Bolivar: American Liberator Read online

  On March 30, Bolívar wrote to the head priest of Cartagena, imploring him to use his holy office to bring about a resolution. The notion of raising arms against a fellow republican seemed obscene. He wrote on April 12: “I have offered to withdraw. It seems to me that I’ve done it with more generosity of spirit than anyone might have expected. This is hardly a contrived liberality, but one that springs from my heart, which cannot abide the possibility of seeing this place despoiled by a frightening anarchy. . . . The very thought of it makes me shudder.” But the priest didn’t answer that letter or, for that matter, any of the letters that followed. On April 24, he sent Bolívar a terse message advising him that a mighty armada—sixty ships and more than fourteen thousand Spanish soldiers—seasoned veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, had landed in Venezuela. At its head was one of Spain’s most illustrious warriors, Pablo Morillo, a general who had distinguished himself at Trafalgar and fought brilliantly at the Duke of Wellington’s side.

  Bolívar may well have suspected that such an expedition was inevitable, but he probably did not know the depth of Spanish conviction that animated it. King Ferdinand had expressed a mortal impatience with the tenets of democracy; in order to please him, his court had urged him to be “absolutely absolute”; mobs in the streets of Madrid had taken to yelling, “Death to the Constitution!” Spain was getting its empire in order, and it wanted its rebel colonies back.

  History unfurled quickly after that. Taking advantage of the standoff between Castillo and Bolívar, the royalists sped down the Magdalena and took Mompox handily. Bolívar, agonizing over the impossibility of his situation, called a council of war and explained that the only thing left for him to do, given Castillo’s obstinacy, was to resign his commission and separate himself from New Granada. His troops, which had once numbered 2,400, had been reduced to 700. He negotiated a treaty with Cartagena, insuring the safety of those few. On the 8th of May, he handed over their command to his cousin Florencio Palacios and set sail for Jamaica on board a British brig. With him were his secretary, his aide-de-camp, and a handful of loyal comrades. Santiago Mariño, Liberator of the East, followed a few days later.

  By then, all indications were that the cause of independence in Spanish America could not possibly survive. The Spanish general Pablo Morillo, “Pacificator of Tierra Firma,” had landed at Margarita and was working his way west. It’s not difficult to imagine the impression his magnificent expedition of sixty ships must have made as it approached the tranquil shores of Margarita. Six regiments of infantry and two of cavalry—sporting splendid uniforms, shining medals, and the latest in arms—had arrived on battleships the likes of which America had never seen. It was the most expansive, organized force Spain had sent to the New World. One look at that breathtaking sight, and it didn’t take long for General Juan Bautista Arismendi, governor of Margarita, to surrender. On April 7, General Morillo strode off his ship to embrace the infamous “butcher of La Guaira,” recalling later: “I treated them all with respect, even Arismendi—the fierce, cruel Arismendi—who only a year before had been the instrument of death, in the most inhuman way, for eight hundred captive Spaniards.” Morillo’s mandate in the Americas could not have been clearer: he was to reconquer Venezuela, the most recalcitrant and rebellious of Spain’s colonies, then move on to pacify New Granada and Quito. After that, he was to continue over the Andes and—with the help of loyal Peru—crush San Martín’s anarchists in Argentina.

  San Martín had fought valiantly in Spain, defending the madre patria against Napoleon, but on his return to Buenos Aires, he joined the Argentine revolution, rising to command the rebel Army of the North. Even as Morillo’s ships were approaching Venezuela, San Martín was beginning to plot a bold strategy to train a more disciplined army, cross the Andes, and attack the viceroy of Lima from the sea. It was an ingenious plan, conceived almost entirely in secret and with careful, military precision. But that victory was yet to come. As far as Morillo was concerned, San Martín would be an easy conquest for Spain’s seasoned troops. As would Bolívar and the rest of the unruly Americans.

  By May 11, as Bolívar’s ship lost sight of the Colombian coastline, Morillo and his legions swarmed ashore at La Guaira and overland to Caracas. The capital had been prepared by Captain-General Cajigal, who had published a long string of recriminations about the Liberator. According to him, Bolívar’s revolutionary career was finished: he had made bitter enemies, spilled much of his country’s blood, shown a patent inability to rule, pressed his own prejudices on the people, engaged in puerile self-salutes, and, in the mass evacuation of the capital, had caused unimaginable and unnecessary suffering. “Some day,” the new captain-general added, “God will punish his execrable deeds.”

  There seemed to be little point in thrashing Bolívar. There was every reason to believe that his revolution was truly over. Morillo announced a general amnesty and declared business as usual. “The army of King Ferdinand VII has entered your country without shedding one drop of blood!” he told the people, “I trust you will now return to the peace and fidelity of former years. Prepare to tremble if you do not!” But Caracas was a fraction of its former self, its society turned upside down. Pardos ruled; whites were few. There would be no going back to the old colonial ways. Morillo, whose skills were far more acute in military matters than political, washed his hands of administrative details, reorganized his army, and in July sailed to Santa Marta with fifty-six ships and a force augmented by five thousand of Boves’s finest horsemen. By August, he was planning a siege of Cartagena.

  Colonel Castillo—stubbornly proud, fatally grandiose—decided to lock down the fortress of Cartagena, hold out against the inevitable. The day before the Spanish landed in Santa Marta, he took a young woman’s hand in marriage and, for all the impending danger, there seemed to be a dreamy, deluded air about the man. Eventually, the city was choked by Morillo’s blockade and, surrounded by an army more powerful than any Spanish America had ever known, Castillo began a suicidal effort that would be remembered as one of the grimmest moments of Colombian history. For 108 days, from September to December, he barricaded the population in that mighty stone citadel. From without, the city was virtually indestructible; from within, however, it was a different story. There was nothing to drink, nothing to eat.

  Little by little, the once beautiful, prosperous city of Cartagena began to die from the inside. By the end of November, conditions were desperate. Every donkey, dog, cat, rat—even leaves off the trees, grass sprouting from walls, shoes of dead men—had been devoured and starvation was rampant; disease, endemic. The few republicans who had managed to slip into the walled city from the outside—among them, Antonio José de Sucre, Carlos Soublette, and José Francisco Bermúdez, all fugitives from Morillo’s invasion—deposed Castillo and sent off a letter begging Bolívar to return, but the damage had been done. The city was in ruins, the population doomed. Half of them—more than six thousand—perished in the course of the Spanish blockade. Every day, three hundred corpses were swept off the streets in a desperate attempt to curb cannibalism. On December 5, in the pale light of a new moon, two thousand patriots, men and women, scaled the walls and stole out of the city, streaming down to shore, where corsairs awaited with promises to sail them to liberty. Many of them drowned; others were robbed or abandoned in the wild; but some who would play significant roles in Bolívar’s future—Sucre, Briceño, Bermúdez, Soublette, Luis Ducoudray, and Mariano Montilla—made it to safety. When General Morillo and his troops stormed into Cartagena the next day, they found its streets abandoned, its houses silent. Cowering in a corner of one house was Manuel del Castillo. He was taken prisoner and shot.

  There was little doubt that Spain was master of Tierra Firma now. By mid-1815, there were countless signs to prove it. Boves, author of one of the bloodiest hecatombs in the annals of American horrors, was honored with a lavish Mass in the Cathedral of Caracas, pronounced by the eminent Archbishop Coll y Pratt. “The throne thanks his important services,�
� the holy man proclaimed, enshrining for all posterity the notion, so common in South American history, that power buys impunity. In Peru, the most obedient of Spanish colonies, the Inca Mateo Pumacahua, who had fought for Spain then protested against it by overtaking La Paz and Arequipa, was dogged down by the king’s army, and, in a lesson to the Peruvian people, hanged, decapitated, and quartered. Thousands of miles away, on the highway from Caracas to La Guaira, the fried head of José Félix Ribas sat in its iron cage for a thousand days, picked over by birds and flies, reminding anyone who dared pass that there was no glory in crossing Spain, no triumph in being a rebel. His widow, Josefa Palacios, the sister of Bolívar’s mother, fell mute, shut herself in her room, and, for seven long years, refused to open the door.

  REVOLUTION HAD BEGUN TO TAKE a physical toll on Bolívar. Everyone could see it. In Jamaica, the Duke of Manchester, governor of the island, looked across his dinner table and beheld a spent man: his guest was restless, fidgety. Seeing the black eyes glitter from an unnaturally gaunt face, the governor remarked that the oil had consumed the flame. Bolívar was thirty-two years old.

  But as Bolívar would prove in harder years to come, he was far stronger than he appeared. He had a near-Herculean appetite for adversity. Challenges seemed to electrify him. Within two weeks of his arrival in Kingston, he was writing to Lord Wellesley, trying to convince the former foreign secretary that it was high time the English turned their sights on Latin American independence. “I have seen the ravening fire that devours my benighted country,” Bolívar told him. “After innumerable efforts to quench it, I have come to sound an alarm, beg for help, say to Great Britain and the rest of humanity: a vast part of your species is about to expire, and the most beautiful half of this earth will soon be a desert.” Britain, however, had its sights firmly fixed elsewhere. It was fighting the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon had escaped to invade once again, and Wellesley’s brother, the Duke of Wellington, would win eternal fame for crushing him. But there were other reasons for Britain’s demurral. The country was entering into a treaty with the Holy Alliance—a powerful cabal that included Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and had firmly outlawed revolution—and so its only response, ironically, was to forbid its retired officers in the Caribbean from serving Bolívar’s cause.

  Help was forthcoming from no one. In the United States, an eighty-year-old John Adams, who perhaps had never forgotten his son-in-law’s perilous friendship with Miranda, now wrote:

  What could I think of revolutions and constitutions in South America? A people more ignorant, more bigoted, more superstitious, more implicitly credulous in the sanctity of royalty, more blindly devoted to their priests, in more awful terror of the Inquisition, than any people in Europe, even in Spain, Portugal, or the Austrian Netherlands, and infinitely more than in Rome itself.

  On September 1, 1815, President Madison drove a final nail into Bolívar’s hopes by issuing a proclamation that prohibited United States citizens from enlisting in military campaigns against Spain’s dominions.

  Bolívar’s lone offer of support was from a wealthy Dutchman in Curaçao. He was Luis Brion, a young Jewish merchant with a lust for adventure. Brion had a Philadelphia education, multiple citizenships, and a twenty-four-gun English brig to give away. He was one of a network of freewheeling Caribbean businessmen from whom Bolívar had bought arms and munitions. An ardent proponent of free trade who wanted Spain out of the Americas, Brion was keen to help Bolívar any way he could. He offered Bolívar the battleship. Bolívar thanked him warmly, calling him “America’s best friend,” and then sent one of his trusty colonels, Miguel Carabaño, to Curaçao to urge Brion to mount an entire expedition.

  In the interim, Bolívar wrote editorials, memos, letters to anyone he could think of, including one respectfully declining the invitation to take up the reins in the besieged fortress of Cartagena. Little did he know that as he penned those words, Cartagena was littered with corpses, its scant survivors plotting a fevered getaway.

  One of Bolívar’s many writings during that time was an astonishingly prescient letter addressed to an Englishman in Jamaica who expressed interest in his struggle for independence. More than a friendly missive, this was a masterful tour d’horizon. Clearly Bolívar meant it to enjoy wide dissemination. Written in vibrant prose and reflecting a profound grasp of the legacy of colonialism, the letter was read at first only by the small English circle for whom it was intended. It would take more than a dozen years to be retranslated into Spanish. But the letter served as a blueprint for Bolívar’s political thought, and its ideas would emerge in countless documents during those formative days.

  The “Letter from Jamaica” declared unequivocally that the bond between America and Spain had been severed forevermore: it could never be repaired. Although the “wicked stepmother” was laboring mightily to reapply her chains, it was too late. The colonies had tasted freedom. “Our hatred for Spain,” he declared, “is vaster than the sea between us.”

  In turns a paean to the inexpressible beauty of the continent and a shriek of fury at its despoliation, Bolívar’s letter is a brilliant distillation of Latin America’s political reality. His people, he explains, are neither Indian nor pardos nor European, but an entirely new race, for which European models of government are patently unsuitable. Monarchies, to these Americans, were abhorrent by definition; and democracy—Philadelphia style—inappropriate for a population cowed and infantilized by three hundred years of slavery. “As long as we do not have the political virtues that distinguish our brothers of the north,” he argued, “a democratic system, far from rescuing us, can only bring us ruin. . . . We are a region plagued by vices learned from Spain, which, through history, has been a mistress of cruelty, ambition, meanness, and greed.” Most important to the welfare of these fledgling republics, Bolívar insisted, was a firm executive who employed wisdom, dispensed justice, and ruled benevolently for life. His America needed a strong, centralized government—one that addressed the people’s wretched condition, not a perfectly conceptualized, theoretical model dreamed up by idealists on some far-flung shore.

  But the “Letter from Jamaica” was more than mere propaganda; it was inspired prophecy. In it, Bolívar predicted that revolution-torn Mexico would opt for a temporary monarchy, which indeed it did. He pictured the loose confederation of nations that later became Central America. Given Panama’s “magnificent position between two mighty seas,” he imagined a canal. For Argentina, he foresaw military dictatorships; for Chile, “the blessings that flow from the just and gentle laws of a republic.” For Peru, he predicted a limbo in which privileged whites would not tolerate a genuine democracy, colored masses would not tolerate a ruling aristocracy, and the constant threat of rebellion was never far from hand. All these would come to pass. In some countries, one could even say, Bolívar’s visions still hold.

  Reduced for the time being, however, to producing revolutionary doctrine, Bolívar was living like a pauper, using what funds he could cadge to contribute to a flurry of rebel ventures that blew in and out of Jamaica along with his erstwhile companions. Most of his financial assistance came from Maxwell Hyslop, an Englishman he had known from Caracas—a merchant who, like Brion, avidly advocated free trade. Hyslop’s loans afforded him two tiny rooms, a black manservant named Pio, and a hammock. “I am,” as he reported to Brion in Curaçao, “living in uncertainty and misery.” Eventually he wrote Hyslop that he had lost all patience with his harridan landlady and left her house.

  A few days later, on December 10, when a former paymaster in Bolívar’s army, Félix Amestoy, came looking for him at that address, Bolívar was no longer there. That very day he had found new quarters. But Amestoy didn’t know that. Seeing the hammock in the corner, he decided to take a nap and wait until Bolívar returned. Bolívar’s manservant, Pio, too, had no idea his master had moved. In the black of night, he crept in and attacked the man in the hammock with a knife, stabbing the body several times. The killing done, Pio made a quick esc
ape through the window, but he was drunk, loud, and, in the course of the murder, his victim had managed to cry out, “A Negro is killing me!” Shortly after, Pio was hunted down and apprehended. He admitted that foreigners had plied him with liquor and paid 2,000 pesos—an unimaginable sum—to assassinate Bolívar. The courts never determined by whose agency the murder had been contracted, or why. Within a few weeks, Pio was convicted and hanged—his head lopped off, affixed to a stake, and exhibited on Kingston’s Spring-Path.

  Many a legend has been made of that fatal night. Some historians claim that Bolívar was saved because he had lolled abed with Julia Cobier, a wealthy widow renowned for her beauty and brains, whom he’d been romancing. Others say he was off having dinner at Hyslop’s. Rumors even had it that General Morillo himself had ordered the assassination, and that money had passed from Spanish hands to a Polish Jew in Kingston, who ended up recruiting Pio to the task. In any case, the incident was enough to unnerve Bolívar. He left Jamaica on December 18 before authorities carried out Pio’s execution. Assisted by Brion and Hyslop, he sailed with food and supplies for the beleaguered city of Cartagena.

  While at sea, however, Bolívar was stunned to learn from corsairs headed the other way that Cartagena had already fallen. The news shouted from bow to bow was grim: The trusty colonel sent as an intermediary—Carabaño—was dead; neither he nor Brion’s battleship had ever made it to Cartagena. Half the city had perished. The unfortunates too weak to escape had been slaughtered indiscriminately. Even after the royalists had taken Cartagena, they continued to fly the rebel flag precisely in order to trap rescue operations like Bolívar’s. Lastly, the patriots who had managed to escape were all headed for Haiti. Bolívar immediately ordered his ship to change course and follow.