Simón Bolívar

Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco was born on 24 July 1783 in Caracas, capital of the Captaincy General of Venezuela, into one of the wealthiest creole families in the Americas. His ancestors had emigrated from the Basque country in the late sixteenth century and had accumulated land, slaves, mines and political connections over six generations. Bolívar lost his father at three and his mother at nine, and was raised by his uncle and a series of tutors. The most consequential of these was Simón Rodríguez, a free-thinking pedagogue who introduced him to Rousseau and the Enlightenment classics, and who would remain a moral touchstone for the rest of Bolívar's life.

In 1799 he was sent to Spain, where in 1802 he married María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro in Madrid. He brought her home to Caracas, where she died of yellow fever within months of arriving. Bolívar was twenty-one. He never remarried and later said that without her death he would have been only the mayor of Caracas: "the death of my wife placed me very early on the road of politics." In 1805, on the Aventine Hill in Rome with Rodríguez, he swore the so-called Monte Sacro oath: "I swear before the God of my fathers... that I will not rest my arm nor my soul until I have broken the chains that bind us by the will of the Spanish power."

He returned to Venezuela in 1807. Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 created the political opening: Spanish colonial authority was suddenly questionable everywhere in the Americas. Bolívar joined the patriot junta of 1810 and was party to Venezuela's declaration of independence in July 1811. The First Republic collapsed by 1812 after a devastating Caracas earthquake and Spanish counteroffensive. From New Granada (today's Colombia) he issued the Cartagena Manifesto in December 1812, marched on Caracas in the 1813 Admirable Campaign, and won the title El Libertador from grateful citizens that August. The Second Republic also fell within a year. By 1815 he was an exile in Jamaica, where he wrote the famous Jamaica Letter, a systematic vision of constitutional republican federation across the Spanish American territories. In 1816 he agreed with Haitian president Alexandre Pétion to abolish slavery in any territory he liberated, in exchange for Haitian military support — coupling national independence with the end of slavery in his own letters and decrees thereafter.

The military breakthrough came in 1819. In a brutal forced march through the rainy season, Bolívar crossed the Andes from the Venezuelan llanos to Boyacá in New Granada and on 7 August routed the Spanish royalist army; three days later he entered Bogotá. The Congress of Angostura in December proclaimed the Republic of Colombia — later called Gran Colombia — federating present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador. Carabobo (1821) freed Venezuela; Pichincha (1822) under his lieutenant Sucre freed Ecuador; the decisive Battle of Ayacucho (December 1824), also commanded by Sucre, broke Spanish power in Peru. In 1825 Upper Peru declared independence as Bolivia, taking his name. Five sovereign nations were now free of Spanish rule. The 1826 Panama Congress, the first attempt at a Pan-American collective-security treaty, drew only four states and was ratified only by Gran Colombia — the first major failure of his unification dream.

The final years were a study in contradiction. Bolívar had argued throughout his career for strong executives, long presidential terms and centralised government — drawing on his belief that Spanish colonial heritage had left South Americans "unprepared for federalism." In August 1828, faced with disintegration, he suspended the Colombian constitution and assumed dictatorial powers for life, a step the young Rousseauian republican of 1819 had explicitly disavowed. The next month his mistress Manuela Sáenz, who would be celebrated as "the Liberator of the Liberator," saved him from a Santanderist assassination attempt by hiding him while she confronted the conspirators. In 1829 Venezuela seceded from Gran Colombia under General Páez; in 1830 Ecuador followed. The assassination of his trusted successor Sucre in June 1830 broke him. He resigned and set out for European exile but never made it past the Caribbean port of Santa Marta, where he died on 17 December 1830 of tuberculosis (though a 2010 Venezuelan government investigation raised, without conclusive evidence, the alternative hypothesis of arsenic poisoning). He had sold every estate and mine to fund the wars and left almost nothing.

Five weeks before his death, he wrote to General Flores: "all who have served the Revolution have plowed the sea." The defeat was, in his own terms, total. But his shadow has been impossible to remove. Bolivia bears his name; Venezuela's formal name since 1999 has been the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela; both countries use the bolívar as currency; and his statue stands in capitals from Lima to Cairo. Hugo Chávez's twenty-first-century "Bolivarian Revolution" reactivated his legacy as a contemporary political resource. The contradictions of his career — liberator and dictator, federalist visionary and centralising executive, abolitionist and slaveholder until 1816 — make him not a clean hero but the central, unavoidable reference for every Latin American debate about who they are.