Bolivar: American Liberator Read online

  Bewildered, heartsick, Bolívar had no choice but to do what Ribas demanded. He was a virtual stranger in the eastern provinces, despised by Mariño’s army, and now, with his own field marshal’s betrayal, he had lost hold of the republic altogether. The sudden hostility from Ribas was especially galling; he was Bolívar’s uncle, after all, married to his mother’s sister. There was no doubt that Ribas was hotheaded, vain, and far too hungry for power—it had always been so—but he had never shown Bolívar anything but loyalty. In a strange twist that echoed the fate of Miranda, Bolívar was cast to the winds by a man he had assumed to be one of his most loyal defenders. Ribas wasted no time in ridding Venezuela of Bolívar; he yanked Mariño out of prison and exiled them both on the same ship.

  So was it that the second republic crumbled as quickly as the first and the patriot leadership splintered into a host of petty, internecine squabbles. Eerily enough, Bolívar repeated the arc he had traveled almost exactly two years before. He set sail from the turbulent coast of Venezuela, hoping to start all over again on calmer shores. This time, however, instead of being accompanied by his uncle, he was in the company of a former rival, General Mariño, in a bizarre, uneasy partnership that only a cauldron of revolution could forge. It was the 8th of September, 1814. Only hours after their departure, Colonel Piar arrived from the island of Margarita with a company of two hundred riflemen, intending to shoot them both.

  ENTERING THE GHOST CITY OF Caracas on July 16, 1814, Boves was greeted by white flags and a nervous archbishop. On the road, he had made it clear to Spanish general Cajigal, to whom he had already made menacing remarks, that Caracas was his to rule, not some lily-handed appointee’s. Cajigal, who had been made interim captain-general of Venezuela, tried to appease Boves by promising to make him colonel, but Boves scoffed, saying that he had promoted many a colonel himself—he was nobody’s officer. The insubordination was so blatant that Cajigal, red-faced and speechless, didn’t know what to say. He made a quick course for the fortress at Puerto Cabello, where he sulked and sent off bitter complaints to Madrid.

  In Caracas, Boves issued a proclamation promising that henceforward bygones would be bygones—all who had remained in the capital would be safe from harm. But no sooner had the Spanish archbishop of Venezuela Narciso Coll y Pratt intoned a grateful Mass for this welcome peace than the killings began. Anyone who had assisted the patriot cause was put to the lance or machete. Anyone who had remained faithful to King Ferdinand was allowed to live. In this, the people of color, especially, were rewarded: beggars were sent off to manage haciendas and produce food for the city. Pardos rose to high positions in the army. In an irony few at the time appreciated, the royalist victory succeeded in toppling the social pyramid that Spain had been building for three hundred years. Overnight, Boves inverted the racial order: The colored, whom he perceived as loyal and trustworthy, were favored; the whites were treated as dangerous foes. To be Creole or Mantuano, for Boves, was tantamount to being a criminal. Only in Haiti had the lower classes achieved such a stunning reversal; but in Haiti the revolution—bloodily fought and won—had been undertaken in the name of freedom, not in the name of a king.

  By October, Boves had moved up the coast, from Caracas to Cumaná. Here, too, he rode into a largely deserted city. The Legions of Hell, grown to more than ten thousand, now controlled the entire seaboard of Venezuela. The patriot leadership, on the other hand, had fallen into disarray. General Piar ignored Field Marshal Ribas’s desperate communiqués. Ribas and Bermúdez, too, were bickering, unable to agree on how to confront Boves. They finally met him in battle on December 5 in the valley of Urica, just south of Cumaná. The royalists, with a force twice as large, crushed the patriots easily, but as the republicans fell into retreat one of their ranks managed to leap toward Boves and spear him in the heart. He died instantly.

  It is difficult to overestimate the impact Boves had on Venezuelans, their revolution, the Americans they would become. It was he who first allowed blacks and Indians to imagine they could have a voice in the nation’s future. The Creole revolution had begun, after all, much like its North American version: as a movement that was of, by, and for whites. Boves changed that; the irony is that Spain saw potential in his racial war, and used it. Retrieved from the battlefield, his body was given an elaborate funeral in Urica; in time, it was mourned by Spanish priests throughout the land, most elaborately by that fanatical enemy of the revolution Archbishop Coll y Pratt.

  Boves’s sudden death only served to whet the Legions of Hell’s appetite for vengeance. General Francisco Tomás Morales took command of Boves’s troops and Ribas and Bermúdez fought him a few days later outside the republican city of Maturín. There, too, the patriots lost decisively. Reduced to a tiny force now, the patriots dispersed. Ribas made a vexed escape west, through mountain and vale, and finally—exhausted and sick—took refuge in a house near Pascua. He was awakened one night by a band of angry townspeople, pro-Boves royalists who had persuaded Ribas’s manservant to tell them where he was. They dragged Ribas into town, killed him, dismembered him, fried his head in a vat of bubbling oil, and transported it in an iron cage to Caracas, where it was displayed—with his customary red cap perched jauntily on top—on the road that led to La Guaira. No one was surprised.

  The people had seen too much to be shocked by any one atrocity. By the end of 1814, Boves had killed eighty thousand republicans. But Bolívar’s war to the death, too, had executed thousands. Bolívar didn’t deny it. He openly reported that “all Europeans” he encountered in his Admirable Campaign “almost without exception were shot.” This incontinent violence had not sprung spontaneously from the Venezuelan people; it was the calculated result of strategies put into place by two rival leaders who were intent on unnerving their enemies. Bolívar was not a truculent man: killing in cold blood sickened him. But he was well versed in the uses of fear. Boves, on the other hand, reveled in death. He had laughed to see an unborn child struggling for life in its dead mother’s belly; he took pleasure in watching a boy witness the mutilation of his father. It is said that Boves was eager to march on Cumaná precisely because his bloodlust had grown extreme. Whatever Boves’s and Bolívar’s intentions, the results of their policies were one and the same: the country stank of death; hospitals were overrun with invalids; populations were displaced; women were transferred from one place to another to care for the maimed and dying. The nation was devastated beyond recognition. A Spanish official wrote of Venezuela:

  There are no more provinces left. Towns that had thousands of inhabitants are now reduced to a few hundred or even a few dozen. In some, there are only vestiges of human habitation. Roads and fields are strewn with unburied corpses; entire villages have been burnt; whole families are nothing but a memory.

  By now, the republicans held only a small patch of land: the island of Margarita. As Bolívar contemplated this reduced universe from a distant shore, he must have seen what was so clearly obvious: the uprising he had helped to kindle was unlike any other he had read about in the comfortable library of his old Spanish mentor, the Marquis of Ustaríz, and certainly like no revolution since. This was no uniform group of like-minded whites united by class and faith upending an oppressor and casting out an old system: it was no France or United States of America—or Haiti, for that matter—where strong commonalities existed among the rebels. The overwhelmingly mixed-race population of Latin America existed in few other societies, and it was a population too prevalent to ignore. A revolution would never succeed without engaging it. If Miranda had taught him that Creoles were profoundly afraid to confront the perilous questions of race in Spanish America, Boves had taught him that no war could be won without doing exactly that.

  The idea of recruiting black troops had occurred at about the same time to the Argentine liberator José de San Martín, as he contemplated the liberation of Chile and Peru. The notion had suggested itself, too, to Andrew Jackson, who had led two battalions of free blacks—among them Haitian refugees�
��to defend New Orleans against a looming British attack. Jackson would later declare himself in favor of shipping all freed slaves back to Africa, but in that fraught year of 1814, Old Hickory defended himself against his critics by arguing that blacks made first-rate soldiers. “They must be for, or against us,” Jackson said, in a phrase that Bolívar himself might have spoken. “Distrust them, and you make them your enemies, place confidence in them, and you engage them by every dear and honorable tie to the interest of the country who extends to them equal rights and privileges with white men.” It was no small irony that a North American was arguing this, for in Washington’s halls of power, the fact that Bolívar began conscripting blacks and mulattoes to his revolution would be enough to cast suspicion on his whole enterprise. Nevertheless, for a fleeting moment in time, it seemed—at least to those three American contemporaries, Bolívar, San Martín, and Jackson—an idea whose time had come.

  Bolívar’s message to fellow patriots as he left his native shores in early September was repentant, but resolute. “Destiny elected me to break your chains,” he wrote, “as surely as Providence charged me to be the instrument of your misfortune. Yes, I brought you peace and liberty, but those inestimable treasures were followed immediately by war and bondage.” With a clear grasp that the nation needed to understand and overcome its racial divisions, he went on to say:

  The destruction of governments, the ousting of laws, the reform of customs, the reversal of opinions, and the founding, finally, of liberty in a country of slaves are goals as impossible to achieve overnight as they are beyond our power to control. . . . I swear to you that, Liberator or dead, I will strive to merit the honor you have conferred on me; there is no human power on the face of this earth that can impede the course I am determined to follow, until I have returned to liberate you by way of the west, covered in blood and laurels. . . . Do not compare your might with that of the enemy, because spirit cannot be compared to matter. You are men, they are beasts; you are free, they are slaves.

  BOLÍVAR ARRIVED IN CARTAGENA, NEW Granada, on September 19, 1814. Despite his bitter failures in Venezuela, the people of Cartagena received him warmly. To them, he was the hero who had won them a republic. He installed himself in the palace of the Spanish bishop, who had evacuated the city years before, and found himself sharing that grand manse with a family he knew all too well: the mother and sisters of his fellow soldier Carlos Soublette, who had been Miranda’s adjutant.

  The Soublettes were distant cousins of Bolívar’s and, like him, refugees from Caracas. In the fragrant, bougainvillea-hung gardens of Cartagena and on the avenues lined with stately palms, he came to spend considerable time distracting himself with lovely Isabel Soublette—sixteen years old, irresistibly flirtatious, with an abundance of pale red hair. She was nothing like the intense Pepita, who had insinuated herself into his political affairs, miffed his officers, and then fled to safety and the Caribbean. Isabel was too young and tender to be anything more than a light diversion. Eventually, she and Bolívar fell into a love affair, which they would have an opportunity to renew as the winds of revolution buffeted them from exile to exile. He would memorialize those dalliances much later with the gift of a house—on the occasion of her wedding to another man.

  But romance, for Bolívar, was but a passing salve in an ongoing war, and revolution was never far from his mind. He was nervous in the extreme, in perpetual motion, lit by a preternatural energy. The bishop’s house became more a nest of intrigue than a nest of love; in it, he proceeded to plot a campaign to reconstitute his revolution. But it was clear that what had happened in Venezuela was now coming to pass in New Granada. Antonio Nariño, the former president in Bogotá, was languishing in the dungeons of Cádiz, alongside Miranda. Republican governments were being threatened by royalists on all sides. In the south, the Spaniards had a firm grip on the gold mines of Popayán. In the north, they had retaken the crucial port of Santa Marta. Bolívar knew he could not rely on Cartagena alone to reignite his revolution; he needed the firm support of the confederation. Toward that end, he traveled to Tunja, where the congress gave him a rousing show of support, an army, and instructions to march immediately to subdue the unruly capital of Bogotá. The congress’s president, Camilo Torres, assured him, “General, as long as your sword lives on, your country is not dead. . . . You have been an unfortunate soldier. But you are a great man.”

  Bolívar was not considered great by the people who ruled Bogotá. To them, he was the Man of Terror, the architect of a barbaric war. The archbishop had gone so far as to excommunicate him. In early December, as Bolívar and his army of eighteen hundred camped outside Bogotá’s walls, he exhorted the city leaders to listen to him. “I give you my word of honor,” he wrote one of them, “My goal is to conserve human life, and so I urge you to negotiate with me and spare your citizens the horrors of a siege and battle.” The city put up a halfhearted struggle, but after two days capitulated. On December 12, Bolívar entered the city and took power, assuring the people of their rights. Not long after, the Church commuted its decree of excommunication and, reversing itself completely, celebrated a glorious Mass in his honor. The Congress of the Confederation, overjoyed with Bolívar’s success, made him commander in chief of its army, and Camilo Torres’s government in Tunja hastily moved to reestablish itself in Bogotá.

  But the rest of New Granada would not be so easily won. Spanish generals had reconquered the inland waterways. In order to dislodge them, Bolívar needed to secure Santa Marta, the port at which the great Magdalena rushed to sea. With congress’s blessings, he marched from the mountains of Bogotá toward the coast, liberating towns along the river, much as he had done in the opposite direction two years before. But even as history repeated itself in reverse in those early months of 1815, his enemies, too, flew back to haunt him.

  By the time Bolívar arrived in Mompox, his old nemesis Colonel Manuel del Castillo had seized control of Cartagena. Castillo was a dedicated republican, an ardent American, greatly favored by the people of that city, but he was virulently opposed to the Venezuelan liberator—brazenly so—and just as he had spurned Bolívar’s liberating expedition a year before by refusing to march into Venezuela, he furiously rejected him now. Castillo immediately set out to blacken Bolívar’s reputation, attributing the loss of Venezuela to his cowardice and ineptitude. He published broadsides against him, arrested anyone suspected of being Bolívar’s supporter. He was aided in this by others as passionately jealous of Bolívar. They urged Castillo to resist Bolívar at all costs and liberate Santa Marta himself. Boosted by this vote of confidence, Castillo began a mad course toward civil war. He refused Bolívar’s innumerable attempts at reconciliation. He put the city of Cartagena on high alert. He ordered his commandant of operations along the river to raise troops against Bolívar’s army. Bolívar had no choice but to linger on those muggy banks for more than a month as smallpox and cholera tore through his ranks, eradicating them one by one. Castillo’s efforts became so blatant, so infamous, that the Spaniards eagerly dispatched a messenger to him, offering to help squelch the Liberator for good.

  It was a disastrous situation; and as it unfolded, Bolívar made a drastic miscalculation. He decided to use the same tactics he had employed in Bogotá: he would camp on the outskirts of the city, send in a few strongly worded missives, and then threaten an incursion. He moved his headquarters to the monastery of La Popa, a walled fortress on a verdant promontory overlooking Cartagena. But when he arrived he found that Castillo had poisoned its water supply. Putrefying animal corpses bobbed in the monastery’s wells. To make matters worse, Cartagena’s cannons were turned against him and the incoming fire was so constant that fetching fresh water from the lake was impossible. Bolívar’s troops grew weak with thirst and succumbed to rampant infection. Six weeks elapsed in this mind-numbing waste of manpower and, in the interim, royalists began to sweep down the Magdalena again, taking back all the ground Bolívar had gained and opening the way for a large-scale inva
sion.