Bolivar: American Liberator Page 19

  EVEN AS DECEMBER CAME AND went—even as Spain crept out from under Napoleon and Ferdinand resumed his teetering throne—the butchery in Venezuela continued. It is altogether possible that the Spanish nation, emerging from its long night of terror, had little idea of the carnage that consumed its colonies. For Bolívar, a war to the death was a retaliatory measure; he had believed it would unite Americans against foreigners. The result was quite the opposite: Americans turned against Americans—Venezuelans took up weapons against their neighbors—and the revolution became a racial conflict, a full-fledged civil war.

  On January 2, 1814, Bolívar convoked a public assembly in the ancient church of San Francisco—the church of his ancestors—so that he could address the people. He was aware of the concerns about his authoritarian ways, and could sense a need to bolster his position. “Citizens!” he began, “I am not your sovereign.”

  To save you from anarchy . . . I exercised supreme power. I gave you laws; I gave you government. . . . You honor me with the illustrious title of Liberator. The officers, the soldiers of your army—those are your liberators, they are the ones who deserve the nation’s gratitude. You know very well that they are the authors of your rebirth. . . . I beg you now to release me from a charge that is far greater than my capabilities. Elect your representatives, your magistrates, a just government, and rest secure that the forces that rescued the Republic will protect your liberty. . . . A country in which one lone person exercises all power is a country of slaves!

  At the end of the address, Governor Mendoza begged him to continue as supreme commander, and the audience responded with deafening support. Bolívar argued, “There are more illustrious citizens than I!” And then, after a pause, added, “General Mariño! Liberator of the East! Now there is a leader worthy of directing your destinies!” But the assembly wouldn’t hear of it. They insisted he retain the title of dictator. Bolívar had surrendered his power only to have it bestowed again. It was a strategy he would employ again and again during his long career as Liberator: resign a position, be implored to take it back, and, in the process, impel everyone to share in the responsibility.

  Indeed, Bolívar needed all the help he could get. He had barely been able to equip his soldiers. No arms were manufactured in Venezuela and, although Bolívar was seizing lead, sulfur, and coal in order to forge bullets and make gunpowder, all guns and munitions had to be purchased from elsewhere. This was no easy venture in a world reeling from Napoleon’s wars. Britain had outlawed the arms trade, and the United States—aspiring to purchase Florida from Spain—categorically refused to sell arms to Spanish American rebels. Bolívar was forced to buy illegally from merchant ships, and he welcomed Caribbean captains and businessmen to help him do it. This shortage of guns would have dire effects on the war for independence; some historians claim it was a decisive factor in the second republic’s demise.

  Guns alone wouldn’t have fixed the problem. Boves’s Legions of Hell did not depend on guns and, in any event, against an onslaught of horsemen with lances and machetes, a man with a musket didn’t have a chance: rifles of the time required six complicated motions to load and, although a well-placed first round might have picked off the enemy’s vanguard, by the time the patriots reloaded, the next wave of cavalry would have mowed them down.

  More than horses or arms, Bolívar needed powerful partners who could help tame an unruly population. He was well aware that he could not continue to govern without a better hold on the patriot forces. Managing both a revolution and a civil war was more than he had bargained for. By the start of 1814, he was trying everything he could think of to save the effort. He offered Spanish deserters unquestioned amnesty if they would join him. He sent a diplomat to the United States to lobby for support. He wrote an impassioned letter to Lord Wellesley, congratulating him for Wellington’s victory over Napoleon and beseeching him to intervene in the South American effort. He had written a number of gracious, even pleading messages to Mariño, liberator of eastern Venezuela, in a last-ditch effort to consolidate the country. Mariño, by nature, was haughty, ambitious—the privileged son of a Spanish nobleman and an Irish mother—with strong visions of his own. Daring and charismatic, he had learned soldiering in the heat of battle and, despite his twenty-six years, had risen through the command quickly. At first, he had sent one of his officers, the audacious pardo captain Manuel Piar, with a brig and five schooners, to help Bolívar mount a naval blockade at Puerto Cabello; then petulantly, and without explanation, he had ordered Piar to withdraw. By mid-January of 1814, Mariño had relented; the Liberator of the East sent the Liberator of the West a more encouraging response. He would contribute soldiers.

  Even so, Mariño was slow to put words into action. On February 2, Bolívar again dispatched Campo Elías with fifteen hundred men to meet Boves, who was cutting through the country like a knife—the Legions of Hell were now a mere fifty miles south of the capital. Mariño agreed to assist Bolívar, but the Liberator of the East never showed up. The oversight had fatal consequences. Boves entered combat in a high wrath: his favorite general, Yañez, had been killed in Ospino, and when his men had gone to recover the body, they had found it dismembered, hanging in little pieces along the road. Campo Elías finally met Boves in battle at La Puerta, but for all his army’s ferocity, it was no match for the thundering hordes of angry horsemen. The Legions of Hell took the republican infantry easily, leaving a thousand corpses in their wake.

  Once again, brutality was met with brutality. The countryside was strewn with dead, towns razed or abandoned. Lakes delivered up carcasses. Skeletons dangled from trees. Fugitives huddled in hill and forest, fearing the rumble of hooves, the cloud of dust on the horizon. People had learned to be practical in the extreme. If it served them to say they were royalists, they said it; if it kept them alive to claim the opposite, they did that, too. Some soldiers deserted and rejoined the enemy as many as eight or ten times. One thing was clear by now: the royalists had a numerical advantage, though Bolívar was loath to admit it. In many of the ongoing conflicts, it had been boldness that counted, not size. Nevertheless, his army was so desperate for troops that José Félix Ribas was forced to recruit boys from seminaries; children as young as twelve were ordered to report for service.

  Ribas and his army of youngsters were able to fend off Boves’s second in command, Colonel Morales, at La Victoria, largely because Campo Elías came to the rescue, but that victory was soon offset by disaster. Bolívar had ordered Ribas to march to the nearby town of Ocumare, a republican enclave not far from Caracas, having heard that Boves was riding there with an army of a thousand slaves. But Ocumare was silent as a tomb when Ribas entered it. The city had already been ransacked. Dead women and children littered the streets. The church’s floor ran with the blood of old men. In that hecatomb, Ribas found a lone priest, able to recount the atrocities. But a sack flung on the roadside would tell more. It belonged to General Morales, and had been dropped in the course of the raid and forgotten in the frenzy of massacre. Inside was a packet of correspondence that revealed a plan to incite the royalist prisoners in the dungeon of La Guaira to a violent uprising.

  One of the commandants in La Guaira, Leandro Palacios, Bolívar’s nephew, had already warned him of just such an eventuality. What sprang to mind now as Bolívar heard this new evidence was his own scarring experience less than two years before in Puerto Cabello—the dungeon uprising he had been powerless to contain, the one that had scuttled the revolution. Bolívar could not afford to lose La Guaira and, in so doing, risk the capital; worse, he had no troops to spare. He responded swiftly and decisively. He ordered the immediate execution of every Spanish prisoner in La Guaira and Caracas, with no mercy for the sick, the elderly, or even those who, in times of shifting loyalties, may have sheltered a patriot or two. His words were simple and to the point: “Without delay and without exception, you will put to the sword every Spaniard in dungeon or hospital.” Colonel Juan Bautista Arismendi, the interim military commandant
of Caracas at the time, was only too happy to comply. He fulfilled the command to the letter, and with relish. With no questions asked and no due process of law, he and his minions marched more than one thousand Spanish prisoners out into the sunlight and, over the course of four days, beheaded them all.

  History would never forgive Bolívar for it. It was one thing for an untested soldier to become feral in the field; it was quite another for a liberator to exterminate a thousand chained prisoners. His war to the death had been difficult enough to justify. As time passed and the rest of the world learned of it, this mass execution would mark him as a brutal man.

  EVEN SO, FOR THE MOMENT, the world had other things on its mind. By the middle of 1814, Napoleon had been reduced to a prisoner on Elba, Louis XVIII was busily restoring the French monarchy, and England was dusting itself off and looking to intensify its wan, two-year war against the United States of America. Within a few months, the British would invade Washington and set fire to the White House and U.S. Capitol, the flames of belligerence visible as far as thirty miles away. Rear Admiral George Cockburn pocketed a few knickknacks as he strolled through the deserted White House, then supped on the president’s wine and dined at Dolley Madison’s table before he ordered the presidential mansion torched. In Spain, King Ferdinand didn’t wait until he got to Madrid to start undoing the work of the Regency. He abolished the liberal 1812 Cádiz constitution, which had established, among other things, universal suffrage, freedom of the press, and free enterprise; after that, he arrested the leaders who had written it, reinstated the Inquisition, and began an iron rule. It was a vicious time.

  For Bolívar, caught in the dust of stampeding llaneros, time seemed to be running out. To make matters worse, his enemy had molted, and no longer was it an orderly column in strict service to the Spanish crown. His new foe was massive, undisciplined, lawless, with no real love for King Ferdinand and his empire, and with no apparent agenda beyond rape and despoliation. Boves’s army had grown so large and fierce that his troops seemed to be everywhere at once, terrifying villages, violating women, sporting squirming babies on lances. The Spanish field marshal Manuel Cajigal, who headed the king’s militias and understood rules of battle, wrote to Boves, asking him to cease unnecessary cruelty and join his command. Boves’s response to Cajigal was blunt and unequivocal: he was the leader of the colored people, whose cause he championed. He had no superiors, answered to no one, and, once he was done exterminating patriots, he would come after Cajigal himself.

  Although Mariño had joined Bolívar in earnest now, the two could not claim enough victories against the royalists to make significant gains. At first, there were encouraging moments—on the plains of Carabobo, for instance, when Bolívar and Ribas engaged General Cajigal’s army in a long and stubborn struggle. Nature itself seemed on the side of the patriots. Gunfire set the tall grasses of the savanna ablaze and a brisk wind blew blinding smoke into the Spaniards’ faces. Bolívar’s troops were able to outflank them, inflict punishing losses, and emerge with four thousand of the enemy’s horses. In the confusion, General Cajigal had no recourse but to flee on foot, wander the forests, eat wild fruit, and escape down the Orinoco to fight another day. What might have been luck for the patriots, however, was war as usual for Boves. The llaneros habitually used dust, wind, fire, smoke—even seasonal floods—to their advantage. They routed Bolívar decisively at La Puerta, they pushed him back until he was obliged to take refuge at his hacienda at San Mateo. And then the patriot troops seemed to vanish in insurmountable losses. The Legions of Hell took them easily at Valencia. Boves personally led the charge, storming the city at the head of his roaring horde.

  When Valencia surrendered, Boves signed a treaty, even celebrated a Mass in church, assuring citizens they would be safe. The townspeople were stunned and deeply grateful. A Spanish general later recounted how, on the night of his victory, Boves invited the city’s matrons to dance the piquirico at a celebratory ball—convincing them that by doing so they would guarantee their husbands’ well-being. When they resisted, he took out his lash and made them dance by force; then, sufficiently amused, he beheaded them all. Within days, his multitudes were riding toward the capital, sending its citizens into paroxysms of fear and forcing Bolívar to contemplate a major evacuation. The Liberator called for a sweep of all the precious silver and gold objects in the city’s churches, impounded the republic’s treasury, put all of it in twenty-four trunks, and ordered them shipped out at once to Mariño’s republican stronghold in the east. Mariño had assured Bolívar that in Barcelona, his domain on the coast, the patriots would be out of harm’s way.

  On the morning of Thursday, July 7, as an unrelieved rain fell from the gray expanse over Caracas, twenty thousand people—almost the entire population of the city—began a long march toward Barcelona, two hundred miles away. Led by Bolívar’s army, which had dwindled to a force of twelve hundred, they waded through knee-high mud, ferrying what worldly possessions they could. They were largely members of the Creole class, aristocrats who had never had to walk to church much less trudge through swamps. As the road grew worse, the heat intolerable, the mosquitoes thick and fierce, even the strong grew weak. Soldiers took the incapacitated onto their horses, often two at a time, to cross the swollen marshlands. Soon they were in a harsher landscape, scored by high rivers and treacherous mountains—alive with snakes and jaguars—where food or rest could not be found. For twenty-three days the diminishing mass inched ahead, ragged, hungry, with no shelter from torrential rains, no mantle against the damp of night. Many died along the way, drowned in floods, killed by roving bandits, or devoured by wild animals. Many of those fortunate enough to survive died later, of cholera and yellow fever. Often they succumbed to a spiraling madness. Bolívar told of a starving mother who—in a fit of desperation—snatched the baby from her empty breast and hurled it away, to a quicker, more merciful death.

  We can only imagine the horrors of this tragic exodus. His cape pulled tight against the deluge, Bolívar watched his people pass, unable to offer them much hope or comfort. He had, in three years of war, gone from pampered plutocrat to hardened soldier; from sleeping in a gilded bed to spending nights in an improvised hammock. His hair was long, his beard full; and yet, despite that hirsute guise, the dark hollows of his face were all too evident. For all the energy that fueled his purpose, he was frail in body, plagued by hemorrhoids, susceptible to fevers, delicate of stomach. But his was a single-minded vision. He could admit no pessimism. If there were moments, as there had been for Miranda, when the sight of a bloodied earth forced him to wonder whether his war of ideals was worth the soul-breaking sacrifice, Bolívar never let on. He kept his eyes firmly on the dream.

  He would not allow his sisters to remain in Caracas, although María Antonia had insisted on it. Four thousand souls had stayed on in that phantom capital: some, like the Marquis de Casa León, because as Spaniards they could count on pardons; some because they were pardos; others because they were patriots who preferred to die inside their houses; still others because—as nuns, priests, or artists—they felt immune to war’s prejudices. But Bolívar knew what Boves’s men would do to any Creole who fell into their hands: he had seen the pyramids of skulls, heard the stories of rape and mutilation. Bolívar decided that what little family he had would travel under his protection. María Antonia, Juana, and their children, as well as his mistress, Pepita Machado, and her family, made the arduous trip at his side. Once they reached the northeastern coast of Venezuela, Pepita, who had spent a year following Bolívar from battle to battle, was shipped off to the island of St. Thomas to await her lover’s instructions. Bolívar’s sisters were sent on to Curaçao.

  WHEN THE CARACANS FINALLY STRAGGLED into Barcelona or, farther east, to Cumaná, they realized that the safe harbor Mariño had promised was little more than a mirage. The ports were chaotic, teeming with too many patriots and too few ships to ferry them away; and to the south, heading toward them, was the royalist general Morale
s with a ravening army of llaneros. The war, at least from the republican side, was all defense now—precisely the kind Bolívar had struggled to avoid. To make matters worse, they were in a part of Venezuela that seemed utterly alien to Bolívar. The east was markedly different terrain, and Mariño’s troops made sure he knew it.

  With the Legions of Hell approaching, the patriots now struggled to rally a defense of those valuable port cities. Bolívar hastily raised an army and marched to the town of Aragua, where Mariño’s second in command, Francisco Bermúdez, awaited him. The situation seemed promising: they had gathered six thousand patriot soldiers in all. But on August 17, the royalist general Morales swept into the valley of Aragua with a force of eight thousand. A savage combat began the next morning, and by late afternoon 3,700 patriots lay dead on a scorched and bloody field. Bolívar and Bermúdez had no option but to abandon the fight. As republicans scattered over the hills, Morales and his horsemen took Aragua, where they butchered three thousand townspeople, including those who had sought refuge in the church.

  It was a resounding defeat. The patriot leaders could only flee now—to Cumaná and, ultimately, toward Guiria, a slender spit of land even farther east. On August 25, Bolívar arrived in Cumaná, where Mariño awaited him with the silver and gold of Caracas—it was their only hope for equipping a renewed republican offense. But, in preparation for evacuation and in the roiling confusion, Mariño had placed the treasure on board several ships belonging to an Italian captain, who now threatened to sail away with it all. Panicked, Bolívar sent Colonel Mariano Montilla to persuade the perfidious captain to return the trunks, but when Montilla went on board the captain’s schooner, he was taken prisoner. Mariño then embarked to try to recoup the situation, and, when he, too, didn’t emerge, Bolívar embarked as well. As the ship pulled anchor and drifted off toward the island of Margarita, the two liberators succeeded in convincing the Italian captain to return sixteen of the twenty-four containers. All would be settled amicably once they reached the island. But Mariño’s man in command of Margarita—the ambitious pardo colonel Manuel Piar—wanted no part of it. When he was notified that Bolívar and Mariño were on board one of the approaching ships, Piar refused to acknowledge their authority, and gave the command to open fire. The Italian ordered his ships to wheel around and hurry back to the mainland, but there, too, they found a similar reception. This time it was Bolívar’s deputy, the haughty Field Marshal José Félix Ribas, who confronted them on the pier. He accused Bolívar and Mariño of cowardice, desertion, and conspiring to steal the gold and silver for themselves. It was clear that Ribas and Piar had fed one another’s suspicions and, ready to take power into their own hands, decided to depose their superiors. Eventually, Francisco Bermúdez, Mariño’s trusted officer who had fought alongside Bolívar days before, began to have misgivings, too. Taken aback by this alarming turn of events, Mariño and Bolívar tried to defend their actions—explaining that they had left shore to rescue the precious relics for the republic, not to abscond with them—but mistrust and misapprehension ruled the day. Publicly stripping the two liberators of their power, Piar and Ribas declared themselves supreme commanders of east and west. With no further ado, Mariño was thrown into prison and Bolívar forced to turn over the trunks.