Bolivar: American Liberator Read online

  THE PORTRAIT IN THE ELABORATE gold frame above Don Juan Vicente’s sofa was of Simón de Bolívar, “El Viejo” (“The Old Man”), who, almost two centuries earlier, had been the first Bolívar to emigrate from Spain. The Old Man was by no means the first of the Liberator’s ancestors to reach the New World. Through Doña Concepción, the newborn was also a descendant of the powerful Xedlers, a family of German nobles who had settled in Almagro, Spain, and acquired interests in the Americas. In 1528, Charles V had granted a select group of German bankers the right to conquer and exploit the northern coast of South America. Their advent marked the start of a ruthless era, dominated by the relentless pursuit of riches and, especially, the legendary El Dorado, the “lost city of gold.” Another of the family’s distant relatives, Lope de Aguirre—the infamous Basque conquistador also known as El Loco—had wreaked murderous havoc up and down the continent in search of the same dazzling chimeras.

  But Simón de Bolívar, a Basque from the town of Marquina, had come on a very different mission. He arrived in Santo Domingo in the 1560s as a member of Spain’s royal civil service, whose express purpose during those years was to impose some measure of discipline on the wild bonanza that Spanish America had become. Santo Domingo was the capital of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola—now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the first seat of colonial rule in the Americas, Santo Domingo was, during that period, the staging area for a new, brash initiative to tame the unruly coast of Venezuela, where hostile Indian tribes and rapacious pirates were playing havoc with Spain’s efforts at colonization. Toward that purpose, in 1588, King Philip II bestowed on the island’s governor, Diego Osorio, the additional responsibility of governing the province of Venezuela. Osorio decided to take de Bolívar, by then his trusted aide and scribe, to Caracas with him to carry out the king’s wishes. Accompanied by his wife and son, de Bolívar set himself up handsomely in that emerging city, and went about acquiring enormous tracts of land even as he did the governor’s bidding.

  Under Osorio’s auspices, de Bolívar became regent and procurator of Caracas and accountant general of Venezuela, and in those capacities sailed to Spain to report on the status of “Tierra Firma,” as South America was known, to King Philip II himself. De Bolívar turned out to be a fairly civic-minded leader. He introduced large-scale agricultural projects—until then, unknown in that area of South America—and, with the collaboration of the Church, established a system of public education. With Osorio, he conceived and built the port of La Guaira, which would increase Venezuela’s fortunes into the unbounded future. In 1592, he helped found the seminary that would eventually become the University of Caracas. De Bolívar built haciendas and created new wellsprings of commerce; he gave the city its first coat of arms. He also regulated the annual shipment of goods between Spain and the port of La Guaira, including the transport of one hundred tons of black slaves from Africa. In such ways did America’s first Bolívar step into the continent’s roiling history—not as an adventurer or settler, but as a high-ranking emissary of the Spanish crown.

  Alongside this march of history, however, was the steady hardening of a racial hierarchy that would define South America into the modern age. It had begun when Christopher Columbus’s men had landed on Hispaniola, and imposed their will over the Taíno people. At first, Queen Isabel and the Church roundly censured the capture and massacre of Indians. Columbus’s men had committed harrowing atrocities, burning and destroying whole tribal villages, abducting natives as slaves, unleashing murderous plagues of syphilis and smallpox on the population. The priests who accompanied the crown’s “civilizing missions” made a point of recording it all. As a result, the state tried to take a strong stance against any kind of institutionalized violence. It introduced a system of encomiendas, in which Spanish soldiers were assigned allotments of Indians and, in exchange for the task of instructing them in the Christian faith, were given the right to put them to work on the land or in the mines. The soldiers were often harsh and corrupt, killing natives who did not comply with their brutal demands, and, eventually, the system of encomiendas had to be abolished. But the notion of encouraging soldiers to work the land rather than live from plunder opened the way for a new era of plantation life.

  Throughout, the state had a hard time enforcing laws that prohibited slavery. Even the queen had to agree that without the use of physical force, the Indians would refuse to work and the mines so necessary to Spain’s economy would cease to function. There could be no gold, no silver, no sugar, without the systematic subjugation of American Indians. In 1503, a mere decade after Columbus stepped foot in America, the queen hedged on her initial disapprobation of slavery and decreed:

  Forasmuch as my Lord the King and Myself have ordered that the Indians living on the island of Hispaniola be considered free and not subject to slavery . . . I order you, Our Governor . . . to compel the Indians to cooperate with the Christian settlers on the said island, to work on their buildings, to mine and collect gold and other metals, and to work on their farms and crop fields.

  In other words, killing was a Christian sin and genocide would not be tolerated, but “compelling” rebellious natives was a necessary evil. The Spanish colonizers understood the tacit approval in this. Despite the official condemnation of slavery, the state had conceded it would turn a blind eye. Indians continued to be a commodity to be owned and traded. And though Spanish sailors and Indian women had propagated freely from the start, a psychology of superiority and inferiority was established. It was best to be Spanish—unfortunate to be indigenous—in the New World that Europe had made.

  The Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas took issue with all this, especially the moral dithering about slaves. A former slave owner who had undergone an emphatic change of heart, he fumed about the brutalities Spaniards had visited on the Taíno people and the boatloads of indigenous slaves that Columbus was transporting regularly to Spain. “Slaves are the primary source of income for the Admiral,” Las Casas wrote of Columbus. Finally, in an impassioned plea to Charles V, he argued that institutionalized barbarism had cruelly decimated the Indian population: “Spaniards are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples.” In Hispaniola, they had reduced three million people to “a population of barely two hundred”; on the mainland of South America, they had stolen more than a million castellanos of gold and killed some 800,000 souls. A “Deep, Bloody American Tragedy” he called it, “choakt up with Indian Blood and Gore.” To mitigate the damage—to prevent the depletion of these “humble, patient, and peaceable natives”—he advocated that Spain begin the importation of African slaves.

  Eventually, Las Casas was to see the hypocrisy of that proposal, but not before the colonies had swung into a lively commerce. By the time Simón de Bolívar had made his children and grandchildren indisputably the richest landowning aristocrats of Caracas, there were ten thousand African slaves working the fields and plantations of Venezuela. The Indians, less able to toil in the sun, too easily affected by heat prostration, were sent off to work in the mines.

  As soon as the crown was able to impose some semblance of control, it moved to enforce strict divisions between the races. A ruthlessly observed system of racial dominance was put in place. At the top were the Spanish-born, crown-appointed overseers, such as Simón de Bolívar; below them, the Creoles—whites, born in the colonies—such as de Bolívar’s own son. After that came the pardos, an ever burgeoning mixed-race population that was either mestizo, part-white, part-Indian; or mulatto, a mixture of white and black; or sambo, a combination of black and Indian. As in most slave societies, labels were fashioned for every possible skin color: quadroons, quintroons, octoroons, moriscos, coyotes, chamisos, gíbaros, and so on. For each birth, a church registry would meticulously record the race, for there were concrete ramifications for the color of a child’s skin. If he were Indian, he would be subject to the Spanish tribute, a tax imposed by the crown; if he we
re unable to pay, he was forced to meet his debt through hard labor. Indians were also subject to the mita, a period of compulsory toil in the mines or fields. Many of them didn’t survive it. Chained, herded in gangs, separated from their families, those serving the mita would often be shipped great distances to satisfy the viceroy’s demands.

  Indians were also forced to buy goods according to laws of repartimiento. The governors would sell them food and supplies and expect them to pay with gold or silver. Often, the result was a disgraceful trafficking of sick mules, spoiled food, or faulty goods, sold at double or triple the normal prices. Sometimes these commodities were absolutely useless: Indian men who had no facial hair were made to buy razors. Women who wore tribal wraps were forced to buy silk stockings. The proceeds were gathered dutifully and sent off to the royal coffers in Madrid.

  For blacks, life in Spanish America was equally punishing. Severed from family, country, language, they were brought as fishermen, pearl divers, cacao and sugar field workers. They were Bantu from Angola and the Congo, Mandingo from the Gold Coast. In the course of a little more than two hundred years, an estimated one million slaves were sold into South America by the Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Uniformly disdained as the lowest rung in the human hierarchy, they nevertheless left an indelible imprint on the culture. They worked their way from field hands to skilled craftsmen, from house slaves to beloved nursemaids, but it wasn’t until after Bolívar’s revolution that they were released into the mainstream of possibility.

  For all of Spain’s attempts to retain absolute control of its colonies, it could not prevent the interracial mixing that was inevitable in a world forged by male conquistadors. The crown quickly—and by necessity—took the attitude that marriage between races was acceptable, as long as Spanish men could persuade non-Spanish women to be baptized Christians. In truth, the Spaniards were hardly racially “pure” Europeans. After centuries of tumultuous history, the bloodline contained traces of Arab, Phoenician, African, Roman, Basque, Greek, Ligurian, Celt, German, Balkan, and Jew. But once they began mixing with Indians and blacks in the Americas, a cosmic race representative of all continents began to emerge. When Simón de Bolívar, the Spanish overlord, arrived in Venezuela in the late 1500s, the population counted 5,000 Spaniards, 10,000 Africans, and 350,000 native Indians in the country. Two hundred years later, when the Liberator was born, according to anthropologist Alexander von Humboldt, Venezuela had 800,000 inhabitants, of whom more than half were mestizo or mulatto. Today, more than two thirds of all Latin Americans are mixed-race. Nowhere else on earth has a civilization of such ethnic complexity been wrought in such a short span of time.

  IN THE PATRICIAN HOUSEHOLD TO which Simón Bolívar was born, race was hardly a preoccupation. Marriages had long been arranged in order to ensure future generations all the privileges an aristocratic bloodline could afford. But in 1792, when Doña Concepción decided to seek official approval for a title of nobility her father-in-law had bought sixty years earlier, Spain’s rigorous wheels of justice went into motion and secret doubts about the family’s racial purity began.

  For Creoles like the Bolívars, a title of nobility was an enormously valuable asset. In spite of the wealth and comfort they enjoyed, Creoles were second-class citizens, barred from the government’s most powerful positions. Many of them yearned for the singular advantages—the opportunity to hold office, the possibility of higher income, the ability to hand down hereditary rights—a marquisate or baronetcy might bring. When the Liberator’s grandfather Juan de Bolívar learned in 1728 that King Philip V had donated a marquisate to a Spanish monastery in order to raise money for the monks, he bought the title outright. It cost him 22,000 ducats. In such ways were noblemen made.

  Juan Vicente de Bolívar, his son, had every right to use that title and call himself the Marquis of San Luis, but he didn’t. For him, it was enough to be a Bolívar, the descendant of so many rich and illustrious Bolívars before him; it was enough to lord over the vast holdings he had inherited. But when Juan Vicente died and Doña Concepción decided to try to make the marquisate official for her sons, she learned that the Bolívar family tree wasn’t so pristine, after all.

  It turned out that Juan de Bolívar’s grandmother had been the illegitimate daughter of a liaison between his great-grandfather, Francisco Marín de Narváez, and a chambermaid. Whether the servant was white or brown or black was uncertain—no one was able to say. But Spain’s strict laws of succession did not allow for such aberrations, quite apart from the prickly question of race. The title remained in official limbo, unavailable to Juan Vicente de Bolívar’s sons. They hardly seemed to care. In time, they would drop the “de” from the Bolívar surname, ignoring that last marker of peerage.

  Bolívar’s racial makeup has been a subject of endless fascination for generations of historians, but ultimately the debate comes down to the color of this one servant and, in the end, it is a matter of conjecture. Some claim that the personal chambermaid of a rich seventeenth-century Caracas matriarch would most likely be white; others say that she was bound to be mulatta or mestiza. One thing is sure: no mention of race is made in the family’s papers or letters. And more: upon the illegitimate child’s seventh birthday, she inherited much of her father’s vast estate. Whatever her mother’s skin color might have been, when little Josefa Marín de Narváez reached fourteen, she became a highly marriageable young woman.

  Historians are not the only ones who argue over the “knot of Josefa Marín.” Simón Bolívar’s political boosters and detractors alike have used it to support opposing points of view. For some, Josefa’s mother was an Indian from Aroa; for others, she was a black slave from Caracas. Bolívar’s critics have often raised the question of race to impute a character flaw. His disciples see it as a way to identify an ethnic group with greatness. But if Bolívar had African blood in his veins, it very well might have been in the family before his Spanish ancestors ever set foot in America. If he had traces of Indian blood, he was probably no different from many Latin Americans who have it, yet consider themselves pristinely white. In the end, the question of Josefa’s race serves more as a mirror on history’s polemicists than as any possible insight into the man. For all the ink that has been expended on the subject, “the knot of Josefa Marín” is little more than unsubstantiated gossip.

  There was, however, very real reason for gossip in the house where Don Juan Vicente presided over guests and Doña Concepcion cooed over their newborn baby. Little Simón’s great-great-great-grandfather hadn’t been the only one in the family to exercise his droit de seigneur over the female servants. His father, Don Juan Vicente, had been doing it for years.

  Don Juan Vicente de Bolívar y Ponte had been born into a considerable fortune, the careful accrual of many generations of Creole wealth. He had inherited the splendid house on San Jacinto Street and the lucrative cacao plantations from none other than Josefa; a side chapel in the Cathedral of Caracas from his great-grandfather Ponte; and the sprawling sugar estate in San Mateo from a legacy that dated all the way back to the original Simón de Bolívar. As a youth, he had trained in the military arts and, at the age of sixteen, served the Spanish king by defending Venezuela’s ports against marauding British invaders. At twenty-one, he was appointed procurator of Caracas and was held in such high esteem by Spanish authorities that he was called to the Court of Madrid for five years. He returned to Venezuela in 1758 an educated, sophisticated man, and so was rewarded with even more prominent responsibilities. By the age of thirty-two, he had become a veritable institution.

  He had also become something of a sexual profligate. He came home to his bachelor’s empire flush with a sense of license. He began to molest his female servants, demand that they surrender physical favors. He singled out the most attractive and sent their husbands on faraway expeditions. He waylaid the women in bedrooms, boudoirs—in the secluded alcoves of his capacious house. The transgressions were so flagrant, so persistent—verging on outright rape—tha
t his victims could no longer remain silent. When the bishop of Caracas made a pastoral visit to the plantation of San Mateo in 1765, he began to hear a litany of complaints from Don Juan Vicente’s housemaids as well as from the wives of male employees.

  One claimed she had been forced to be his love slave for three years—to be at his beck and call whenever he fancied her. She testified that there were at least two other servants he was abusing similarly at the same time; he would choose among them at whim, summon the unfortunate woman to his bedroom, then lock the door and defile her. Another witness named Margarita claimed he had assaulted her in a corridor and was in the process of dragging her into his room, but when he was told a visitor was on the way, he thought better of it. Even though she had been spared on that particular occasion, Margarita admitted that she eventually succumbed; she didn’t dare lock her room against him, “fearing his power and violent temper.” Margarita’s sister, María Jacinta, too, wrote a petition to the bishop, begging him to intercede on her behalf against “this infernal wolf, who is trying to take me by force and consign us both to the Devil.” She claimed that, for days, Don Juan Vicente had been importuning her to sin with him, going so far as to send off her husband to a remote cattle ranch so as to better carry out his designs. “Sometimes I wonder how I can defend myself against this wicked man,” she told the bishop, “and sometimes I think it best for me simply to say yes to him, take a knife in with me, and kill him outright so as to liberate us all of this cruel tyrant.”

  The bishop was so appalled by the accusations that he was moved to address them with Don Juan Vicente himself. He suggested to the colonel that his “loose ways with women” were growing too obvious to go ignored by the Church; that it was known far and wide that he lived in “a state of moral disorder.” The bishop had been careful to warn each of the witnesses that it was of utmost importance that their accounts be absolutely accurate, but as the testimonies emerged—utterly compelling, mutually corroborating—there could be no doubt: Don Juan Vicente was a moral reprobate. He had to be stopped.