Bolivar: American Liberator Page 16

  On arrival in Cartagena, Bolívar lodged in a modest house on San Agustín Chiquito Street. Diminutive, white, resplendent in the Caribbean sun, it was all of ten paces wide. The bedrooms and alcoves were hung with hammocks; a tiny wood balcony opened onto the street from one of the windows. The breeze, the blue vault of sky, the clear nights strewn with stars, the vibrant port with its raucous comings and goings—all served to fill the young traveler’s heart with promise and possibility.

  In New Granada, the revolution was indeed alive, if chaotic—defended by a number of vying independent governments. Granadans wanted their freedoms, but had countless opinions on how to win them and who should govern. The result was an unruly splintering of regions and factions. La patria boba, they would come to call it, a republic of fools. The city of Bogotá, under the government of President Antonio Nariño, had declared itself the capital, and a loose federation had been established at Tunja under the leadership of Camilo Torres, but the fortified port city of Cartagena had risen against both, proclaimed its sovereignty, and established its own constitution. Drunk on illusions of grandeur, other communities, cities, provinces were following suit. The region had become a cauldron of discontent, a din of quibbling functionaries, a hotbed of pirates and opportunists. For all its wealth and abounding whiteness, New Granada was on the verge of a civil war. Rather than be discouraged by this ruinous state of affairs, Bolívar was eager to join it. He and his fellow Venezuelan revolutionaries—his uncle José Felix Ribas, his firebrand neighbor Antonio Nicolás Briceño, the Carabaño and Montilla brothers—assumed that their military experience would be in demand.

  They were right. Bolívar and his companions were received warmly by the government of Cartagena. Its twenty-four-year-old president, Manuel Rodríguez Torices, was in urgent need of seasoned officers, not only because the Spanish army had installed itself in the nearby port of Santa Marta, but because Torices needed to temper the ravening ambitions of his own commanding general, the French pirate Pierre Labatut. He directed Labatut to appoint Bolívar and the others to prominent positions.

  But General Labatut knew these men too well. Like them, he was a veteran of Miranda’s revolutionary forces. He knew about Bolívar’s rout at Puerto Cabello; knew about Miranda’s harsh estimation of the young colonel. A sergeant in Napoleon’s army before he became an adventurer on the high seas, Labatut had mediocre credentials as a soldier. But he had been a favorite of Miranda’s, and had been present in La Guaira during the desperate last days of the republic. Standing on the deck of the USS Matilda as it pushed off from the frantic port, eluding enemy cannons, he had had plenty of opportunity to look back and contemplate the fate of Miranda. Labatut was immediately suspicious of Bolívar, and certainly he had every reason to be jealous: here was a Creole aristocrat who had managed to charm the callow president—who, it was rumored, was even writing presumptuous letters to President Antonio Nariño in Bogotá and to Camilo Torres in Tunja. Labatut was in no rush to help launch Bolívar’s career. On December 1, 1812, he assigned him to the remote outpost of Barranca, an insignificant little town on the banks of the Magdalena River.

  Bolívar had indeed written passionate appeals to Nariño and Torres, as well as to the congress in Tunja, but before leaving to take up his post in Barranca, he turned to animate a far more crucial audience: the ordinary Granadan citizen. Hoping to persuade the people that their struggle was intimately tied to Venezuela’s—that it would take a united front of all colonies to eject Spain from America once and for all—he spent the next two weeks on a frenzy of publications. First, he published General Monteverde’s official proclamations, which served as clear indictments: the Spaniard had broken every promise he had ever made. Then he arranged for the release of a testimonial he had been mulling since Curaçao. He called it A Manifesto from the Venezuelan Colonel Simón Bolívar to the Citizens of New Granada. It was disseminated on December 15, a few days after Bolívar’s departure from the city.

  The Cartagena Manifesto, as it became known, stands as one of the great documents of Latin American history. In it, Bolívar departed radically from revolutionaries before him who had echoed French or North American ideas in ponderous, stuffy prose. It is hard to overestimate the effect that his words had on the leaders of New Granada, and, as the document began traveling from hand to hand, on the region’s people. Bolívar’s words were muscular, direct; his manner of thinking, fresh and riveting. He made the language come alive.

  “I am,” it began, “a son of unhappy Caracas.” With persuasive logic, he went on to analyze the loss of Venezuela, explaining why the fledgling republic had failed: it had been hopelessly fragmented by federalist divisions; ruined for lack of a strong, unified army; there was, of course, the earthquake, the obstructionist clergy, an overreliance on paper money. In the main, its leaders had grown too tolerant, sloppy, corrupt. They had never established a firm, undisputed authority. “Each conspiracy was followed by an easy acquittal followed by another conspiracy,” he explained. The first sign of the republic’s weakness had come early, when the original junta had failed to subdue the feisty city of Coró, from which all royalist opposition had sprung. Had the republic’s leaders been truly assertive—had its institutions been unified and disciplined rather than separate and fractious—things might have turned out differently. But in New Granada, he argued, republicans now had the opportunity to set history straight: Unite, he implored; be firm. Invade Venezuela. Root out the Spaniards, who were a cancer on the Americas, who only stood to get stronger if left to their own devices. Only then would New Granada be free: “Coró is to Caracas as Caracas is to all America,” he wrote with a tidy algebraic logic. In short: do now to Venezuela what Venezuela should have done to Coró in the first place, for all South Americans are linked by a common past and a common destiny. It was a passionate appeal with the clear tenor of truth. In time, it would be recognized as the cornerstone of Bolívarian thought.

  As resolute as the tree to which the poet Andrés Bello later compared him, Bolívar sent down roots, weathered storms, grew stronger. There is no question that he learned richly from his mistakes. How else does a soldier untrained in the art of war—a rebel unschooled in the rule of nations—undertake to harness a revolution? Only months before, Bolívar had been a humiliated man seeking revenge on his failed commander. Now, given this bridge to a new chance, he decided to take nothing for granted. He set out for the tiny town of Barranca—however insignificant and obscure the assignment—determined to make his mark, convinced he could turn random fortune to revolutionary advantage.

  By then he had learned a great deal about New Granadans. He had walked the ancient streets of Cartagena, sat in its colorful plazas, mingled with its residents. He had established what he could about rebel movements in the countryside. He had made a point to get to know rich Creoles who owned property in strategic points along the Magdalena, and who might be helpful to a commander’s cause. He had met with landowners from the Valle de Upar, who impressed him with their revolutionary ardor; they offered the young officer their support, not only moral but in livestock, mules, and supplies. It was in socializing this way that he came to know Anita Lenoit, the angelically lovely seventeen-year-old daughter of a French merchant in town. Lenoit was immediately enchanted with the wiry, electrifying young Venezuelan. She wrote a letter on his behalf to María Concepción Loperena, a wealthy widow with political clout in the provinces, and implored her to help Bolívar’s cause. Legend has it that Bolívar had a brief but passionate dalliance with the comely Lenoit, and that—desperately in love—the delicate, dewy-eyed girl turned up in his military compound weeks later, having eagerly followed him upriver.

  Arriving in Barranca, near where the mighty Magdalena makes its final approach to the sea, Bolívar learned from the scant seventy men under his command that enemy troops had consolidated their hold on the river; republicans on the coast had lost all communication with republicans in the interior. Bolívar immediately set about recruiting mor
e troops. This was hardly an easy enterprise. The only men willing to be recruited came from the dregs of society: slum dwellers, runaway slaves, out-of-work peasants, near-naked tribesmen; they were untrained, undisciplined, weaponless, shoeless, with little more than a pair of tattered trousers, a flea-ridden blanket, a frayed hat. Nevertheless, Bolívar took them on, trained them, fed them; and it was with such troops that he set out against the soldiers of the crown.

  His instinct was to take a bold offensive, and with rapid strategic attacks dislodge the enemy from the river. But General Labatut expressly forbade anything of the kind. Poised to lead an expedition against the Spanish in Santa Marta, the general instructed Bolívar to stay where he was and await further instruction. Bolívar had little faith in Labatut’s abilities; he suspected that the former pirate simply wanted all the glory for himself. He decided to countermand him. On December 21, after building the necessary boats, Bolívar began quietly mobilizing two hundred soldiers upriver. They took off on ten champanes (large dugouts with straw roofs) toward Tenerife, where five hundred royalists were garrisoned. As they approached, Bolívar sent ahead one of his officers to offer the commandant a chance to surrender peacefully. When the Spaniard scoffed, Bolívar rounded the corner with all two hundred men and they leapt ashore, rifles blazing. Terrified, the royalists abandoned the fort in wild disorder, scattering into the forest. It was a stunning victory. Tenerife was a major depository of Spanish ammunition and equipment, and Bolívar appropriated every last sword and musket ball. He summoned the townspeople to the riverbank, scolded them for supporting Spaniards, and insisted they pledge allegiance to Cartagena. “Wherever the Spanish empire rules,” he told them, “there rules death and desolation!” Giving them a stirring lesson in their liberties, he enlisted hundreds to the cause. The following day, fortified by superior arms and fresh troops, he headed to the next enclave on that river, the vigorously republican city of Mompox. News of Bolívar’s valor preceded him. He was greeted with joy, a festive ball, and a new infusion of recruits.

  Bolívar didn’t linger. He had learned a lesson from Miranda’s indecisions. He deployed again immediately, with an avid army of five hundred, to Guamal, Banco, Tamalameque, sweeping enemy guerrillas from the river, alarming them with surprise raids. It was no easy task. The water was infested with crocodiles, the land with snakes; the way was a tangle of green, more likely traveled by hand and ax than by foot alone. As he tramped through the grassy swamps, startling the royalists in their camps, they were so shocked by his army’s ferocity and determination that they fled their garrisons, leaving behind their ships, weapons, and prisoners. Bolívar incorporated them all into a stronger war machine. In the valleys east of the river, the contacts he had made in Cartagena delivered on their promises; the widow Loperena and other wealthy landowners contributed mules, provisions, and sturdy clothing for his troops. He moved quickly, hardly stopping, and, everywhere he went, the enemy panicked at his approach. In the Cartagena Manifesto, Bolívar had written, “every defensive action only brings harm and ruin to those who wage it.” Basing his strategy on a brash, unremitting offensive that was entirely new to the revolution, he moved swiftly over five hundred punishing kilometers; by January 8, 1813, he controlled the entire length of the river. The operation had taken him fifteen days. Soon after reporting this success to the congress of Cartagena, he liberated the city of Ocaña, a natural staging area for an incursion over the mountains into Venezuela.

  By now Bolívar’s name was known and admired throughout New Granada. “I was born in Caracas,” he later noted, “but my fame was born in Mompox.” As General Labatut marched into Santa Marta with his marauding troops—largely adventurers—sacking, plundering, and sending its governor running for other shores, Labatut learned he would have to share the glory. The general accused Bolívar of insubordination and called for a court-martial, even making a trip to the capital to see that it was carried out, but President Torices paid him no mind. No one could doubt Bolívar’s military prowess. He had opened nearly three hundred miles of the region’s main shipping route and freed the plains to its west, for which the independent governments of Cartagena, Bogotá, and Tunja could only thank him. A mere four months after he had been cast from Venezuela, wretched and humbled, he had joined another revolution, devised an audacious strategy, thwarted his commanding officer, and risen to honor and acclaim.

  MEANWHILE, IN CARACAS, MONTEVERDE HAD succeeded in cowing the population with months of unbridled violence. No measure of fragility or infirmity could exempt republicans from his cruelty. From summer’s swelter to winter’s damp, his victims perished in dungeons, steadily making room for more. As the mill of souls ground on, Spaniards confiscated the Creoles’ land and possessions and divvied them up among themselves. An official who arrived from Madrid, convinced he could eradicate the unrest by installing a new policy of tolerance, was so appalled by Monteverde’s reign of terror that he gave up his mission in despair.

  The Gaceta de Caracas, once the mouthpiece of revolution, was back in Spanish hands, and it reproached its readers roundly: “Happiness. Prosperity. Liberty. Three Hundred Years of Slavery. . . . Go on. Be honest: When were you more enslaved? More miserable? When were you more wretched, more immolated by hunger? When did you ever live with such fear, forced to flee to the hills to avoid being pressed to serve as yet one more victim in that disgraceful sacrifice? And why? And for what? For words. Empty words.” A shrill propaganda machine swung into action, denouncing the patriots’ “pompous and extravagant promises”—their childishly irresponsible behavior. Even worse, according to the Spanish, was that they had insulted the king by seeking help from Great Britain. To thwart all future repetition of this madness—to save the Creoles from themselves—Monteverde gave his officers full rein to mete out a crippling punishment.

  Monteverde, in fact, was never meant to be the man in charge. Spain had dispatched Fernando Miyares to take over as captain-general of Caracas. But Monteverde, appointing himself “commander general of the army of pacification,” had managed to scare off Miyares from the moment the captain-general had landed in Maracaibo. A coward by nature, Miyares retreated to Puerto Rico, afraid to enter the bloody fray. Monteverde kept Miyares at bay with promises that he would hand over the command when Venezuela was fully pacified, and Miyares, happy to let someone else do the fighting, allowed himself to be duped. His more intrepid officers, Field Marshal Manuel Cajigal and Brigadier General Manuel del Fierro, could only chafe with frustration, but eventually even they were won over by Monteverde. After months of fruitless waiting, Miyares realized that he was little more than an object of ridicule, and slunk back to Spain, leaving the colony to suffer the excesses of an illegitimate regime.

  Monteverde cannot take all the blame for the cruelty and rapine under his rule, but there is no doubt that he turned a blind eye to his generals’ atrocities and deliberately ignored the laws of conquest spelled out by the constitution of Cádiz. There is no doubt, too, that his officers reveled in bloodlust. In the plains that surrounded Caracas, unchecked by higher power, Eusebio Antoñanzas, governor of Cumaná, had unloosed a wanton truculence, ordering his troops to sack towns, rob the innocent, kill anyone who got in their way. The terrible Antoñanzas was often the first to throw a flaming torch into an unsuspecting house, lancing the frantic family as it fled the fire. Terrible, too, were the deeds of his lieutenant Antonio Zuazola, who commanded his men to slit prisoners’ throats, lop off their ears, and wear human trophies as decorations. No one could deny the chilling effect of seeing a Spanish soldier ride by with ears flapping from his hat, or the sight of a body part nailed to a patriot’s door. Zuazola would order his men to sew prisoners back to back, flay the skin from their feet, then force them to hobble together over broken glass. One pregnant woman who came to beg for her husband’s life was bound and beheaded; when the unborn child began to wriggle in her belly, they stopped it with a bayonet. Twelve thousand Creoles died as brutally. “If it were possible,” Spanish g
eneral del Fierro wrote home from Caracas, “it would be best to exterminate every American from the face of this earth.” Even Franciscan priests were seen galloping through republican neighborhoods dressed more like Tatar warriors than men of God, urging their fellow soldiers to “spare no one over the age of seven!”

  If this uncurbed savagery served to boost the royalist morale, it also inflamed Americans. In outlying areas, a republican backlash gained swift momentum. But it did so in a highly fragmented manner as the struggle for independence became the work of caudillos, leaders who fought on the strength of their regional charisma rather than with any concept of a greater cause. In January of 1813, as Bolívar was purging the Magdalena River of royalist garrisons, Santiago Mariño, a patriot thousands of miles away, mounted a campaign to liberate eastern Venezuela. Within six months, Mariño would free the historic provinces of Barcelona and Cumaná, becoming their de facto leader. Under him were equally ambitious young warriors: the brave mulatto colonel Manuel Piar, who had won significant gains against the Spaniards; José Francisco Bermúdez and his brother Bernardo, who had shown extraordinary mettle at pivotal points of the revolution. In New Granada, too, there were many who harbored grand aspirations. Pierre Labatut would eventually break with Cartagena and declare himself president of the port city of Santa Marta. The young Torices continued to rule Cartagena by hiring pirates to fight off anyone who threatened his walled city. There was President Nariño in Bogotá, President Torres in Tunja. In Pamplona, a province that bordered on Venezuela, Colonel Manuel del Castillo—a well-born Granadan with a large ego and grand designs, had already made it abundantly clear that he answered to no one.