Simon Bolivar

by John Lynch

  Now politics as well as war occupied his mind. As he himself said, he was forced to be a soldier and a statesman, ‘simultaneously on the battlefield and at the head of government … both a chief of state and a general of the army’.31 Bolívar was a dictator when he wrote these words, served by known supporters and backed by the army. Bolivarian dictatorship, however, was not caudillism. It was less personal and more institutional; it dealt in policies as well as patronage. His intention was to concentrate authority in order to defend and extend the revolution. There was some resentment, however, and he convoked an assembly on 2 January 1814, to which he explained his dictatorship: ‘My desire to save you from anarchy and to destroy the enemies who were endeavouring to sustain the oppressors forced me to accept and retain sovereign power…. I have come to bring you the rule of law. Military despotism cannot ensure the happiness of a people. A victorious soldier acquires no right to rule his country…. I am a simple citizen, and the general will of the people shall always be for me the supreme law’32 Did he persuade himself that this was true, or was he reciting a familiar liberal text? Subsequent Bolivarian dictatorships, in Peru and Colombia, embodied the same principles; they were a response to emergency, they represented policies not interests, and they restored law as well as order. Meanwhile, in 1813, Bolívar was dictator of only half of Venezuela – the west. The east was won by Mariño, who also saw himself as a liberator.33

  Bolívar expected the Church to conform and support the republican cause. His religious policy was coloured by deference to the Enlightenment and hatred of Spain. So he deplored the post–earthquake superstition and attacked the alliance between the hierarchy and its Spanish patron. He made it clear to bishops and priests that their only option was independence, no matter what their conscience told them, and that support for the Spanish enemy had to stop. Soon after his arrival in Caracas he wrote to the archbishop of Caracas:

  The time is past for obstructing government decrees, and the full weight of the law will fall upon offenders. Consequently, as Your Grace’s orders are inspired by the same spirit, you should require all the parish priests, preachers and confessors of the archdiocese, under penalty of the powers reserved to you, to explain each week the just principles of American emancipation and persuade them of the obligation to accept and defend them, if necessary at the cost of personal interests and life itself…. As for the confessional, abuse of this sacred ministry by any who seek to undermine political opinion favouring the present government could be prevented by suspending them from their duties for this fact alone.34

  His dispute was with clericalism, rather than religion. And he always distinguished between royalist and patriot priests, some of whom he recognized had also suffered at the hands of the enemy. But the spirit of Bourbon regalism was obviously still alive.

  Bolívar’s writ might run in Caracas, but elsewhere the war raged on. In Puerto Cabello Monteverde refused to surrender and refused to receive the Spanish peace commissioners. This left to their fate more than four thousand European Spaniards, the victims of Monteverde’s intransigence as much as the republicans’ vengeance. Reinforcements from Spain gave Monteverde a brief respite, but he wasted his resources in a premature break out from Puerto Cabello; the Spaniards were driven back with heavy losses in the battle at Bárbula on the Valencia road, and he himself was badly wounded in the fighting at Las Trincheras. The republicans too paid a high price – the loss of Girardot, whose death deeply affected Bolívar and the whole army. The war was by no means over and the royalists were recruiting further support; Bolívar had to send General Urdaneta with a division to protect the western front, where the enemy was still raiding from Coro and Maracaibo.

  When Bolívar returned to Caracas, the municipality called a meeting of prominent citizens on 14 October 1813 in order to reward the achievements of the commander–in–chief. The assembly conferred upon Bolívar the rank of ‘Captain–general of the armies’ and the title of ‘Liberator of Venezuela’. The title was unique and became his greatest distinction, the essence of his identity for all time. In an elegant reply he accepted the title as ‘more glorious and satisfying for me than the crown of all the empires of the world’, and deferred to his commanders Ribas, Girardot, Urdaneta, D’Eluyar, Elías and the other officers and troops as the true liberators.35

  Was the hero of liberation also the author of terror? Bolívar and his colleagues insisted that it was Monteverde who first imposed ‘the law of conquest’ and gave his subordinates a loose rein to terrorize, and Heredia, regent of the audiencia of Caracas, admitted that Monteverde broke the capitulation on the question of amnesty.36 They specifically cited the atrocities commited in eastern Venezuela by Spanish officers: first Cervériz, ‘young, impetuous, and cruel’, according to Heredia, whose coarse and brutal ways became a byword for unrestrained terror, promising a peso for every ear of an insurgent, and then Antonio Zuazola, whose mutilations and killings of prisoners were recorded by appalled Spanish officials.37 In justifying his action to the British governor of Curaçao, who sought to mediate on behalf of Spanish prisoners, Bolívar insisted on his right ‘to deprive the tyrants of the incomparable advantage of their organized methods of destruction’ and he cited the action of Zuazola in the village of Aragua: ‘Men and women, old and young, had their ears cut off, were skinned alive, and then thrown into contaminated lakes or put to death by slow and painful methods … unborn babes were destroyed in the wombs of expectant mothers by bayonets or blows.’38 The English volunteer Richard Vowell, who was with Bolívar in the fighting in the llanos in 1818, saw the war to the death at close quarters. At Calabozo, observing Bolívar’s response to the spectacle of royalist atrocities, he concluded that ‘his own troops would now have torn him to pieces, had he not consented to retaliate to the utmost extent of his power.’39 Retaliation gave him credibility with his own men. So Bolívar intended to terrorize, to establish a balance of fear, to reassure his followers that he was as ruthless as the enemy, and to convince his own side including the caudillos of the east that he was a leader to be reckoned with. From Caracas he reported to the congress of New Granada: ‘After the battle of Tinaquillo I advanced without delay through the cities and villages of Tocuyito, Valencia, Guayos, Guacara, San Joaquín, Maracay, Turmero, San Mateo, and La Victoria, where all the most criminal Europeans and Canarians, were shot.’40 He insisted that ‘a government of a country in revolution must follow routes very different from the ordinary’.

  Some five years later, defending his extremism, Bolívar conceptualized his policy:

  Extreme measures, though terrible, are indispensable in sustaining an enterprise lacking in resources. Simply recall the violent expedients I have had to adopt to gain the few successes that have kept us alive. In order to hold on to four guerrilla bands who had contributed to our liberation, we were compelled to declare war to the death; to gain a few faithful followers, we had to free the slaves; to recruit the two armies of last year and this we had to resort to the oppressive martial law…. A mere glance at all this will show you that it amounts to nothing. To achieve this nothing, we have been obliged to employ all our resources; for it is a general rule that, in an ill–constructed machine, the engine must be enormously powerful to produce the slightest result. Experience has taught me that much must be demanded of men in order that they may accomplish little.41

  Bolívar captured the infamous Zuazola, ‘executioner of countless men, women, and children whose throats he cut with his own hands’, four Spaniards and a number of Americans, near Puerto Cabello in September 1813. Zuazola was promptly hanged, the four Spaniards executed and the Americans pardoned.42 He demanded the surrender of Monteverde in Puerto Cabello, together with his armaments, funds and ships: ‘This is the only way left to him to save the numberless Spanish and isleño prisoners in my power, and I have made him understand that on the slightest delay they shall be exterminated.’ Bolívar hesitated before the enormity of this execution; he was ready to compromise and do a deal with
Monteverde to save the four thousand Spanish captives he held, through an exchange of prisoners, but Monteverde refused to listen and imprisoned the messenger. He rejected another proposal to exchange them for an equal number of Americans of similar rank; again he imprisoned the messenger.43 When all attempts failed, and in the face of the atrocities of Boves and other Spaniards, and reports of conspiracy to escape, he signed the order condemning to death the Spanish and Canarian prisoners in La Guaira. Juan Bautista Arismendi, military governor of Caracas, was more than ready to carry out the order and eight hundred victims were sacrificed on 14–16 February 1814, in spite of the pleas for mercy from Archbishop Coll y Prat. Bolívar defended the action in uncompromising terms to the archbishop: ‘The welfare of the country demands it… indulgence would only increase the number of victims … yesterday in Tinaquillo they murdered twenty–five of its garrison…. Boves has not yet given quarter to a single one of our men taken prisoner. … The enemy, seeing our ruthlessness, will at least know he will pay dearly for his atrocities, and he will no longer be encouraged by impunity.’44

  Counter–Revolution

  By the beginning of 1814 Bolívar had reason to believe that his policies were working and that the second republic was safe. Monteverde had been forced to abandon Puerto Cabello, and further victories in the east and west secured the revolution. But bloody battles lay ahead and the year ended in abject defeat. The reasons soon became clear. The social base of the second republic was no wider than that of the first. The cause of liberation had not yet won the minds and hearts of all Venezuelans. It was a matter of great bitterness to Bolívar that ‘the greater part of the Spanish forces were composed of Venezuelans…. American blood continued to be shed by American hands. Sons of America were among the most obdurate enemies of independence.’45

  Divided against itself the creole upper class was also challenged by the mass of the people and of two particular groups: the slaves and the llaneros. The slave rebellions of the first republic were fresh in minds of the Venezuelan aristocracy, and reinforced its rejection of manumission and any other concession. When Bolívar’s army occupied Caracas in August 1813 it identified the slaves as a major focus of resistance and dispatched a punitive expedition against them. And hacendados pressed Bolívar to revive the national guards and patrols ‘in order to pursue robbers, apprehend fugitive slaves, and preserve estates and properties free from all incursions’.46 ‘We are going to fall into the hands of the blacks.’ This was the persistent fear of white creoles in the years around 1814. Slaves converged into cumbes, armed bands, and continued their own autonomous struggle, independent of Spaniards and creoles alike. When race–conscious black forces fought on either side, it was from opportunism, not conviction. And they consistently singled out the whites of the opposing force for extermination. After an engagement with a royalist unit on 6 September 1813 a patriot officer reported: ‘The deaths [twenty–six] comprise whites, Indians and zambos, with only one black, and face to face we have noticed that black casualties are invariably the least, a fact on which the government can reflect in the interests of our tranquillity.’ The slaves could take lives but not power. Like the blacks and mulattos they were formless and leaderless. Not so the llaneros.

  In the interior a new royalist leader rose to resist the revolution – José Tomás Boves, an Asturian who had entered colonial Venezuela as a pilot in the Spanish merchant marine with contraband as a sideline. After a brush with the law he retreated to the llanos and became a cattle–dealer at Calabozo. When the revolution began, the strong, cunning and sadistic Spaniard was already at one with his new environment, the wide plains of the interior. This endless expanse of flat grassland, scorched by the sun in the dry season and in the wet turned by torrential rain into great swamps and lakes, was the home of a wild and warlike breed, a racial mixture from Indian, white and black stock, hardened by their savage surroundings and capable of great endurance on horseback. The llanos became a refuge for vagrants, fugitive slaves, bandits and the simply impoverished, and for most of the bandidos survival was more important than ideology:

  It is not uncommon to observe in these vast territories groups of bandits who, without any political motivation and with desire of pillage their only incentive, come together and follow the first caudillo who offers them booty taken from anyone with property. This is how Boves and other bandits of the same kind have been able to recruit hordes of these people who live by vagrancy, robbery and assassination.47

  ‘Of all the monsters produced by the revolution in America or elsewhere,’ wrote o’Leary, ‘José Tomás Boves was the most bloodthirsty and ferocious.’48 Insulted by the patriots in 1812 and jailed in Calabozo for insubordination, Boves was freed by the royalists in May 1812 and soon became a caudillo of the llaneros and the scourge of Bolívar. Tall and well built, with a large head, blond hair, staring blue eyes and fair complexion, his appearance contrasted with that of the followers he cultivated, but he more than matched them in physique and endurance. After initial defeat, in October 1813, at the hands of the republican forces led by Vicente Campo Elías, Boves retreated southwards to recoup and fashion the llaneros into a powerful lancer cavalry. On 1 November he issued a notorious circular from Guayabal calling on all llaneros to join him and promising them booty at the expense of their wealthy enemies. The brutalities inflicted by the republican Campo Elías on the rural population also helped his cause.

  What was the Boves magic? Why did men flock to his band? Was he a genuine populist, a leader of an agrarian revolution? In the proclamation of Guayabal, Boves decreed war to the death against his creole enemies and the confiscation of their property.49 But the killing of prisoners was common on both sides. So was pillage. The decree simply meant that Boves, like Bolívar and other military leaders, royalist and republican, took property from the enemy to finance the war effort and pay his followers. His followers, it is true, were blacks and mulattos, and it was the property of whites which he promised them. A potent mixture of race and reward, therefore, animated the llaneros and gave Boves and other royalist caudillos their troops. He also attracted the Canarians, who were drawn to Boves partly because he was anti–creole and anti–elite, and partly because he rewarded his followers with land and booty. It is doubtful whether he was a true populist offering agrarian reform to the llaneros or absolute freedom for slaves. But the fact remains that he was able to recruit a following among blacks and pardos because he promised them white property and because the creole oligarchy of the first republic had been responsible for further land concentration and cattle privatization in the llanos to the detriment of the popular classes. This was the reason why the llaneros joined Boves against the republic – to fight for their freedom and their cattle.

  Boves recruited blacks and pardos by preference; in his forces they became officers and were promised wealth at the expense of whites, and he often referred to the llanos as belonging especially to pardos, as their property and their fortress. According to José Ambrosio Llamozas, chaplain in the army of Boves, it was the caudillo’s principal policy and system to kill whites and reward pardos. Llamozas enumerated specific occasions when whites were killed, amounting to some four thousand victims: ‘He constantly and publicly reminded his troops of the declaration of war to the death on whites which he had made at Guayabal: he always told them that the property of these people belonged to the pardos’50 In the army of Boves, which in December 1814 consisted of seven thousand men, there were only sixty to eighty white soldiers and forty to fifty white officers. The result of this system was a dramatic fall in the white population of the provinces under his control and rising expectations among the blacks and mixed races, ‘the slaves fired by their longing to be free, and the mulattos and other castes by their expectation of civil representation and appointments’.51

  Bolívar was acutely aware of the deep racial divisions in Venezuela and of the reckless exploitation of race prejudice by both sides in the conflict. To some extent this limited his own op
tions. The class hatred infusing the llanero followers of Boves horrified the creole aristocracy and confirmed their determination to gain political power on their own terms. Heredia, the creole regent of the audiencia of Caracas, spoke of the ‘mortal hatred’ between whites and pardos in Venezuela during the first republic and commented, ‘The guerrilla band that later joined the king’s side encouraged this rivalry, and it was commonly said by the European extremists that the pardos were loyalists and the white creoles were revolutionaries whom it was necessary to destroy.’ This was the policy, he added, of José Tomás Boves and other bandit chiefs, nominally royalists but in fact ‘insurgents of another kind’, who waged war on all white creoles: ‘And so he became the idol of the pardos, who followed him in the hope of seeing the dominant class destroyed’.52 When Boves occupied and plundered Valencia in June 1814, the Spanish authorities looked on helplessly; when he took Caracas, he refused to recognize the captain–general or to have his llanero forces incorporated into the royal army.53 His was a personal authority, expressing violence rather than legitimacy, and loyal to only a very distant king. Bolívar grimly observed these developments. He noticed that royalist caudillos incited slaves and pardos to plunder in order to increase their commitment, morale and group cohesion. And he could not fail to see that some of his own insurgents ‘were reluctant to fire on hombres de color’.54

  Bolívar was struggling. Monteverde, wounded in the battle of Las Trincheras on 3 October, was removed from command at Puerto Cabello and replaced as captain–general by Manuel Cagigal, a more conventional Spaniard. The royalists were resilient. In November 1813, at Barquisimeto, inferior royalist forces, apparently defeated, were allowed to recover when a mixture of panic and mistakes caused the patriot infantry to flee, to the fury of Bolívar, who renamed this battalion the Sin Nombre (Nameless), and suffered the loss of a thousand men. He had to swallow his pride, and from Valencia he sent an urgent request to Mariño to come to his assistance. He managed to recruit an army and marched to San Carlos to join with Campo Elías and his troops. At Araure, on the plains between San Carlos and Guanare, Bolívar forced the royalists to fight a set battle on 5 December, addressing his 3,000 troops (against the enemy’s 3,700) with rousing words. His infantry, the Sin Nombre battalion under Urdaneta, kept ranks and discipline under heavy artillery fire and advanced on the royalist infantry while the cavalry came up in support. But the royalists fought back strongly and when the situation became dangerous Bolívar placed himself at the head of his select dragoons; he launched a sudden attack on the enemy cavalry, and managed to turn near–defeat into victory. He now named the Sin Nombre the ‘Victors of Araure’, for they finally charged with fixed bayonets and routed the solid Spanish line. By this important victory he had managed to regain the west, but it was his last big victory for the second republic.