to Morillo to publicize the constitution and negotiate a peace that would return Colombia to the Spanish Empire. Bolívar and Morillo, seeking to gain leverage over each other, delayed talks until 21 November, when Colombian and Royalist delegates met in Trujillo, Venezuela. The delegates completed on 25 November, establishing a six-month truce, a prisoner exchange, and basic rights for combatants. Bolívar and Morillo signed the treaties on 25 and 26 November, then met the next day at . After this meeting, Morillo turned his command over to Spanish general Miguel de la Torre and departed for Spain on 17 December.

In February 1821, as Bolívar was traveling from Bogotá to Cúcuta in anticipation of the opening of a new congress there, he learned that Royalist-controlled Maracaibo had defected to Colombia and been occupied by Urdaneta. La Torre protested to Bolívar, who refused to return Maracaibo, leading to a renewal of hostilities on 28 April. Over May and June, Colombia's armies made rapid progress until, on 24 June, Bolívar and Páez decisively defeated La Torre at the Battle of Carabobo. All Royalist forces remaining in Venezuela were eliminated by August 1823. Bolívar entered Caracas in triumph on 29 June, and issued a decree on 16 July dividing Venezuela into three military zones governed by Páez, Bermúdez, and Mariño. Bolívar then met with the Congress of Cúcuta, which had ratified the formation of Gran Colombia and elected him as president and Santander as vice president in September. Bolívar accepted and was sworn in on 3 October, although he protested the establishment of a precedent of military leaders as head of the Colombian state.

Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia: 1821–1826

After the Battle of Carabobo, Bolívar turned his attention south, to Pasto, Colombia; Quito and the Free Province of Guayaquil, Ecuador; and the Viceroyalty of Peru. Pasto and Quito were Royalist strongholds, while Guayaquil had declared its independence on 9 October 1820 and had been garrisoned by Sucre on Bolívar's orders in January 1821. Panama declared its independence on 28 November 1821 and joined Colombia. Peru had been invaded by a Republican army led by Argentine general José de San Martín, who had liberated Chile and Peru, and Bolívar feared San Martín would absorb Ecuador into Peru. In October 1821, after congress empowered him to secure Ecuador for Colombia, Bolívar assembled an army in Bogotá that departed on 13 December 1821. His advance was halted by illness and a Pyrrhic victory at the in southern Colombia on 7 April 1822.

To the south, Sucre, who had been trapped in Guayaquil by Royalist advances from Quito, now advanced, decisively defeated the Royalists at the Battle of Pichincha on 24 May 1822, and occupied Quito. On 6 June, Pasto surrendered, and ten days later Bolívar paraded through Quito with Sucre. He also met the Ecuadorian Republican Manuela Sáenz, the wife of an English doctor, with whom he began a lasting affair.

From Quito, Bolívar traveled to Guayaquil in anticipation of a meeting with San Martín to discuss the city's status and to rally support for its annexation by Colombia. When San Martín arrived in Guayaquil on 26 July, Bolívar had already secured Guayaquil for Colombia, and the two-day Guayaquil Conference produced no agreement between Bolívar and San Martín. Politically isolated, and disillusioned, San Martín resigned from his offices and went into exile.

Over the rest of 1822, Bolívar traveled around Ecuador to complete its annexation while dispatching officers to suppress repeated rebellions in Pasto and resisting calls to return to Bogotá or Venezuela. Meanwhile, Royalist forces under general José de Canterac overwhelmed the Peruvian republic. After initially refusing Colombian assistance, the Peruvian congress asked Bolívar several times in 1823 to assume command of their forces. Bolívar responded by sending an army under Sucre to assist, then delayed his own departure to Peru until he obtained permission from the Colombian congress on 3 August. When Bolívar arrived in Lima, Peru's capital, on 1 September, Peru was split between two rival presidents, José de la Riva Agüero and José Bernardo de Tagle, and the Royalists under the Viceroy of Peru, José de la Serna.

In November 1823, Riva Agüero, who plotted with the Royalists against Bolívar, was betrayed by his officers to Bolívar and exiled from Peru. Bolívar crossed out the Peruvians and Quiteños as some "vicious to the point of infamy and low to the extreme" in a letter to Santander, since he saw Peru and Quito as the last royalist strongholds, or in the case of Quito, opposed to Colombia. While Bolívar was bedridden with fever over the first two months of 1824, Tagle defected to the Royalists with the garrison and city of Callao and briefly took Lima. In response, the Peruvian congress named Bolívar dictator of Peru on 10 February 1824. Bolívar moved to northern Peru in March and began assembling an army. His repeated demands for additional men and money strained his relationship with Santander.

In May 1824, conservative Royalist general Pedro Antonio Olañeta, based in the region of Upper Peru, against la Serna. Bolívar seized the opportunity to advance into the Junín region, where he defeated Canterac at the Battle of Junín on 6 August, driving them out of Peru. Bolívar's victory in Junín put an end to the military campaigns of the Wars of Independence once and for all. Paradoxically, the defeat of Spain also weakened Bolívar, whose legitimacy as Liberator depended on the continuity of the Spanish threat. Choosing to ignore Olañeta, la Serna ordered his forces to concentrate at Cuzco to face Bolívar. Heavy rainfall in September halted Bolívar's advance, and on 6 October he gave command of the army to Sucre and moved to Huancayo to manage political affairs.

On 24 October, Bolívar received a letter from Santander informing him that because he had accepted the dictatorship of Peru the Colombian congress had stripped him of his military and civil authority in favor of Sucre and Santander, respectively. Although indignant and resentful of Santander, Bolívar wrote to him on 10 November to communicate his acquiescence and reoccupied Lima on 5 December 1824. On 9 December, Sucre decisively defeated la Serna's Royalists at the Battle of Ayacucho and accepted of all Royalist forces in Peru. The garrison of Callao and Olañeta ignored the surrender. Shortly after arriving in Lima, Bolívar began a siege of Callao that lasted until January 1826, and sent Sucre into Upper Peru to eliminate Olañeta. Olañeta was killed at the Battle of Tumusla prior to Sucre's arrival. With Irish volunteer Francisco Burdett O'Connor serving as his second in command, Sucre completed the liberation of Upper Peru in April 1825.

In early 1825, Bolívar resigned from his offices in Colombia and Peru, but neither nation's congress accepted his resignation. On 10 February 1825, the Peruvian congress extended his dictatorship for another year. Accepting the extension, Bolívar settled into governing Peru and passing reforms that were largely not carried out, such as a school system based on the principles of English educator Joseph Lancaster that was managed by Simón Rodríguez.

In April 1825, Bolívar began a tour of southern Peru that took him to the cities of Arequipa and Cuzco by August. As Bolívar approached Upper Peru, a congress gathered in the city of Chuquisaca, now Sucre. On 6 August, it declared the region to be the nation of Bolivia, named Bolívar president, and asked him to write a constitution. Bolívar arrived in Potosí on 5 October and met with two Argentine agents, Carlos María de Alvear and José Miguel Díaz Vélez, who tried without success to convince him to intervene in the Cisplatine War against the Empire of Brazil. The absolute hegemony of Bolívar's army in the region encouraged peripheral elites in Upper Peru to form a new country, independent from Lima. They declared, "If from Romulus, Rome; from Bolívar, it is Bolivia" and offered the presidency to the Liberator .

He departed for Peru on 1 January 1826. Bolívar arrived in Lima on 10 February and dispatched his draft of the Bolivian constitution to Sucre on 12 May. That constitution was ratified with modification by the Bolivian congress in July 1826. Peru, whose elites chafed at Bolívar's rule and the presence of his soldiers, was also induced to accept a modified version of Bolívar's constitution on 16 August. In Venezuela, Páez revolted against Santander, and in Panama, a congress of American nations organized by Bolívar convened without his attendance and produced no change in the hemispheric status quo. On 3 September, responding to pleas for his return to Colombia, Bolívar departed Peru and left it under a governing council led by Bolivian general Andrés de Santa Cruz.

Final years: 1826–1830

Bolívar arrived in Guayaquil on 13 September 1826 and heard complaints against Santander's governance from the people of Guayaquil and Quito, who declared him their dictator. From Ecuador, he continued north and heard more complaints, promoted civil and military officers, and commuted prison sentences. As he approached Bogotá, Bolívar was met by Santander, who hoped to persuade Bolívar to his cause in the conflict with Páez. Although Santander was annoyed at Bolívar for his desire to return to power and ratify a version of the Bolivian constitution in Colombia, they reconciled and agreed that Bolívar would resume the presidency of Colombia; congress had reelected them to a second four-year term beginning on 2 January 1827. Bolívar arrived in Bogotá on 14 November 1826.

On 25 November, Bolívar left Bogotá with an army supplied by Santander and arrived at Puerto Cabello on 31 December, where he issued a general amnesty to Páez and his allies if they submitted to his authority. Páez accepted and in January 1827, Bolívar confirmed Páez's military authority in Venezuela and entered Caracas with him to much jubilation; for two months, Bolívar attended balls celebrating his return and the amnesty. That amnesty, and clashes over Santander's handling of Colombia's finances, caused a break between Bolívar and Santander that became an open enmity in 1827. In February 1827, Bolívar submitted his resignation from the Presidency of Colombia, which its congress rejected. Meanwhile, the Colombian soldiers garrisoned in Lima mutinied, arrested their Venezuelan officers, and occupied Guayaquil until September 1827, allowing Bolívar's opponents in Peru to depose him as president and repeal his constitution.

Bolívar departed Venezuela to return to Bogotá in July 1827. He arrived on 10 September with an army he had gathered at Cartagena and secured the calling of a new congress to meet at the city of Ocaña in early 1828 to modify the Colombian constitution. The elections for this congress were held in November 1827 and, as Bolívar declined to campaign because he did not wish to be perceived as personally influencing the elections, were very favorable to his political opponents. In January 1828, Bolívar was joined in Bogotá by Sáenz, but on 16 March 1828 he left the capital after being informed of a Spanish-backed rebellion in Venezuela. As that revolt was crushed before he arrived, Bolívar turned his attention to the occupation of Cartagena by José Prudencio Padilla, a New Granadan admiral and Santander loyalist. Padilla's rebellion was also crushed before Bolívar arrived, however, and he was arrested and imprisoned in Bogotá. As the Convention of Ocaña opened on 9 April, Bolívar based himself at Bucaramanga to monitor its proceedings through his aides.

The convention appeared likely to adopt a federalist system. To prevent this, on 11 June 1828 Bolívar's allies staged a walkout, leaving the convention without a quorum. Two days later, Pedro Alcántara Herrán, a Bolívar loyalist and the governor of New Granada, called a meeting of the city's elite that denounced the Convention of Ocaña and called on Bolívar to assume absolute power in Colombia. Bolívar returned to Bogotá on 24 June and on 27 August assumed supreme power as the "president-liberator" of Colombia, abolished the office of the vice president, and assigned Santander to a diplomatic posting in Washington, D.C. On 25 September 1828, a group of young liberals that included Santander's secretary made an attempt to assassinate Bolívar and overthrow his government. The attempt was thwarted by Sáenz, who bought time for Bolívar to escape as the assassins entered the Palacio de San Carlos, and the Colombian Army. Bolívar spent the night hiding under a bridge until soldiers loyal to his regime rescued him.

In the aftermath of the attempted coup, Santander and the conspirators were arrested. Bolívar, depressed and ill, considered resigning from politics and pardoning the conspirators, but was dissuaded from this by his officers. Padilla, though uninvolved with the attempted coup, was executed for treason for his earlier rebellion; Santander, whom Bolívar thought responsible for the plot, was pardoned but exiled from Colombia. In December 1828, Bolívar left Bogotá to respond to Peru's intervention in Bolivia and invasion of Ecuador and a revolt in Popayán and Pasto led by José María Obando. He left behind a council of ministers led by Urdaneta to govern Colombia and announced that a congress would convene in January 1830 to devise a new constitution. Over 1829, Obando was defeated by Colombian general José María Córdova at Bolívar's direction in January and then pardoned, while Sucre and Venezuelan general Juan José Flores defeated the Peruvians at the Battle of Tarqui in February, leading to an armistice in July and then the Treaty of Guayaquil in September..

While Bolívar was away, Urdaneta and the council of ministers planned with French envoys to have a member of the House of Bourbon succeed Bolívar on his death as King of Colombia. This plan was widely unpopular, and inspired Córdova to launch a revolt that was crushed in October 1829 by Daniel Florence O'Leary, Bolívar's aide-de-camp. In November, Bolívar ordered the council to cease its planning; instead they resigned. Venezuelans, encouraged by a circular letter Bolívar had published in October, voted to secede from Colombia. On 15 January 1830, Bolívar arrived in Bogotá and on 20 January the convened in the city. Bolívar submitted his resignation from the presidency, which the congress did not accept until 27 April, following the appointment of New Granadan politician Domingo Caycedo as interim President. The end of the war in a stalemate demonstrated to Bolívar, who dreamed of a federated Latin America, that its capacity to project power had limits .

Death and burial

Determined to go into exile, Bolívar, who had given away or lost his fortune over his career, sold most of his remaining possessions and departed from Bogotá on 8 May 1830. He traveled down the Magdalena to Cartagena, where he arrived by the end of June to wait for a ship to take him to England. On 1 July, Bolívar was informed that Sucre had been assassinated near Pasto while en route to Quito, and wrote to Flores to ask him to avenge Sucre. In September, Urdaneta installed a conservative government in Bogotá and asked Bolívar to return, but he refused. With his health deteriorating and no ship forthcoming, Bolívar was moved by his staff to Barranquilla in October and then, at the invitation of a Spanish landowner in the area, to the Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino near Santa Marta. There, on 17 December 1830, at the age of 47, Bolívar died of tuberculosis.

Bolívar's body, dressed in a borrowed shirt, was interred in the Catedral Basílica de Santa Marta on 20 December 1830. In 1842, Páez secured the repatriation of Bolívar's remains, which were paraded through Caracas and then laid to rest in its cathedral in December together with his wife and parents; Bolívar's heart remained in Santa Marta. His remains were moved again in October 1876 into the National Pantheon of Venezuela in Caracas, created that year by President Antonio Guzmán Blanco.

Bolívar's death has been the subject of conspiracy theories advanced by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. In January 2008, President Hugo Chávez set up a commission to investigate his claim that Bolívar had been poisoned by "New Granada traitors." The commission exhumed Bolívar's remains on 16 July 2010. The results, made public on 26 July 2011, were inconclusive; vice president Elías Jaua announced that the commission could not prove Chávez's claim. Chávez continued to claim that Bolívar had been assassinated via arsenic poisoning, citing a paper by infectious disease specialist Paul Auwaerter. Following Chávez's remarks, Auwaerter stated that the arsenic likely came from medicines Bolívar had ingested to treat his illnesses.

Personal beliefs

Bolívar's personal beliefs were scattered, rife with hypocrisies and conflicting or changing perspective as his campaign evolved. His politics equally so, beginning liberal and republican, yet forming into singular powerful executive authoritarianism, motivated by fear of mixed race division and uprising, and formed in part by Classical and Enlightenment philosophy; among his favorite authors were Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, the Baron d'Holbach, David Hume, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The tutelage of Simón Rodríguez, a student of Rousseau, has been traditionally seen as foundational for Bolívar's beliefs. Also important to Bolívar's intellectual development were his stays in Paris from 1804 to 1806 and in London in 1810. The extent of Bolívar's religiosity is debated; while Bolívar resented the social capital of the Catholic Church and its Royalist leanings during the wars of independence, he sought to co-opt its social capital for the benefit of the republics he established rather than dismember the Church.

Bolívar's political and personal beliefs evolved in writing throughout his life, visible through a series of manifestos and congressional addresses written between 1812 and 1819. These would be named the Jamaica Letter, Cartagena Manifesto, and Angostura Address. The Jamaica Letter was said to be a "blueprint of Bolívar's political thought" while the Cartagena Manifesto as "one of the great documents of Latin American history". Throughout his political career, Bolívar concerned himself with the construction of liberal democracy in Latin America and the region's place in the Atlantic world. Through the 1820s, Bolívar became increasingly disillusioned and authoritarian until, in 1830, he declared to Flores, "all who have served the Revolution have plowed the sea."

Bolívar was an Anglophile and sought British aid in securing Latin American independence. By the 1820s, his goal was to create a federation of Latin American republics in Spanish America, each governed by a strong executive and a constitution modeled on the British constitution. Inspired by Montesquieu, Bolívar believed that a government should conform to the needs and character of its region and inhabitants; in the Cartagena Manifesto, Bolívar stated that federalism as practiced in the United States was the "perfect" government but was unworkable in Spanish America because, he believed, Spanish imperialism had left Spanish Americans unprepared for federalism; "as long as we do not have the political virtues that distinguish our brothers of the north, a democratic system… can only bring us ruin". Bolívar sought to prepare Colombia for a more liberal democracy via free, public education. At the Angostura Address, he argues for abolishment of slavery and a concession to pardo, mixed race or black rights. He envisioned a racially united Latin America, to drive out the Spaniards and create a free South America with a common people.

Yet, Bolívar was critical of race and of democracy. Within the Jamaica Letter he recognized the necessity in overthrowing monarchy in North America, while critiquing their installed democracy as inappropriate for a population held back by years of slavery, as it could ruin the unified South America he wished to create. The blueprint for his strong belief in a powerful executive leader begin to form here, as he insists "His America needed a strong, centralized government, not a perfectly conceptualized, theoretical model dreamed up by idealists on some far-flung shore" due to his conflicting views on racial hierarchy he saw it necessary for himself to rule as a dictator to avoid racial conflict and civil war, believing the mixed races would cause chaos and oppression of whites should they rise to leadership. In one of his most authoritarian acts, he ordered the arrest and execution of his former pardo general Manuel Piar for his growing contempt of Bolívar and rising sentiment among the pardos. "It was the pardo Piar who needed to be reined in… he had grown ever more stubborn and unmanageable, ignoring Bolívar's appeals and instructions". "Division was unacceptable. Race, though it had plagued the Americas through three hundred years of difficult history, was no longer a justifiable reason for discord." Bolívar intended to be a president for life, a "benevolent" dictator to firmly rule his liberated Americas to prevent racial divide and hierarchical disruption by the pardos.

Legacy

Bolívar has had an immense legacy, becoming the essential personality of Latin America. The currencies of Venezuela and Bolivia—the bolívar and boliviano respectively—are named after Bolívar. In the English-speaking world, Bolívar is known as Latin America's George Washington. He has been memorialized across the world in literature, public monuments, and historiography, and paid tribute to in the names of towns, cities, provinces, ships, and people.

The Quinta near Santa Marta has been preserved as a museum to Bolívar and the house in which he was born was opened as a museum and archive of his papers on 5 July 1921. In 1978, UNESCO created the International Simón Bolívar Prize "to reward an activity of outstanding merit in accordance with the ideals of Simón Bolívar." In 1997, the Archive of the Liberator Simón Bolívar was inscribed by UNESCO in the Memory of the World International Register and in the Regional Register for Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011.

Initial historical evaluations of Bolívar were at first negative, consisting of criticism of his conduct of the war, execution of Piar, betrayal of Miranda, and authoritarianism. These and other criticisms endure in studies of Bolívar. Beginning in 1842, popular opinion about Bolívar in Venezuela became overwhelmingly positive and eventually became what has been described by scholars as the "cult of Bolívar", led by succeeding heads of the Venezuelan state. In 1998, President Hugo Chávez, who had made extensive use of Bolívar's image for government projects and initiatives, changed the official name of Venezuela to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

In Colombia, allegiance or opposition to Bolívar formed the bedrock of the Conservative and Liberal parties respectively. Bolívar continued to have such a cultural influence in Colombia that in 1974 the 19th of April Movement, an insurgent leftist group that later joined an alliance thereof called the Simón Bolívar Guerrilla Coordinating Board, stole a sword alleged to belong to Bolívar from his Bogotá residence.