(Although Bolívar never prepared a systematic treatise, hi...)
Although Bolívar never prepared a systematic treatise, his essays, proclamations, and letters constitute some of the most eloquent writing not of the independence period alone, but of any period in Latin American history. His analysis of the region's fundamental problems, ideas on political organization and proposals for Latin American integration are relevant and widely read today, even among Latin Americans of all countries and of all political persuasions. The "Cartagena Letter," the "Jamaica Letter," and the "Angostura Address," are widely cited and reprinted.
Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military leader who was instrumental in the revolutions against the Spanish empire. Called the Liberator, he was one of the greatest military figures of South America.
Background
Simón Bolívar was born as Simón José Antonio de la Santísma Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios on July 24, 1783, in Caracas, Venezuela, then part of the Hispanic colonial empire. His parents, María de la Concepción Palacios y Blanco and Colonel Don Juan Vicente Bolívar y Ponte, belonged to the aristocratic upper class, the Creoles. He had two older sisters and a brother - María Antonia, Juana, and Juan Vicente. Another sister, María del Carmen, died at birth. Orphaned at the age of 9, the boy early showed traits of independence and a strong will.
Education
Sent to Madrid in 1799 to complete his education, Bolívar came under the tutelage of an uncle who secured the proper instruction for the young aristocrat. One of his tutors, Simón Rodríguez, was to have a deep and lasting effect on him. Rodríguez, a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, introduced Bolívar to the world of 18th-century liberal thought. Bolívar returned to Caracas in 1801.
Career
Expressions of unrest and rebellion already existed in Hispanic America, but it was not until 1808 that the independence movement disturbed the solid structure of the Spanish Empire. That year Napoleon occupied the Iberian Peninsula, deposed the Bourbon dynasty, and appointed his brother Joseph king of Spain. All the colonies refused to recognize the usurper but were divided about the policy they should pursue. Some continued to adhere to the Spanish royal family, but others were bent upon independence and self-government.
The struggle was waged from Mexico to Cape Horn, but two provinces took the lead: Argentina, then called the Viceroyalty of La Plata, and Venezuela. On April 19, 1810, the Spanish captain general in Caracas was overthrown, and a junta of native citizens took over his duties. Bolívar's participation in these events remains a matter of controversy. Three months later he was sent to London to obtain England's assistance, but his mission was a failure. He returned to Venezuela, and was followed by Francisco de Miranda, a leader in the conflict with Spain.
In July 1811 Venezuela cut its ties with Spain and proclaimed its independence, but this "First Republic" was a flimsy structure and soon came under counter revolutionary attack. Bolívar had joined the army and had taken part in the ensuing struggle, but he had fallen out with Miranda, who had been appointed dictator and commander in chief. Bolívar had lost an important harbor fortress to the enemy, and Miranda used the defeat to end the war and conclude an armistice with the Spaniards. His action enraged Bolívar, who determined to continue the fight.
Fleeing to the neighboring province of New Granada (now Colombia), Bolívar organized a new army, routed the Spanish, and liberated Venezuela in August 1813. He was appointed dictator but was soon faced with internal dissensions which led to civil war. Again forced to flee, he took refuge in Jamaica and again tried to engage British support for his cause. Although this effort came to naught, one of his most celebrated manifestos was composed there: the "Letter from Jamaica."
Obtaining assistance from the small republic of Haiti, Bolívar once more set forth for Venezuela, and a year later, in 1817, he achieved victory on the plains of the Orinoco valley. There he found an untapped reservoir of raw material and manpower. Two more years of inconclusive fighting followed before Bolívar made a sudden decision to attack the Spaniards from the rear, that is, from New Granada. In one of the most audacious operations of military history, he crossed the Andes and defeated the royalist forces at Boyacá on August 7, 1819.
Bolívar's ambitious plans for the liberated colonies included the establishment of a republic in the Andes, to be called Colombia. It was to be composed of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador and to be governed by a president appointed for life and by an aristocracy made up of the patriots who had fought for their freedom. The Colombian Republic was proclaimed in December 1819. Bolívar's triumph was only on paper, since the greater part of the territory was still occupied by the enemy; but in June 1821 he liberated Venezuela at the battle of Carabobo, and one of his most gifted officers, Antonio José de Sucre, freed Ecuador in the battle of Pichincha in May 1822.
When Bolívar entered the capital city of Quito in June 1822, he might have considered his ambition fulfilled. But his imperial dreams had grown. The next month he conferred with the Argentinian general José de San Martin at Guayaquil. These secret meetings have been the source of considerable speculation, but the outcome was clear: San Martin renounced his position as Protector of Peru, leaving the field to Bolívar. He entered Peru in 1823 and was victorious over the royal army at the battle of Junín in August 1824. Sucre, whom he left to terminate the campaign, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Spanish at Ayacucho in December 1824. The fight for independence had been won.
Bolívar was now in an extraordinary position. He was president of Colombia, dictator of Peru, and president of the newly created Bolivia, a region which had been called Upper Peru in colonial times and had once belonged to the Viceroyalty of La Plata. This new country honored Bolívar in its choice of a name, and he composed its first constitution, an extremely autocratic and utopian document which lasted only 2 years. At this point in his career Bolívar harbored certain very ambitious projects, though he cannot be accused of a desire to become emperor; he wanted to be "liberator or nothing." His purpose was the creation of an Andean empire, stretching from one end of South America to the other, and he pursued this aim along several paths.
Bolívar called for a confederation of the Hispanic American countries, and in 1826 he assembled a congress in Panama, but the league he had envisaged never materialized. He had another plan for the countries he had liberated - Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia; he wanted to unite them in a Federation of the Andes, with himself as president and with the Bolivian constitution as the permanent basis of government. This project also failed.
In 1826 civil war erupted in Colombia, and Bolívar returned in haste to prevent a clash between the conflicting factions. He gained a temporary reconciliation and called a new constituent assembly together in 1828, but its deliberations did not agree with his autocratic ideas, and he assumed the dictatorship once more.
By now the opposition to Bolívar had assumed such proportions that a conspiracy to eliminate him was set in motion. On September 25, 1828, Bolívar escaped the daggers of the assassins by minutes. For more than a year he fought to preserve his political creation. A war with Peru prevented its encroachment on Colombian territory, but the voices of dissent in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador were not silenced. A new congress elected in 1830 accepted the secession of Venezuela and, soon thereafter, of Ecuador. Bolívar finally realized that his goal was unattainable and reluctantly admitted that even his presence in Bogotá might spark further discord.
In April 1830, already an exhausted man, Bolívar agreed to leave his country. Possibly his death was hastened by the failure of his political plans, but more likely he died of tuberculosis, on December 17, 1830, near the city of Santa Marta, Colombia.
(Although Bolívar never prepared a systematic treatise, hi...)
2003
Religion
Simón Bolívar was a Roman Catholic. When attacking Spanish churches he sometimes had their wealth stripped out. In his writings, he sometimes invoked God, but mainly talked of the political struggle.
Politics
Bolívar's vision for an independent Spanish America ultimately promoted the inclusion of a strong central government. He sought an ad hoc political model that combined elements of monarchy, republicanism and federalism in an attempt to find the right balance between control, stability and unity in a new pan-American entity. Furthermore, his actions showed that he envisioned himself to initially be the primary leader of this emerging American grouping. He held the highest executive offices, which acted as a dictatorship, in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela with several of these terms overlapping. The mix of political philosophies and methods for implementing them in the newly independent nations fluctuated through the years. In his 1819 Angostura address during the wars for independence in Venezuela and Colombia, Bolívar said, "regular elections are essential to popular government." Seven years later, he remarked, "we shall avoid elections, which always result in that great scourge of republics, anarchy." There was a clear contradiction in his approach to governance at different times.
In the final years of the region's independence movement, Bolívar sought to set up regimes in countries that mixed republican principals and authoritarian rule. He feared that introducing too much liberty to uneducated masses would result in anarchy, thus necessitating a strong central authority. This idea of what a government should look like is reflected in the 1826 Constitution of Bolivia. This document created four separate branches of government: the executive, the legislative, the judicial and the electoral college. However, the executive office was heavily weighted with power. The president would serve for life and be succeeded by the vice president, who would be chosen by the president. Furthermore, the president had the power to appoint and remove officials, as well as full control of the armed forces.
Views
Bolívar was a product of the Enlightenment. His broad and cosmopolitan education made him a key intellectual of the time and he was abreast of the ideas of the enlightenment that had taken hold in Europe in the eighteenth century and the wars of independence in other countries. In fact Bolívar was in France in 1804 and witnessed the coronation of Napoleon on the 2nd December 1804. This was a key event in global history since Napoleon was not a hereditary monarch.
Under the tutelage of Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar was strongly influenced by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In line with the views prevalent in the Enlightenment, Bolívar subscribed to Rousseau's "general will" concept, which calls on the intellectual and educated elite to identify what is in the best interest of the people. Bolívar believed that past subjugation under Spanish colonial rule left many of the American people ignorant and unable to acquire knowledge, power or civic virtue. Therefore, in the name of the greater good, Bolívar believed that these people should be freed.
Quotations:
"Look the way things are: if I were not widowed, my life would have maybe been different; I would not be the General Bolívar nor the Libertador."
"A people that love freedom will in the end be free. We are a microcosm of the human race. We are a world apart, confined within two oceans, young in arts and sciences, but old as a human society. We are neither Indians nor Europeans, yet we are a part of each."
"Do not compare your material forces with those of the enemy. Spirit cannot be compared with matter. You are human beings, they are beasts. You are free, they are slaves. Fight, and you shall win. For God grants victory to perseverance."
"Colombians! My last wish is for the happiness of the patria. If my death contributes to the end of partisanship and the consolidation of the union, I shall be lowered in peace into my grave."
"A republican government: that is what Venezuela…should have. Its principles should be the sovereignty of the people, division of powers, civil liberty, prohibition of slavery and the abolition of monarchy and privileges. We need equality to recast, so to speak, into a single whole, the classes of men, political opinions and political custom."
Membership
Bolívar was a prominent freemason. He was initiated in 1803 in the Masonic Lodge Lautaro, which operated in Cádiz, Spain. In May 1806 he was conferred the rank of Master Mason and in 1824, Bolívar was given the 33rd degree of Inspector General Honorary.
Bolívar founded the Masonic Lodge No. 2 of Peru, named "Order and Liberty".
Personality
Bolívar was a charismatic leader and visionary who succeed in liberating large areas of South America. He was emotional, dramatic with a love of flattery and numerous personal foibles. When the cause seemed lost, he showed steely determination, great courage and leadership. He had an internationalist spirit, seeking a federation of American states, and yet he is often remembered as a nationalistic and militaristic figure. He loved the ideals of the American revolution, but felt democracy would not work for his own people. He had no desire for personal wealth or gain. He began life rich but ended it poor. He freed all his slaves and sought (with mixed results) to end slavery in the countries he liberated.
His life is the subject of endless writings. To liberal historians he was a fighter against tyranny. Marxists interpret him as the leader of a bourgeois revolution. Modern revolutionaries see him as a reformist who secured political change but left the colonial heritage of his continent virtually intact. There are others who question the very importance of his career and reject the cult of the hero.
Quotes from others about the person
"Margaret Hayne Harrison: Both San Martín and Bolívar have been accused by their enemies of plotting to make themselves kings, but most scholars agree today that there is no basis for either accusation. Bolívar, with his sense of drama, felt that to make himself monarch would mean a refutation of his entire past career. Such an attempt would render him ridiculous at the bar of history, and although he intended to keep political control in his hands, it was the control exercised by the power of a political chief, a kind of super-boss."
Connections
At the age of 18 Bolívar married Maria Teresa del Toro. In 1802 the couple went to Caracas, where after only 6 months of wedded life the young wife died. He never remarried, preferring a long series of flings with the women he met while campaigning.
The closest thing to a long-term girlfriend he had was Manuela Sáenz, the Ecuadorian wife of a British doctor, but he left her behind while he was campaigning and had several other mistresses at the same time. Sáenz saved his life one night in Bogotá by helping him escape some assassins sent by his enemies.
Simon Bolivar's Quest for Glory
Richard W. Slatta and Jane Lucas De Grummond bring forth the entire life and legacy of Simón Bolívar, with special attention to the ups and the downs of his military career in Bolívar's Quest for Glory.
2003
Bolivar: American Liberator
In Bolívar, Marie Arana has written a sweeping biography that is as bold and as passionate as its subject.
2013
Simon Bolivar: A Life
John Lynch draws on extensive research on the man and his era to tell Bolívar’s story, to understand his life in the context of his own society and times, and to explore his remarkable and enduring legacy.