by John Lynch
Peru was now split into two zones, occupied in the south by Spain and divided in the north by civil war. It was the extreme inconvenience of this anarchy which drove the Peruvian ruling class to seek Bolívar’s assistance. He had his own problems within the world of revolution, disaster in Peru, bad news from Pasto, murmurs in Bogotá, shortage of troops:
An interesting situation. I won’t call it critical, for the word is overused, nor dangerous, for it could also have advantages. My mind fluctuates between hope and anxiety. Mounted on the slopes of Pichincha, my view extends from the mouth of the Orinoco to the peak of Potosí; this great field of war and politics absorbs my mind and each of its extremes calls my attention imperiously, and like God I would wish to be in all of them…. The worst is that I am not in any part, because to attend to the pastusos is to be away from glory and away from the field of battle. What bitterness. Only my patriotism keeps me going.64
In the event, for the sake of the continental revolution, he had to go to Peru. On 3 August he finally received permission from the congress of Colombia to do so. He sailed from Guayaquil on 7 August on board the Chimborazo. The name would not leave him. During the voyage there was a fire on board owing to the negligence of the cook, but Bolívar retained his usual sangfroid and the passage continued amid much ribaldry.65
To arrive in Peru is not to enter a scene of gold and silver. Lima is not a gateway to the sun, but a grey wasteland of coastal desert giving way to gloomy hills beyond. Bolívar’s mood was no lighter. Although he regarded the long march from Caracas to Lima as a continuous process of liberation, and journey’s end as simply another revolution in waiting, in fact Peru was a new phase of his life, a people whom he would find strange, a landscape full of dangers, a political scene more difficult than he had ever known. Peru was different. And for Peru, Colombia was different: Bolívar was a Venezuelan, and his army invaders.
Yet Lima gave him a frenzied welcome when he arrived on 1 September 1823 and he was immediately invested with supreme military and political authority. Manuela Sáenz followed soon afterwards. His spirits picked up. ‘Lima is a large pleasant city which was once rich. It seems very patriotic. The men appear to be loyal to me and say they are ready to make sacrifices. The ladies are very pleasant and very pretty. There is a ball being given today where I shall see them all.’ He tried to be optimistic: ‘The men respect me and the women love me. That is all very nice. They hold many pleasures for those that can pay for them …. The food is excellent, the theatre fair but adorned by beautiful eyes and attractive figures … carriages, horses, excursions, bullfights, Te Deums … nothing is lacking but money.’66 Bolívar had a roving eye but in Lima it rested on Manuela, and their love was still young. She stayed at home with her complaisant husband and visited her lover at night. Other formalities were also observed; in deference to what was socially acceptable she was not able to visit him on his sickbed at Pativilca.
Politically Peru was hideous to behold, the site of four separate patriot forces – Peruvian, Argentine, Chilean and Colombian – a semi–rebellious navy, and a large royalist army.67 It had a congress, two presidents and a dictator. The legitimate president, Torre Tagle, resented his now empty title. And the ruling class rediscovered its suspicions of foreigners. Bolívar knew that his own presence was a liability: ‘This is not Colombia, and I am not Peruvian. I shall always be a foreigner to Peruvian people and I shall always arouse the jealousy and distrust of these gentlemen. … I have already regretted that I ever came here.’68 He was forced to act as a military governor, yet he had little to govern. Argentina and Chile were anxious to withdraw their support. In the south the Peruvian army under Santa Cruz disintegrated before it even engaged the enemy. The guerrillas of the central zone, Peruvians before all else and torn in their allegiance between Riva Agüero and Bolívar, were reduced to a few disorganized bands. And in the north, ex–President Riva Agüero, displaying more energy against Colombia that he had ever done against Spain, opened negotiations with the royalists rather than submit to Bolívar. His intentions are disputed. Did he hope to establish an independent monarchy? Did he plan a joint campaign with the royalists to drive out the Colombians? Bolívar had no doubt that he was ‘a usurper, rebel and traitor’. Traitor or not, Riva Agüero was hopelessly wrong, for he could not negotiate successfully with Spain from a position of weakness. In any case his troops rose against him in November 1823 and submitted to Bolívar, and Riva Agüero was allowed to depart for Europe. Bolívar was more disillusioned by the day: ‘I face the storm for the good of Colombia …. Chileans and Argentines can no longer be relied upon. And these Peruvians are the most miserable kind of men for this war.’69 ‘Discord, misery, discontent and egoism reigned everywhere,’ he recalled, ‘and Peru no longer existed.’ Santander might be his life line: ‘In the middle of the Andes, breathing the poisonous air called the soroche, upon the snow, and with llamas at my side, I write you this letter. It will surely be frozen, if the condor does not carry it away and warm it in the sun.’70 Peru was hopeless; only Colombia could win liberation, and he needed more Colombian troops.
On his way back to Lima from Trujillo the pressures of Peru caught up with him, and on 1 January 1824 in the harbour of Pativilca, a small village north of Lima, he collapsed with a high temperature and was carried ashore. For seven days he fought for his life with no professional aid and few medicines against an illness which he described in terms of rheumatism, gastric fever and renal colic, aggravated by recent journeys in the high sierra, but which could also have been food poisoning or even early symptoms of tuberculosis. He had to remain in Pativilca for two months, weak and emaciated, hardly recognizable, ‘very spent and very old’, he admitted, his slightest movement an agony. His mood veered between defeatism and defiance. His view of Ecuadorians and Peruvians, never high, plunged further. ‘Of all the Colombians, the quiteños are the worst. The Venezuelans are saints compared with these villains. The quiteños and the Peruvians are the same thing: infamously vicious and utterly depraved. The whites have the same character as the Indians, and the Indians are all cunning, thieving, cheating, treacherous, totally devoid of any moral principles.’71 These were the views of a foreigner who did not understand strangers and had evidently not heard of José Olaya, Indian messenger and ‘martyr of the patriot cause’. They were also the outpourings of a sick man, who wanted to renounce his public destiny and his command in the south and return to Bogotá.
As conflicting thoughts passed through his mind, resignation was one of them and the example of San Martín. But Bolívar tended to speak in two voices. One, to Santander from whom he was demanding troops, insisted that he would resign the presidency of Colombia and leave the country; it would simply need a single attack from the Spanish forces and his tiny army would be pushed out of Peru and with it would go his own reputation. The other, to Sucre and his commanders, was remarkably cool. He did not make a great deal of his illness or spread alarm and despondency, but gave every sign of keeping control and taking the fight to the Spaniards. His pessimism fought with his ambition. He continued to organize the revolution, dictating letters – a total of forty–two in these painful weeks – and issuing orders from his sickbed. It was a superb performance in the face of real danger, for the royalists in 1824 reoccupied most of Peru, including Lima and Callao, and independence seemed a lost cause.
He desperately needed more troops, Colombian and Peruvian. He complained to Torre Tagle that the Peruvian troops had no interest in the war: ‘All the Peruvian troops that are not kept shut up within a fortress are sure to desert … no sooner are they left to sleep in the open or taken on long marches than they desert to a man.’72 Yet Torre Tagle himself was the greatest security risk, and it was an error of judgement for Bolívar to entrust him with the task of negotiating with the Spanish command in order to gain time. This weak and confused opportunist wanted more than negotiations with the Spaniards, and was in fact preparing to change sides yet again. On 5 February 1824 Argentine and C
hilean troops in Callao mutinied for arrears of pay, and receiving no satisfaction from the Peruvian government they handed over the fortress to the royalists. On 29 February, with the connivance of Torre Tagle and other turncoats, the enemy occupied Lima once again with an army of Spaniards, creoles, blacks and Indians, a warning and a lesson to white waverers. Torre Tagle, the principal officials and over three hundred officers of the Peruvian army promptly went over to the royalists, as they had previously passed from the royalists to the patriots, always anxious to be on the strongest side.73 ‘Peru is a chamber of horrors,’ exclaimed Bolívar. In his five months in Peru he had witnessed one disaster after another: the loss of the army of Santa Cruz, the treason of Riva Agüero, the desertion of the Chileans, the uprising of the Peruvian fleet, the surrender of Callao and the loss of Lima. He seemed to have reached the end of the road. In a mood of deep introspection he wrote one of his most emotive and elusive letters:
Until now I have fought for liberty: in future I will fight for my glory, no matter what it costs. My glory now consists in ruling no more and in thinking of nothing but myself; I have always had this intention but it increases progressively by the day. My years, my ill health, and my disillusion with all the dreams of youth prevent me from taking any other way. The revulsion I feel is such that I do not wish to see or to eat with anyone. The presence of another person kills me: I live among the trees of this miserable place on the coast of Peru and I have become a misanthrope overnight. But you must understand that I am not depressed, and this loathing for people and society does not come from a physical cause or from any personal trouble, but from a conviction deep within me. Ambition, says Rousseau, guides men when they reach the age of forty, and I have reached that age. But my ambition has died. I have nothing to hope for and everything to fear. Observe the breakdown in human affairs. At all times the works of men have been ephemeral but in our day they are like the emerging embryo that dies before it even develops. On all sides I hear the sounds of disaster. My era is one of catastrophes. Everything comes to life and dies before my eyes as though struck by lightning. Everything passes, and I would be a fool to flatter myself that I can stand firm in the midst of so many upheavals, in the midst of so much destruction, in the midst of the moral subversion of the world. No, my friend, that cannot be! Since death has not decided to take me under its protective wings, I must hurry to hide my head in the midst of oblivion and silence, before I am struck by blows from heaven and reduced to dust, to ashes, to nothingness. It would be madness on my part to watch the storm and fail to take shelter…. Everyone falls, struck by disgrace or disaster. Can I remain standing? Impossible. I too must fall.74
A dark night for Bolívar, his thoughts apparently lost in a maze of words but emitting one clear message: he had a will to survive and did not intend to succumb. In Pativilca an innate ability to pick himself up reasserted itself and rescued him from despair. Within weeks he was his old self, impervious to the disasters around him. The Colombian envoy to Peru, Joaquín Mosquera, travelling nearby, was alerted by an Indian that the Liberator was lying mortally ill in Pativilca. He saw him in his garden, slumped on an old bench too ill to rise, his head bound in a scarf, looking skinny and decrepit. Mosquera asked him how the Colombian army could survive; what would he do? ‘Triumph!’ was the reply. ‘In three months I shall have an army ready to attack. I shall climb the cordilleras and defeat the Spanish.’ The timing was premature but the determination real: ‘Tell our comrades how you left me lying on this inhospitable shore, where I fight with shattered arms to achieve the independence of Peru and the safety of Colombia.’75 Now everything depended on the Liberator, and his Colombian army was the last line of defence, if he could persuade an exasperated Santander to send more arms and men. But Santander was dragging his feet over Peru. It needed all the Liberator’s tact and powers of persuasion to get him to square congress and send him aid. Times had changed since Bolívar’s departure. Bogotá now had more lawyers, professors and journalists, and a ruling class prone towards liberal opinions that did not know or appreciate the distant Bolívar, or accept his constant demands for troops and money for projects that were not Colombian. So Santander was caught between a reluctant congress and an exigent Liberator, who seemed to regard him as a ready source of funds for his own campaigns. There was a critical moment of confrontation, from which both drew back and started again.
By decree of 10 February 1824 the Peruvian congress appointed Bolívar Dictator ‘for the salvation of the country’ and suspended the constitution. o’Leary recorded the event in a memorable passage:
The situation of Peru when this decree was issued was very different from what it was when San Martín disembarked four years previously. At that time the support for independence was general throughout Peru, and enthusiasm for the liberators matched the resources placed at their disposal. San Martín had only to come, see, and conquer; he came, he saw, and he could have conquered. But the task was perhaps beyond him, or at least he believed so; he hesitated and finally abandoned it. When congress entrusted to Bolívar the salvation of the republic, it handed him a corpse.76
O’Leary exaggerated the degree of support which the Peruvians had given San Martín, but otherwise there was truth in his invidious comparison. San Martín had sought to win the minds and hearts of Peruvians. Bolívar, on the other hand, saw a ‘Peru divided into three parties: first, anti–Colombian patriots; second, Spanish loyalists; third, loyalists of Torre Tagle and Riva Agüero. The rest of the unarmed masses has no commitment at all.’77 And he perceived more acutely than San Martín that Peruvians were indifferent to one cause or the other, that each sector of this highly stratified society sought only to retain its own immediate advantage, that in these circumstances only power could persuade, and only a military victory by an American army could liberate Peru. ‘We are the only ones who feel these disasters, for they are of little concern to the Peruvians. They have no hope at all, so they will do everything by sheer strength, like men who expect nothing from our sacrifices. But if we lose Peru, adios Colombia. So, for the good of Colombia, I am going to ride out the storm.’78
Bolívar did not go further and ask why this should be so. Why were the Peruvian elite, at first apparently ready to resist Spain, no longer committed to independence? One answer is that they had been alienated by the brutal expulsion of Spanish families and confiscation of their properties, people with whom they had many ties of family, friendship and business. After 1822 many creoles, led by Riva Agüero and Torre Tagle, rediscovered their cultural ties with Spain, their social affinity with the Spanish regime and their hostility to brutish Colombians.79 A further explanation may have been that the elite were convinced that independence would bring a lax regime with a liberal policy towards Indians and blacks and that their security would be better protected by Spanish viceroys and generals than by Bolívar and his republicans.
Bolívar’s friends and colleagues were convinced that it was madness to accept the dictatorship of Peru and advised him to withdraw. But his position was strong and legitimate, even if it did create a dilemma. The congress of Angostura had made him president of Venezuela in 1819. The congress of Cúcuta appointed him president of Colombia in 1821 with special powers to absent himself on military duty. Quito acclaimed him and accepted its incorporation into the Republic of Colombia. Now, his Peruvian dictatorship too came sanctioned by a congress. Appointed by others, Bolívar then trusted his own genius and vision. After recuperating at Pativilca, he began to organize resistance, to stop the rot, to improve morale. Civil affairs he placed in the hands of a single minister, José Sánchez Carrión, an able Peruvian and known patriot, who collaborated closely with Bolívar and was responsible for the renewal and creation of civil institutions, social policies and the administration of law in the liberated territories, giving added meaning to the concept of dictatorship. The Liberator’s own task was to assemble an army, to procure more troops from Colombia, more recruits from Peru, and to find the money to pay
for men and supplies. While still convalescing at Pativilca he had sent a long set of instructions to Sucre, the work of a professional commander at the top of his form. He gave an expert description of the landscape of battle, the challenges of the terrain and climate, the resources available to the army on the move. He laid down rules for training, the need for route marches to make their army as quick as the enemy’s and capable of reacting to decisions for advance or retreat. He emphasized the different deployment of cavalry and infantry, the need for provisions and animals, the welfare of troops, not forgetting the provision of hospitals. He considered too the disposition of the enemy and the critical question of whether to prepare for attack or defence.80 However debilitating his illness, Pativilca was a place of convalescence which gave him two months to think and plan his decisive campaign.
At the beginning of March he established his headquarters at Trujillo and in April moved to Huamachuco. He had to make the highlands, not the coast, his theatre of war, in order to take the fight to the enemy: the sierra was the royalist power base and the last chance for Spain. He made northern Peru the supply base of the revolution. He confiscated royalist property, cajoled money out of the Church, imposed taxes. It was now that Peruvians made their contribution to the cause of independence with men, money and supplies. Bolívar’s indispensable assistant in the task of recruiting and organizing was the faithful Sucre, ‘the right arm of the Liberator and the mainstay of the army’, who established workshops for arms and horseshoes, placed orders in Trujillo for uniforms, prepared maps, reconnoitred the routes. Between them they created and trained a new army of liberation. Santander did not let him down entirely over Colombian troops. Reinforcements arrived from Panama and Guayaquil, among them an Irish contingent led by Colonel Francis Burdett o’Connor, who showed a talent for logistics that impressed Bolívar and who was appointed chief–of–staff to coordinate personnel and supplies in the patriot forces. Another Irishman, Arthur Sandes, a veteran of the Peninsular War, had joined Bolívar in Venezuela and had reached the rank of colonel by the time of the Peruvian campaign and was afterwards promoted to general.81 By April 1824 the patriot army was eight thousand strong, composed of a majority of Colombians under the command of General Jacinto Lara and Colonel Córdova, heavily reinforced by Peruvian recruits under Marshal La Mar, against a Spanish army of sixteen thousand dispersed between Peru and Upper Peru and consisting of Indians and cholos, officered by Spaniards and Peruvians. The patriot army enjoyed two distinct assets. It possessed an incomparable cavalry, composed of the gauchos of Argentina, the huasos of Chile and the llaneros of Venezuela and Colombia. And it was paid, if not well (half a dollar a week) at least regularly; on this Bolívar insisted.
