Military career of Simón Bolívar

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The military and political career of Simón Bolívar (July 24, 1783 – December 17, 1830), which included both formal service in the armies of various revolutionary regimes and actions organized by himself or in collaboration with other exiled patriot leaders during the years from 1811 to 1830, was an important element in the success of the independence wars in South America. Given the unstable political climate during these years, Bolívar and other patriot leaders, such as Santiago Mariño, Manuel Piar, José Francisco Bermúdez and Francisco de Paula Santander often had to go into exile in the Caribbean or nearby areas of Spanish America that at the moment were controlled by those favoring independence, and from there, carry on the struggle. These wars resulted in the creation of several South American states out of the former Spanish colonies, the currently existing Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and the now defunct Gran Colombia.

In his 30-year career, Bolívar faced two main challenges. First was gaining acceptance as undisputed leader of the republican cause. Despite claiming such a role since 1813, he began to achieve this only in 1817, and consolidated his hold on power after his dramatic and unexpected victory in New Granada in 1819. His second challenge was implementing a vision of unifying the region into one large state, which he believed (and most would agree, correctly) would be the only guarantee of maintaining American independence from the Spanish in northern South America. His early experiences under the

The idea of independence for Spanish America had existed for several years among a minority of the residents of northern South America. In 1797 the Venezuelans Manuel Gual and José María España, inspired by exiled Spaniard Juan Bautista Picornell, unsuccessfully attempted to establish a republic in Venezuela with greater social equality for Venezuelans of all racial and social backgrounds. Nine years later, in 1806 long-time Venezuelan expatriate Francisco de Miranda led a small group of mostly British and American foreign volunteers in an attempt to take over Venezuela and set up an independent republic. Like Gual and España's conspiracy, Miranda's putsch failed to attract Venezuelans of any social and economic class, in fact local Venezuelans organized the resistance to Miranda's invasion and quickly dispersed it. The lack of interest on the part of the Venezuelan Criollos is often explained by their fear that the loss of the removal of Spanish control might bring about a revolution that would destroy their own power in Venezuela. Nevertheless, in the decades leading up to 1806, Criollos had often been at odds with the Spanish Crown: they wanted an expansion of the free trade that was benefiting their plantation economy and objected to the Crown's new policy of granting social privileges that had been traditionally been reserved for whites (españoles) to Pardos through the purchase of certificates of whiteness (gracias al sacar). So the Criollos' failure to support Gual, España and Miranda, which would have created a state under their control, needs to also be understood by the fact that a national identity separate from the Spanish had not yet emerged among them.

In neighboring New Granada tensions also existed with the Crown but had not evolved into an outright desire for separation. In 1779 the Revolt of the Comuneros pitted middle-class and rural residents against the royal authorities over the issue of new taxes instituted as part of the Bourbon Reforms. Although the revolt was stopped and the leaders punished or executed, the uprising did manage to slow down the economic reforms that the Crown had planned for New Granada. In the subsequent decades, a few New Granadans, like Antonio Nariño, became intrigued by the ideas of the French Revolution and attempted to promote its values by disseminating translated documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Again, this was a minority and not necessarily a sign that the majority in New Granada did not see themselves as members of the Spanish Monarchy.

The break with the Crown came in 1808 with the disappearance of a stable government in Spain. The crisis was precipitated by

In 1809 a twenty-six-year-old Bolívar had retreated to his estate in the Valleys of Aragua, refusing to openly participate in calls for the establishment of a Venezuelan junta, because the plans did not consider the option of independence. He was still in his country estates when a junta was successfully established on April 19, 1810. The new Junta of Caracas chose him to be part of a delegation to the United Kingdom to seek British aid. The delegation did not have much success, but Bolívar did return in December 1810 with Francisco de Miranda, who saw an opportunity in the political turmoil to return to Venezuela.

Independence declared

The terms of the Capitulation of San Mateo, which Monteverde approved but which Miranda never came to sign, granted amnesty and the right to emigrate from Venezuela to all republicans, if they chose to do so. Nevertheless, there was great confusion among the republicans as to what the treaty actually contained or if Monteverde would keep his word. It was in this uncertain environment that Miranda chose to abandon the country before Monteverde occupied Caracas. In the early morning of August 1, Miranda was sleeping in the house of the commandant of La Guaira, Colonel Manuel María Casas, when he was awakened by Casas, Bolívar, Miguel Peña and four other soldiers, who promptly arrested Miranda for treason to the Republic and turned him over to Monteverde. For his apparent services to the royalist cause, Monteverde granted Bolívar a passport, and Bolívar left for Curaçao on August 27.

Exile and the Second Republic (1812-1814)

Bolívar's push towards Caracas was aided by the fact that the general population, which had welcomed Monteverde a year earlier, had become disillusioned by his failure to implement the terms of the San Mateo Capitulation or the Spanish Constitution of 1812, which the capitulation promised. Monteverde also faced attacks on two fronts, since Santiago Mariño had already opened a front on the east in January 1813. Bolívar's forces easily defeated the overtaxed and underpaid royalist army in a series of battles, entered Caracas on August 6, 1813, and laid siege to Monteverde, who had retreated to Puerto Cabello. In Caracas Bolívar announced the restoration of the Venezuelan Republic, but placed himself at the head of a military government, since the situation did not allow for the restoration of the old authorities or new elections. Bolívar would base his subsequent and enduring claim to be the sole head of the Venezuelan republic and commander-in-chief of its forces on this accomplishment, although even at this time he was not universally acknowledged as head of the state or the republican forces. Mariño, based in Cumaná, did not recognize Bolívar's claim, but did collaborate with him militarily. Reprisals were carried out against Peninsular royalists that were captured. It was during this period that the republican city fathers of Caracas, following the example of Mérida, granted Bolívar the title of Liberator and office of captain general in the Church of San Francisco (the more appropriate site, the Cathedral of Caracas, was still damaged from the 1812 earthquake).

Bolívar and Mariño's success, like Monteverde's a year earlier, was short-lived. The new Republic failed to convince the common people that it was not a tool of the urban elite. Lower-class people, especially the southern, rural llaneros (cowboys), flocked to the royalist cause. Llaneros played a key military role in the region's struggle. Turning the tide against independence, these highly mobile, ferocious fighters made up a formidable military force that pushed Bolívar out of his home country once more. By 1814, the regular royalist army headed by Governor and Captain General Juan Manuel Cajigal was overshadowed by a large, irregular force of llaneros recruited and led by José Tomás Boves. With the royalist irregulars displaying the same passion and violence that Bolívar had demonstrated in his "war to the death" decree, the republicans suffered their first major setback at the Battle of La Puerta on June 15, 1814, and Boves took Caracas on July 16. The republicans and Criollo royalists in Caracas, who also feared Boves's llanero hoards, had to flee en masse to Mariño's strongholds in the east. The combined forces of Mariño's and Bolívar were defeated again at the Battle of Aragua de Barcelona on August 18, at a cost of 2,000 royalist casualties of the 10,000 troops they fielded, most of the 3,000 combatants in the republican army, in addition to many civilian casualties. Due to their series of repeated reverses both Bolívar and Mariño were arrested and removed from power by José Félix Ribas and Manuel Piar, each representing the two republican commands then in place in Venezuela. A few days later Ribas and Piar decided not to try them and instead released them into exile. On September 8, Bolívar and Mariño set sail for Cartagena de Indias, leaving Piar and Ribas to lead the increasingly encircled republicans.

Royalist control consolidated

Earlier in March 1814,

Like many other Venezuelan republicans who fled to New Granada after the second wave of royalist victories, Bolívar once again entered into the service of the United Provinces and fought against cities that had refused to acknowledge its authority. His forces took Bogotá on December 12, 1814, after an eight-month-long war, and was promoted to captain general for his efforts. He was then given the task of capturing the royalist stronghold, Santa Marta, but Cartagena, the obvious base from which to launch this offensive, refused to give him the necessary soldiers and supplies, so infighting broke out. As Santa Martan forces gained ground against the divided republicans in northern New Granada, Bolívar left for Jamaica on May 8, 1815. Cartagena would fall to Morillo in December 1815 and Bogotá in May of the following year.

Aid from the Haitian Republic and Curaçao

Now thirty-two years of age, he found himself in exile for the second time. In Jamaica, Bolívar once again issued a manifesto explaining his view of the failure of the republican cause in Venezuela. His famous

Bolívar took the forces he brought from Haiti to the Orinoco region, which was mostly controlled by Piar. Piar was making headway against the royalists of Angostura, and was preparing to lay siege to the city. The siege proved difficult and long, since Angostura had a lifeline in the river itself. Bolívar's reinforcements were useful and the city fell in August 1817.^[4] Angostura proved to be an immensely valuable base. From it the republicans had access to foreign trade in Caribbean and beyond via the Orinoco. The river's tributaries also provided access to the Venezuelan and New Granadan Llanos to the west, especially those in Casanare, where refugees from Morillo's troops had organized themselves under Francisco de Paula Santander. In Angostura Bolívar began publishing the Correo del Orinoco newspaper, an official organ of the revolutionaries, which was circulated not only in Venezuela, but in the Caribbean and in Europe. Under Páez and Piar, the republican armies had begun to recruit the local llaneros who, after Morillo disbanded Boves's informal units, no longer had an outlet for quick enrichment and social advancement under the royalist banner. This, however, posed the challenge to the Criollo republican leaders of channeling the llanero's energy, while not re-igniting the race war that had occurred under Boves. In this environment leaders like Piar, who in recent years had begun to emphasize his Pardo roots as he built a Pardo and llanero following, became suspect, and this weakness proved useful to Bolívar, when the moment came to reassert his position as head of the nascent republic.

Challenges to Bolívar's authority

The first overt challenge to his rule came with the meeting of the "Congresillo of

It was clear to Bolívar by mid-1817 that he need to set a clear example that he would not tolerate challenges to his leadership. After the fall of Angostura Piar had become upset at Bolívar's leadership and decided to leave the area. He requested a passport from Bolívar, which he granted. Piar had begun to leave the area, when Bolívar changed his mind and accused Piar of plotting to kill all whites in the area and setting up a black and Mulatto republic (a pardocracia) in imitation of Haiti. Piar was tracked down, court-martialed and found guilty. On October 16 he was executed. Although Piar's crime had ostensibly been fomenting racial hatred, it was understood that his true crime had been not recognizing Bolívar authority. After Piar's execution, Mariño, whom Bolívar's confidant and chronicler Daniel Florencio O'Leary later admitted had been more guilty of insubordination than Piar, fell in line and dropped any other pretensions to an independent leadership.^[6]

His political position secured, Bolívar began to expand the scope of his military activity. He met with Páez for the first time in January 1818, who accepted Bolívar as head of the republicans. Páez, however, refused to take his powerful llanero cavalry outside of the Llanos, where they were extremely effective in holding off and defeating Morillo's formal army. Bolívar was, therefore, left alone in a mid-year attempt to take Caracas, which failed. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, the republicans were secure enough in southern Venezuela, that Bolívar felt it was time to convene a new Venezuelan congress to give the republican government a permanent form. Elections were held in republican areas and to pick representatives of the provinces of Venezuela and New Granada under royalist control, among the troops of those areas. The Congress of Angostura, consisting of twenty-six delegates, began holding sessions in February 1819. The highlight of the opening session was Bolívar's "Address at the Congress of Angostura", now seen along with his "Cartagena Manifesto" and "Jamaica Letter" as a foundational exposition of his political thought. The same day the Congress elected Bolívar president of the Republic and ratified his command of its armies.

The New Granada Campaign

After the opening of the Congress, Bolívar conceived of a daring, yet risky, plan of attacking New Granada which had been a Spanish stronghold for the past three years. If he could liberate New Granada he would have a whole new base from which to operate against Morillo. Central New Granada held great promise since, unlike Venezuela, it had only been recently conquered by Morillo and it had a prior six-year experience of independent government. Royalist sentiment was not strong. But it would be hard to take the initiative against the better prepared and supplied royalist army. To surprise it, Bolívar decided to move during the Venezuelan invierno, the rainy season, when the Llanos flooded up to a meter and the campaign season ended. Morillo's forces would be evacuated from the Llanos for months and no one would anticipate that Bolívar's troops would be on the move. This decision, however, would mean literally wading in waist-deep, malarial water for days before attempting to scale the Andes. Understandably the plan received little support from the Congress or even from the master of the Llanos himself, Páez. With only the forces he and Santander had recruited in the Apure and Meta River regions, Bolívar set off in June 1819.

The small army consisted of about 2,500 men: 1,300 infantry and 800 cavalry, including a

With New Granada secure under Santander's control, Bolívar could return to Venezuela in a position of unprecedented military, political and financial strength. In his absence the Congress had flirted with deposing him, assuming that he would meet his death in New Granada. The vice-president Francisco Antonio Zea was deposed and replaced by Juan Bautista Arismendi. All this was quickly reversed when word got to the Congress of Bolívar's success. By year's end Bolívar presented himself before the Congress and asked it to decree the union of Venezuela and New Granada in a new state, Colombia. It did so on December 17 and elected him president of the new country. The Constitution that the Congress had just written for Venezuela became null and void and a new congress was set to convene within two years.

President and Commander-in-Chief of Gran Colombia (1820-1825)

1820 proved to be a banner year for Bolívar. His dream of creating a new nation was becoming a reality. Morillo no longer had the upper hand militarily and by late March reports began to arrive about the success of the Riego Revolt. The revolt meant that the reinforcements that Morillo's expeditionary force desperately needed would not be coming. Moreover, in June the official orders to reinstate the Cádiz Constitution arrived and were implemented. The new Constitutional government in Spain radically changed policy towards the rebellions in America. It assumed that the revolutionaries, as liberals, were either fighting for, or could be co-opted by, the Spanish Constitution. Although this might have been true in parts of Spanish America at the start of the decade, by 1820 most Spanish Americans did not trust Fernando VII to keep his oath to the Constitution for long. More importantly, it had always been Bolívar's stance that the wars were between two sovereign states, and therefore, the question of reconciling with the Spanish Monarchy under the 1812 Constitution was never a consideration.^[7]

Despite this, Morillo continued with negotiations and focused on getting a ceasefire and bringing the war in line with the law of nations. This was achieved in two treaties signed on November 25 and 26 in Santa Ana de Trujillo, which established a six-month cessation of hostilities and regularized the rules of engagement. The negotiations were also important because the Spanish government for the first time tacitly granted Colombia national status, rather than seeing its representatives as mere rebels. Spain did not of course recognize Colombia, but the negotiations papers referred to it as such, rather than with the previous denominations of "Bolívar's forces" or "the Congress at Angostura."^[8] The ceasefire allowed Bolívar to build up his army for the final showdown everyone knew was coming. By the end of the year, the Constitutional government granted Morillo his long-standing request to resign and he left South America. He was replaced by Miguel de la Torre.

Victory in Venezuela

The truce did not last all six months. On January 28 the cabildo of Maracaibo, which had been in secret negotiations with the republicans aided by native son Rafael Urdaneta, declared the province an independent republic, which chose to join Colombia. La Torre took this to be a violation of the truce, and although the republicans argued that Maracaibo had switched sides of its own volition, both sides began to prepare for renewed war. The fate of Venezuela was sealed, when Bolívar returned to Venezuela in April 1821, leading an army of 7,000 from New Granada. At the Battle of Carabobo on June 24, the Colombian forces decisively defeated the royalist forces, assuring control of Venezuela, save for Puerto Cabello and guaranteeing Venezuelan independence. Hostilities continued until the surrender of Puerto Cabello in 1823, but the main front of the war now moved to southern New Granada and Quito.

The Southern Campaign, Quito and Peru (1821-1824)

With the Spanish Monarchy collapsing in South America and the uncertainty of constitutional rule in Spain, provinces of the

For details, see Bolivian War of Independence

Bolívar was now president of both Gran Colombia and Peru and had been granted extraordinary powers by the legislatures of both countries to carry out the war against the Spanish Monarchy. Since Bolívar was tied up with the administration of Quito and Peru, the liberation of Upper Peru fell to Sucre and O'Connor, and within a year in April 1825, the task had been completed. A congress of Upper Peru on August 6, 1825, chose to name the new nation after the Liberator and called it the Republic of Bolívar. (The name would later be changed to Bolivia.) With independence secured for all of Spanish South America, Bolívar's political life entered a new phase. He now had to turn to consolidating the large nations he had created out of the former Spanish provinces. And dissension began to brew in the north as the regions of Gran Colombia began to chafe under the centralized government.

The dissolution of Gran Colombia and aftermath

During 1826, internal divisions had sparked dissent throughout the nation and regional uprisings erupted in Venezuela, and Gran Colombia appeared to be on the verge of collapse. An amnesty was declared and an arrangement was reached with the Venezuelan rebels, but political dissent appeared in New Granada as a consequence of this. In an attempt to keep the nation together, Bolívar called for a constitutional convention at

The Convention of Ocaña (April 9 to June 10, 1828) met under a cloud. Many felt that the breakup of the country was imminent. Addressing these fears, the Congress went in the opposite direction that Bolívar had hoped, and drafted a document which would have implemented a radically federalist form of government with greatly reduced the powers for the central administration. Unhappy with this outcome, pro-Bolívar delegates left the convention and the constitution was never ratified.

After the failure of the convention, Bolívar proclaimed himself dictator on August 27, 1828, through an Organic Decree of Dictatorship. He considered this as a temporary measure, as a means to reestablish his authority and save the republic, though it only increased dissatisfaction and anger among his political opponents. On September 25, 1828 an attempt to assassinate Bolívar failed, but it illustrated the tense political atmosphere in Gran Colombia. Although Bolívar emerged physically intact from the event, he was, nevertheless, greatly affected. Dissent continued, and new uprisings occurred in New Granada, Venezuela and Quito during the next two years. Gran Colombia finally collapsed in 1830. Bolívar himself died in the same year at age 47 on December 17. His closest political ally at the time, Sucre, who was intending to retire from public life, had been murdered earlier on June 4, 1830.

Bolívar's legacy continued in the successor states to Gran Colombia. Many of the officers who had fought by him were not only involved in the revolts that led to the dissolution of Gran Colombia, but continued to play important political and military roles in the decades and wars that followed. Bolívar's political thought—his emphasis on a strong, centralized government—became the basis of conservative thought in nineteenth-century South America.

See also

• Libertadores
• Spanish American wars of independence
• Latin American integration
• Bolivian War of Independence

Notes