Simon Bolivar

by John Lynch

The frequent desertion of soldiers from one division to another on the pretext of being natives of the province where their chosen division is operating, is a cause of disorder and insubordination in the army and encourages a spirit of regionalism which we have tried so hard to destroy. All Venezuelans ought to have the same interest in defending the territory of the Republic where they have been born as their brothers, for Venezuela is no more than one single family composed of many individuals bound together by indissoluble ties and by identical interests.57

  He urged the caudillos to help each other, ordering them to transfer men and supplies wherever necessary ‘according to the development of the war’. New structures, impressive on paper, were not immediately effective. He did not succeed in integrating Venezuelan insurgency into a single army, and it remained a collection of local forces with a high turnover of troops through illness and desertion. But unity was his ideal. His object was to end dissi–dence, to harness regional resources and to inspire a national effort. In the course of 1817–19 he organized three military groups: the Army of the East, the Army of the West and the Army of the Centre under himself. To recruit and organize an army on the ground was his enduring task in these years and to create its logistical infrastructure a constant nightmare, but one from which he emerged with military credit. He could not hope to create an army of citizen soldiers attaining professional standards, but had to take what he could get, and this included bandits, guerrillas and more or less reluctant conscripts from all over Colombia, forming a series of armies of independence that were Bolivarian in the sense that he was their originator and supreme commander.58

  Bolívar’s problem was that he needed an army for all occasions, cavalry for warfare in the plains, infantry for fighting in the highlands and whatever artillery he could assemble. All these roles would usually be required in a single campaign, as the army proceeded from llanos to foothills to mountains, and the relative strength of each arm would be determined not wholly by tactical considerations but by what was available. Tactics, of course, were known, and Bolívar had a small library of military authorities teaching the drill of infantry movements, the deployment of supporting cavalry, and the use of effective fire power, and he had knowledgeable colleagues such as Sucre whose judgement he valued. But South America was not Europe; the terrain and its sheer size presented conditions beyond European experience. Improvisation rather than Napoleonic models was a key factor in Bolívar’s military thinking. He had to be prepared to fight in plains and páramos, peaks and gorges, and to lead men reared in the tropics into icy altitudes without any chance to acclimatize. Once Bolívar had ordered his troops forward, within a basic structure of battalions, companies and squadrons, a battle would develop into a free–for–all and the result depended on a combination of manoeuvres and morale.

  The Liberator’s military reforms in the course of October–November 1817 were accompanied by political changes to assist him in the work of government. Even without Piar’s propaganda on behalf of ‘democratization’, Bolívar was aware of the need to institutionalize his authority as Jefe Supremo. He created a provisional council of state as an interim measure to supply the function of a legislative power until a constitution could be established after liberation. The council consisted of the chief military and civil officers, and existed to deal with matters of state, defence and justice. It was advisory only, and depended on the supreme chief for its meeting.59 He also established a council of government, consisting of Juan Germán Roscio, Fernando Peñalver and Rafael Urdaneta, as an arm of the executive and to supply government in the case of the death of Bolívar.

  Caudillos who collaborated were employed in specific assignments. After the execution of Piar, Mariño was isolated and his government collapsed. Bolívar could afford to wait for his voluntary submission. He sent Colonel Sucre, a model of the trained and professional soldier, on a mission of pacification to persuade Mariño’s allies and subordinates to acknowledge the authority of the supreme chief. His charges against Mariño were expressed in precise terms: while Piar was a ‘rebel’, Mariño was a ‘dissident’, a threat to authority and unity, and Bolívar made it clear that he was determined ‘to break up the faction of which you are caudillo’. In cool and caustic words he told Mariño: ‘If you insist on resisting, you will no longer be a citizen of Venezuela but a public enemy. If you are determined to quit the service of the republic just say so and the government will have no problem in granting you leave to go.’60 Bermúdez was appointed governor and military commandant of Cumaná, a province so impoverished by war that it was incapable of sustaining independent caudillism and had to be supplied from outside. Bolívar now approved of Bermúdez: ‘He has a great reputation in his country, is well liked, obedient, and a keen defender of the government.’61 Not everyone agreed.

  Coercion of the caudillos was not complete. Bolívar’s policy of using caudillos to control caudillos had only limited success. While he regarded Bermúdez as an agent of unification, others knew him as a savage and vindictive rival, a medium of discord, not peace, the arch–caudillo, who now happened to be on Bolívar’s side. Mariño rejected the mission of Bermúdez and swore that ‘no power on earth would remove him from his province’.62 It was some time before Bolívar could pacify Mariño and persuade him to collaborate in an attack on the enemy; late in 1818 he appointed him general–in–chief of the Army of the East, with jurisdiction in the llanos of Barcelona, while other eastern districts were assigned to Bermúdez and Cedeño. But the struggle for leadership was not over. Having reconciled the easterners, Bolívar had still to win over the warlord of the west, José Antonio Páez.

  Páez and the Llaneros: A New Challenge

  In January 1817 General Morillo left New Granada for Venezuela, placed his forces astride the Andean provinces, and in August made his headquarters at Calabozo, the gateway to the plains. This was his preferred theatre of war, giving him access across the llanos to Guayana, Maturín and Cumaná, and positioning him to protect Caracas, Maracay and Valencia, and to defend himself against Páez in the Apure. As for Bolívar, he was now bursting with premature optimism, impatient to take the offensive. In July he told the still unliberated province of Caracas of great republican victories: ‘From the wide plains of Casanare to the mouths of the great Orinoco, victory has led our steps. Twenty glorious actions have assured the fate of Venezuela.’63 Bolívar himself held Guayana. Mariño had freed much of Cumaná. In Maturín General Rojas kept the republican cause alive. General Monagas engaged the royalists at Barcelona. And in the south–west, in the Apure valley, Páez fought as a republican caudillo of the llaneros. On the ground operations were not as conclusive or as promising as Bolívar depicted, but if Páez could be brought under his command, he would control a vast area from the Orinoco to the Andes.

  Páez claimed that he commanded in the Apure ‘with absolute independence and answerable to no human power’. In September 1816 in Trinidad de Arichuna he displaced Colonel Santander as commander–in–chief of the Army of the West, when he was chosen by a movement of chiefs and officers, seconded by a great many local people as ‘the only one who could save them from the danger threatening on all sides’ and inspire the defence of the republic against the royalist enemy.64 This was the day when he was recognized as a caudillo, the supreme leader of the western llanos, anticipating a yet greater confrontation with Santander ten years later. He campaigned for over a year as an independent commander, yet when Bolívar sent a commission from Guayana to ask that Páez recognize him as ‘supreme head of the republic’, the caudillo did not hesitate; he agreed without even consulting his own officers, and insisted to his reluctant troops that they do the same.65 So Páez submitted his authority to that of the Liberator, ‘taking into account the military talents of Bolívar, the prestige of his name and his reputation abroad, and realizing above all the advantage to be derived from a supreme and central authority which would direct the different caudillos operating in various parts …’66 On 31 December 1817 Bol
ívar left Angostura and, in a spectacular move by river and land, and hard marching by his troops across three hundred kilometres, took his force of three thousand to the Apure plains. There, at San Juan de Payara, Páez had his headquarters, while the royalists were stationed some fifty kilometres to the north at San Fernando de Apure. On 30 January 1818 Bolívar and Páez met for the first time, dismounting, embracing warmly and taking stock of each other.67

  Páez, archetypal caudillo and leader in his own land, was a creole of modest origins, though he did not come from the margin of society. He was white, or could pass for white, son of a petty official, heir of the colonial bureaucracy, had fled into the llanos after a private affray in Barinas, and was promoted a cavalry captain in the army of the First Republic. Páez began life without basic reading and writing and was left with an enduring sense of inferiority. Officers in the British Legion noted his qualities as a llanero warrior but one of them also reported: ‘When I served with him, Páez could neither read nor write, and until the English came to the Llanos, had never used a knife and fork, so rough and uncultured had been his former life; but when he began to meet the officers of the British Legion he copied their way of living and their dress, modelling himself as much as possible upon them, that is, as far as his lack of education allowed.’68

  Observers noticed his sense of inferiority and silence in the presence of those he thought better educated than himself. During the war illiteracy was not a great handicap, though he had other weaknesses – being prone to epileptic fits when excited or crossed, and defective in his judgement of Bolívar and higher policy. Dressed in an ill–fitting green jacket, white pantaloons and a large cocked hat, he was slightly more presentable than his followers, described as ‘all badly clad and some almost in a perfect state of nudity’. His power, like his dress, was informal, but he underwent recognizable preparations for leadership, learning llanero life the hard way on a cattle estate, and becoming more successful than others in fighting, looting and killing. Built like an ox, suspicious and cunning, accompanied always by a giant black bodyguard, his qualities of leadership attracted his first followers and plunder retained them.

  His troops, or some of them, had previously fought for the enemy and were ‘composed in large part of those ferocious and valiant zambos, mulattos, and blacks who had formed the army of Boves’.69 But Páez had his own methods with the llaneros. Many of the Venezuelan officers he regarded as barbarians and assassins, claiming that unlike them he did not personally kill prisoners; his men certainly did, slicing their heads off with one blow of a sword, often to a round of applause. This was the force which he fashioned into an army of cavalry. This was the force Bolívar wanted for the army of independence. The republic offered the llaneros more than plunder. Páez promised a share of estates taken from the enemy, and Bolívar confirmed this policy in his decree of 1817, ordering land from national property to be distributed to the patriot troops.

  The guerrilla war which Páez waged was a personal triumph; in the lands of the Arauca River and the plains of Apure he was supreme. But his force was not effectively linked to the independence movement, and while the Spaniards were harassed, they were not destroyed. Bolívar knew that he needed Páez and his army for the revolution. The two leaders came to terms. When Páez first met Bolívar in the llanos of San Juan de Payara he was struck by the contrast between his civilized manner and the wild surroundings, between his refined appearance and the barbarism of the llaneros. ‘There could be seen in one place the two indispensable elements to make war: the intellectual force which plans and organizes and the material force which brings them to effect, qualities which assist each other and which are ineffective without the other.’70 The caudillo’s stereotypes were false and he was wrong in assuming that Bolívar was an intellectual only. In the next ten years the man of culture would march more miles and fight more battles than the warrior of the llanos would ever do.

  In February 1818 Páez contributed a thousand cavalry to a joint force of over four thousand. The force included a group of British volunteers, among them the young Richard Vowell who had left Oxford with a reputation for extravagant living. Vowell came up with Bolívar, surrounded by his staff officers, on the road between the River Apure and the town of Calabozo. He saw a man of about thirty–five who looked more like forty, just below medium height but well proportioned and remarkably active. His features were thin and care–worn, expressing endurance under adversity, yet his manner remained elegant, ‘surrounded as he was by men far his inferiors in birth and education’. He wore the helmet of a private dragoon and a plain jacket of blue cloth with red cuffs, coarse blue trousers and alpargatas on his feet. His officers were chiefly ‘men of colour’, except the two generals, Páez and Urdaneta, who were white. Summoned to meet the Liberator, ‘we found him seated in a cotton net hammock, under some trees, and were received by him with the politeness of a man who had seen the world’; he had words of welcome for the newcomers from Europe, whom he expected to bring discipline, instruction and example to his officers and men.71

  Bolívar moved north in February 1818 and after overrunning the royalist outpost at Guayabal forced Morillo to evacuate Calabozo, inflicting heavy casualties, capturing arms and supplies and offering to suspend the guerra a muerte.72 But his optimism was premature. He allowed Morillo to evacuate Calabozo and, thwarted by battle fatigue among his troops and the disciplined fire of the Spanish infantry, failed to bring him to battle in the plains, where the patriots should have had cavalry advantage. He wanted to pursue the enemy northwards towards the coast, still beguiled by the lure of Caracas, but first he had to return to Calabozo to rest his troops and wait for Páez. There his army suffered mass desertions, most of them in the direction of Páez and, as he confessed: ‘I cannot send more troops after them, for I do not trust these to return.’ He needed Páez: ‘Hurry, hurry, join me here, so we can seize the moment.’73 But the caudillo was dragging his feet and instead continued to press the siege of San Fernando. There were good military reasons for this decision, beyond the prospect of booty. San Fernando was important in itself and for an opening to New Granada, while to pursue Morillo northward into the mountains was to take the patriot cavalry into territory where the Spanish infantry was superior.

  The next stage of the campaign was not to Bolívar’s advantage and according to his British officers his tactics were not of the best. With depleted forces he decided to make a stand at the Semen gorge, and in the battle of La Puerta (16 March 1818), scene of two previous defeats for the republicans, he was comprehensively defeated by Morillo, losing over a thousand infantry, much war material and his own papers, though not his reputation for personal courage in the field.74 Still retreating, he was almost killed at Rincón de los Toros by a Spanish hit squad that penetrated the camp at night and, carelessly directed to the required spot by Colonel Santander on his rounds, surprised the general asleep; he escaped only with the help of his men though with a sprained ankle when a mule threw him. On 2 May Páez was defeated at Cojedes. Cumaná, too, was lost at this time.

  There were political elements as well as tactical thinking in the caudillo’s reluctance to advance northwards. He still played with the idea of an independent authority, and when a group of officers and llaneros at San Fernando de Apure attempted to install him as general–in–chief, he accepted, and it needed a steely response from Bolívar to crush this movement at birth. It was one thing to criticize his tactics, another to question his leadership. In his autobiography Páez tells the story as an innocent bystander, but this was not the impression of the young o’Leary, recently arrived in the Apure and now a direct observer of events. Bolívar was not a man to be embarrassed by his recent reverses and he did not hold back from reprimanding Páez. He made it clear that he took a serious view of the sedition of the ringleader, the Englishman Colonel Henry Wilson, whose arrest, imprisonment and dismissal he ordered: ‘Military discipline, social principles, and the honour of the nation and the government demand
exemplary punishment of such an execrable offence. Prompt punishment is the only way to curb indiscipline and military sedition, and to avoid anarchy.’75 The episode was another piece in the fabric of his leadership. As for authority, he was secure enough to accept the law of the llanos, as o’Leary explained: ‘In this, too, Bolívar had to acquiesce, because the troops of the Apure were more like the contingent of a confederate state than a division of the army. They wanted to return to their homes…. Páez, accustomed to exercise a despotic will and the enemy of all subordination, could not reconcile himself to an authority which he had so recently recognized. And Bolívar, for his part, was too shrewd and tactful to exasperate the violent and impetuous Páez.’76

  Master of the grand strategy, Bolívar was not infallible in the tactics of war. The campaign in the llanos in 1818 taught him a lesson he might have been expected to know already: that Caracas and the coast, protected by mountainous terrain, could not be invaded from the south. Once again the republicans were forced back beyond the Orinoco. Bolívar returned to Angostura, a military camp, a river port to the sea, and a base from which to organize the republic and plan his next campaign. The presentation of his case to Venezuela, to the Americas and to the world was his daily preoccupation, and public relations his second nature. He established a weekly newspaper, El Correo del Orinoco to counterbalance the influence of the Gaceta de Caracas, now in the hands of the royalists and edited by José Domingo Díaz. The first of 128 numbers appeared on 27 June 1818 under the distinguished editorship of Francisco Antonio Zea, followed by Juan Germán Roscio and then by José Luis Ramos. While the editors were not mere figureheads, the input of Bolívar was obvious and decisive, and he kept a close eye on what he regarded as the intellectual preparation of the next offensive. In spite of his distrust of the idea of ‘democratization’, he took it for granted that there should be a legislative assembly and that ‘while our soldiers fight, our citizens should exercise the valuable functions of sovereignty…. It is not enough to win battles, to eject our enemies, to have the whole world recognize our Independence, we need above all to be free, under the rule of liberal laws, deriving from the most sacred source which is the will of the people.’ 77 So he proposed to the council of state the calling of a national congress and a law for the election of deputies, to meet on 1 January 1819. The organization of the army and the preparation of elections became his two most urgent tasks, taking him on long journeys out of Angostura, and dominating his correspondence with his generals and officials in the year 1818.