by John Lynch
Now, before he re–established his authority in Guayana, Bolívar faced a rebellion of the caudillos. First Bermúdez and Valdés revolted against Mariño, then Mariño against Bolívar, and Piar against all authority. Mariño convoked a mini–congress at Cariaco to establish a provisional government and make himself legitimate, urged on by the preposterous canon Cortés Madariaga, back from imprisonment in Spain and now a troublemaker no less to Bolívar than he had been to the Spaniards. On 9 May 1817 Mariño issued a proclamation to the peoples of Venezuela, a sign of his desire to be a national leader, not simply a regional caudillo. But a caudillo could not suddenly become a constitutionalist. This was where Mariño lost his credibility. Bermúdez and Valdés had already left him for Bolívar. Now General Urdaneta, Colonel Sucre and many other officers who had previously obeyed Mariño went to Guayana to place themselves under Bolívar’s orders. The tide began to turn. With forces loyal to him personally, he was able to contribute to the military campaign and challenge Piar, who in April had won a crushing victory over superior royalist forces at San Félix, for leadership in Guayana. Bolívar’s strategy was to neutralize Spanish power in Angostura and at the same time establish naval as well as military control over the Orinoco. On one occasion he was in danger of losing his life, or his liberty, when he dismounted to inspect his gunboats and was surprised by a Spanish detachment; he escaped by plunging into the river and swimming to safety. Military success in Guayana, naval control of the Orinoco and his own political sense enabled Bolívar to establish his absolute control of Angostura and Guayana, and to improve his prospects against the caudillos. It was at this point, when Bolívar was gathering power, that Piar chose to reject it.
Strong leadership at the top, freedom from rivals – these were not the only imperatives for Bolívar. He knew that the revolution also required a broader social base. To widen its constituency beyond white creoles, the popular sectors had to be brought into its ranks, a difficult decision and Bolívar was aware of its complexity. He spoke of ‘this amazing chaos of patriots, godos, self–seekers, whites, pardos, Venezuelans, Cundinamarquis, federalists, centralists, republicans, aristocrats, the good and the bad, and the whole crowd of hierarchies into which each of these groups subdivide’.36 The largest single group in Venezuelan society were the pardos, victims of discrimination by law and convention alike, emerging from colonial society ready for revolution. War gave them a kind of equality, new opportunities and new leaders; but war also denied them the richest prizes and showed them the limits of toleration. Bolívar scorned race prejudice; he fought for liberty and equality. This was the essence of independence: ‘Legal equality is indispensable where physical inequality prevails.’ The revolution would correct the imbalance imposed by nature and colonialism: previously ‘the whites, by virtue of talent, merit and fortune, monopolized everything. The pardos, degraded to the most humiliating condition, had nothing…. But the revolution granted them every privilege, every right, every advantage.’37 As a social phenomenon the war of independence can be seen as a competition between republican and royalist creoles for the allegiance of pardos and recruitment of slaves. In the Bolivarian model the revolution became a kind of coalition against Spain, a coalition of creoles, pardos and slaves. Not all the creole elite agreed with this. Coro and Maracaibo, centres of previous black rebellion, rejected Bolívar’s coalition and resisted the revolution to the end. Bolívar knew he had to manage the coalition carefully, to include the pardos only as a subordinate partner and under creole control. They were not allowed autonomous leaders. This was why Bolívar had to confront and defeat the challenge from Manuel Piar.
In creole thinking Piar was a prototype of the racist demagogue. He was not a typical caudillo, for he did not possess an independent power base, either regional or economic. He had to rely on his military abilities alone, rising ‘by my sword and good luck’ to the rank of general–in–chief by decree of Bolívar himself.38 He was a pardo from Curaçao and he made the pardos his constituency. According to a royalist chronicler, ‘Piar was one of our most terrible enemies, adventurous, talented, and with great influence among the castes, to whom he belonged. He was thus one of the few Venezuelans who could inspire the greater part of the population.’39 Bolívar, too, wanted to recruit coloureds, to free the slaves and incorporate the pardos, in order to tilt the balance of military forces toward the republic, but he did not propose to mobilize them politically.
Bolívar suffered much else from Piar, from his arrogance, ambition and insubordination. When in January 1817 a group of officers left Piar to join Bolívar, Piar demanded of his superior that he give them the severest punishment, the only lesson acknowledged by ‘immoral, barbarous, and corrupt people like those. In such quarters clemency is seen as weakness; kindness is mistaken for lack of character and energy; all the virtues are reckoned for nothing. Your excellency ought to have known this.’40 Bolívar endured these lessons in the law of the caudillo and made a point of repaying insults with reason, hinting that without political values the caudillos reverted to mere bandits: ‘If we destroy ourselves through conflicts and anarchy, we will clear the republican ranks and they will rightly call us vagrants.’41 But Piar was uncontrollable. He claimed the Orinoco campaign as his own theatre of war, Guayana and the missions as his private domain. A contest for supremacy turned into outright rebellion. According to General Morillo, there was evidence that Piar had an even more sinister plan than rebellion: ‘Piar, a mulatto and the most important of the castes, has very close relations with Alexandre Pétion, a rebel mulatto who calls himself president of Haiti; together they propose to create a base in Guayana from which they can dominate America.’42
Piar appeared not to realize that the balance of power was turning against the caudillos, or perhaps this was what drove him. The victory over the royalists at Angostura – after a year–long siege and campaign in which blacks and Indians fought on both sides – confirmed Bolívar’s power and placed the initiative with him. The time of decision had come in June 1817, following a period in which he had dealt with caudillos patiently, swallowing dissent, hostility, intrigues and arrogance from his subordinates. The posturing of the politicians at Cariaco and the behaviour of Piar in Guayana caused him to send a trusted officer, Pedro Briceño Méndez, for a clarifying talk with Piar. Briceño reported that Piar professed friendship and did not wish to disturb things; he was simply speaking of assigning Bolívar democratic institutions and creating a political authority alongside his military authority. Bolívar regarded the report as mealy–mouthed and he exploded. He was no longer operating from weakness, he said, as in Cartagena, Güiria and Carúpano; he was stronger than ever; three thousand men obeyed his every command and they would not tolerate factions. ‘If I have been moderate up to now it is out of prudence, not weakness…. There is neither tyranny or anarchy here as long as I am alive with sword in hand.’43 On 30 June he gave Piar a passport to leave for wherever he wished to go. But Piar was on his way to rebellion.
Bolívar decided the moment had come to challenge factionalism and dissi–dence in the east. In an extraordinary outburst, a marvellous exercise in sustained vituperation, he reversed his previous patience and denounced the rebel as one who claimed nobility against all the evidence of his pardo birth, a criminal, a man of violence, a thief, a ferocious despot, a mediocrity promoted beyond his merits, a monster who sought to provoke race war yet despised the coloureds he claimed to elevate. ‘General Piar has broken the laws, has conspired against the system, has disobeyed the government, has resisted orders, has deserted the army, and has fled like a coward. So he has placed himself outside the law: his destruction is a duty and his destroyer a well doer.’44
In this mood he ordered Piar, ‘with other caudillos and followers of his faction’, to be hunted down.45 Piar was captured, tried and sentenced to death as a deserter, a rebel and a traitor. The court was headed by Brión, the prosecution led by Soublette. Bolívar confirmed the sentence and had him publicly executed b
y a firing squad in the main square of Angostura ‘for proclaiming the odious principles of race war … for inciting civil war, and for encouraging anarchy’.46 The sentence may have been defective in terms of law, but Bolívar calculated carefully in executing Piar. Piar represented regionalism, person–alism and Black revolution. Bolívar stood for centralism, constitutionalism and race harmony. He later claimed: ‘The death of General Piar was a political necessity which saved the country, for otherwise he would have started a war of pardos against whites, leading to the extermination of the latter and the triumph of the Spaniards. General Mariño also deserved to die because of his dissidence, but he was not so dangerous and therefore policy could yield to humanity and even to an old friendship … never was there a death more useful, more politic, and at the same time more deserved.’47
The danger lay in pardocracia. Bolívar denounced Piar for inciting race war at a time when equality was already being granted to the coloured people: ‘General Piar himself is an irrevocable proof of this equality.’ The measured, gradual programme of reform under creole control was threatened by total subversion of the existing order, which could only lead to anarchy. While it was essential to widen the basis of the revolution, this did not involve destroying the creole leadership: ‘Who are the authors of this revolution? Are they not the whites, the wealthy, the aristocracy and even the militia chiefs? What principles have these caudillos of the revolution proclaimed? The decrees of the republic are eternal monuments of justice and liberation … liberty even for the slaves who were previously the property of the same leaders, and independence in the widest sense of the word to replace the dependence in which we were bound.’ Piar had sought to unleash a war against creoles ‘simply because they had been born more or less white. According to Piar, a man’s skin is a crime and carries with it the decree of life or death.’48 The day after Piar’s execution, Bolívar asked the soldiers of the liberating army: ‘Have not our arms broken the chains of the slaves? Has not the odious distinction between classes and colours been abolished for ever? Have I not ordered national property to be distributed among you? Are you not equal, free, independent, happy and respected? Could Piar give you more? No. No. No.’49
The Tactics of Race
The problems of race and class were not so easily resolved. In spite of his initiative, Bolívar knew that he was taking risks and he had some misgivings, or at least he later expressed misgivings. In 1828, at Bucaramanga, he said:
In the first years of Independence, we needed men who were above all brave, who could kill Spaniards and make themselves feared; blacks, zambos, mulattos, and whites, all were welcome as long as they fought bravely. No one could be rewarded with money, for there was none; the only way of maintaining ardour, rewarding exceptional actions and stimulating valour was by promotion, so that today men of every caste and colour are among the generals, leaders, and officers of our forces, though the majority of them have no other merit than brute strength. This was once useful to the Republic but now, in peacetime, is an obstacle to peace and tranquillity. But it was a necessary evil.50
From 1815–16, therefore, growing numbers of pardos were incorporated into the army of liberation; they were needed to fill the gaps in the patriot ranks left by creole casualties and desertions, and they themselves were imbued with greater expectations from wartime social mobility. From now on the traditional structure of the republican army was transformed, and while the creoles retained military and political control, the pardos had greater opportunities for advance to higher ranks and offices. Were they politically convinced by the cause of independence?
Bolívar campaigned to convince them, though not with complete success. In the early years of the revolution the balance of support among the black population had favoured the royalists. According to José Domingo Díaz, in December 1818 the royalist army in Venezuela numbered thirteen thousand men, of whom three thousand were Europeans and ten thousand Americans: ‘Almost all the Americans in this brave army were Indians and mulattos, zambos and free blacks, but not slaves.’51 Díaz was a royalist, of course, but there is no reason to doubt that his statement was more or less correct, though in the past the royalists had been more adroit – or more opportunist – than the republicans in assimilating slaves to their cause than he implied. o’Leary admitted that recruitment for the republican army was difficult. He explained the problem in terms of the social divide. The upper sector of society produced the republican officers, who were imbued with a sense of service and commitment:
The lower classes, on the other hand, were the victims of the frequent incursions of the belligerents. Victory or defeat was all the same to them; whoever was the victorious chief, he was sure to recruit his troops from them. The moral compensation of sooner or later winning independence, which sustained the upper class of society, was small consolation for the masses, who had few aspirations. Thus it became more difficult every day to find the necessary recruits to replace the casualties of the various units.52
War itself acted as a social dissolvent and divided the pardos against themselves, incorporating some into the officer corps and the upper sectors, and leaving the pardo masses at the bottom of society. Some royalists believed that the crown should take more advantage of these divisions and positively recruit from pardo ranks. But it remained Spanish policy basically to rely on Morillo’s expeditionary force and the support of royalist creoles, in order to restore the colonial structure of society. To this extent Bolívar was right: the pardos had more to gain from the republican cause. But what had the slaves to gain?
Bolívar was a military leader who needed recruits, and during the war he tied emancipation to conscription, offering slaves manumission in return for military service. He began by announcing from the island of Margarita, fulfilling his commitment to Pétion: ‘There will be no more slaves in Venezuela, except those who wish to remain so. All those who prefer liberty to repose will take up arms to defend their sacred rights and they will be citizens.’ From the mainland, decrees of 2 June and 6 July 1816 then proclaimed the ‘absolute’ freedom of slaves on condition that they joined the republican forces. ‘Nature, justice, and good policy demand the emancipation of the slaves: from now on there will be only one class of men in Venezuela, all will be citizens.’53 The response was negative. Although Bolívar liberated his own slaves, few hacendados followed his example. Slave owners rarely volunteer to give up their property or abandon their investments, and the Venezuelan aristocracy were no exception. This was not their idea of republican revolution. So the decrees of 1816 were unavailing. The slaves themselves were hardly more enthusiastic. The Liberator believed that ‘the slaves have lost even the desire to be free’. The truth was that the slaves were not interested in fighting the creoles’ war – according to a republican officer: ‘Very few were the slaves who wished to accept liberty in exchange for the burdens of war.’54 Nevertheless, Bolívar’s campaign was not in vain. It served to nullify rebellions of slaves; they no longer actively fought the republic as they had done in 1812–14, and they gradually receded from the war as an autonomous movement. It was clear that Morillo had nothing to offer them and that, whatever the republic stood for, Spain unequivocally stood for the status quo. Morillo was not averse to recruiting slaves when casualties forced him to do so, but their status hardly changed. As his army appeared more and more like a colonialist force, so it lost the popular following which Boves had won and which Bolívar now sought to divert towards the republic. And Bolívar wanted the support not only of the pardos and the slaves but also of a third marginalized group: the llaneros. That meant returning to the problem of subordination and recruiting their caudillo.
An Army for Liberation
The Jefe Supremo now took his campaign for supremacy a stage further. He could either continue to tolerate a rabble or create an army worthy of a liberator. The surest antidote to unrestrained caudillism was an effective army structure and a clear chain of command. With the authority and resources won from vic
tory in Guayana, Bolívar initiated a series of army reforms designed to create a professional army modelled on military institutions in Europe. Bolívar had inherited from the colony a system of militias, useful for internal security but not for fighting a war. In the next few years combat units were improvised, and in 1815 he created his own Guardia de Honor of 450 men, which was subsequently incorporated into the main army. By the 1818 campaigning season this consisted of two divisions, four brigades and a variable number of battalions. The decree of 24 September 1817 marked the beginning of his campaign to replace personalism with professionalism. He created the General Staff ‘for the organization and direction of the armies’, a staff for the whole army and one for each division. The Staff was part of a career structure open to talent; it was also the source of command, instructions and orders downward to commanders, officers and troops.55 He established courts martial at all levels of the army. And in an attempt to move beyond plunder he created a tribunal de secuestros to administer the confiscation of royalist estates, properties and possessions for the benefit not of individual caudillo bands but of ‘the national treasury’.56
The caudillos became generals and regional commanders; their hordes became soldiers and subject to military discipline defined at the centre. Reform extended to recruitment. Commanders were given quotas and encouraged to seek troops beyond their original constituencies. Bolívar fought against regionalism and immobility, and projected a Venezuelan army with a national identity:
