Simón Bolívar
Based on Wikipedia: Simón Bolívar
A young widower stands on a Roman hilltop in August 1805, overlooking the ruins of an empire that once ruled the known world. He is twenty-two years old, Venezuelan, and utterly heartbroken. His wife died of yellow fever just eighteen months ago, and he has spent the time since wandering through Europe trying to outrun his grief. Now, on the Mons Sacer—the Sacred Mountain where Rome's common people once staged a mass walkout against their patrician rulers—Simón Bolívar makes a theatrical vow to liberate South America from Spanish rule.
It sounds like the kind of grandiose promise young men make and forget. Bolívar would spend the next twenty-five years keeping it.
The Orphan Aristocrat
Bolívar entered the world on July 24, 1783, in Caracas, the colonial capital of what Spain called the Captaincy General of Venezuela. His full baptismal name—Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios—hints at both his family's wealth and their Spanish obsession with elaborate naming conventions. The Bolívars were criollos, meaning they were of Spanish blood but born in the Americas, a distinction that mattered enormously in the rigid caste system of colonial Latin America.
The family had been accumulating power and money in Venezuela for two centuries. The first Bolívar had arrived in the 1580s as a minor bureaucrat from the Basque region of Spain, and his descendants had done what ambitious colonial families do: they married well, secured government posts, acquired land, and became one of the wealthiest dynasties in Spanish America.
But wealth didn't protect young Simón from tragedy.
His father died of tuberculosis when Bolívar was two years old. His mother followed when he was eight. Following colonial custom, the Bolívar children were raised by enslaved African house servants. Simón grew particularly attached to a woman named Hipólita, whom he would later describe as both mother and father to him. The British historian John Lynch summarized Bolívar's childhood as "at once privileged and deprived"—he had everything money could buy except the parents to guide him through it.
Custody of young Simón fell to his uncle Carlos Palacios, a man who showed no interest in the boy beyond his eventual inheritance. Bolívar grew up notoriously unruly, bouncing between tutors and relatives who couldn't control him. At twelve, he fled his uncle's house to live with his married sister. A colonial court ordered him back.
The one bright spot was Simón Rodríguez, a Venezuelan educator who became Bolívar's tutor and would remain his lifelong friend. Rodríguez was a radical, influenced by the Enlightenment ideas then sweeping through Europe—the revolutionary notion that people could govern themselves, that kings and empires were not ordained by God, that reason and liberty were the highest human values. These ideas would prove contagious.
A Brief Marriage, A Long Shadow
At fifteen, Bolívar's uncles shipped him off to Spain to complete his education, as was customary for wealthy colonial families. He arrived in Madrid in 1799 to find a sophisticated European capital and his uncle Esteban, who was horrified to discover that his nephew was "very ignorant" by metropolitan standards. Esteban arranged for proper tutoring in the classics, literature, and what we might now call political science.
Then came María Teresa.
She was María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alaysa, daughter of another wealthy Venezuelan family living in Madrid. Bolívar was eighteen; she was twenty-one. They were engaged within months, married in May 1802, and sailed immediately for Venezuela to begin their life together.
That life lasted seven months.
María Teresa contracted yellow fever in Caracas and died on January 22, 1803. Bolívar was shattered. He would later tell one of his generals that he swore never to remarry—a vow he kept, though not a vow of celibacy. The death redirected the entire trajectory of his life. As he put it much later, if María Teresa had lived, he would have spent his days as a comfortable Venezuelan landowner. He would never have become a revolutionary.
Instead, he returned to Europe to grieve, and grief took him on a journey through the intellectual ferment of the early nineteenth century.
The Education of a Revolutionary
By March 1804, Bolívar had made his way to Paris, arriving just as Napoleon Bonaparte was about to transform himself from First Consul of France into Emperor. Bolívar watched the coronation ceremony in May. He rented an apartment, reconnected with his old tutor Rodríguez, and threw himself into the social and intellectual life of the city.
At Parisian salons, he met Alexander von Humboldt, the legendary German naturalist who had just spent five years exploring South America. Humboldt had traveled the Orinoco River, climbed volcanic peaks in Ecuador, and mapped regions no European scientist had ever studied. More importantly for Bolívar, Humboldt believed that Spain's American colonies were ripe for independence—that they had the natural resources, the educated elites, and the growing frustration with colonial rule to break away.
Whether Humboldt actually planted the seed of revolution or merely confirmed what Bolívar already felt is impossible to know. But by the spring of 1805, when Bolívar set off on a grand tour of Italy with Rodríguez and his childhood friend Fernando del Toro, he was thinking seriously about what it would take to liberate his homeland.
In Milan, he watched Napoleon crown himself King of Italy—another coronation, another display of revolutionary power transformed into imperial pageantry. They traveled down through the Po Valley to Venice, then Florence, and finally to Rome.
Rome obsessed him. Here was the evidence of what a republic could become, the ruins of an empire that had started as a city-state where citizens governed themselves. On August 18, 1805, on the Sacred Mountain where Roman plebeians had once staged their famous secession, Bolívar made his vow. With Rodríguez as his witness, he swore to end Spanish rule in the Americas.
The Slow Fuse
Revolutionary fervor is one thing. Actually overthrowing a three-hundred-year-old colonial empire is another.
Bolívar returned to Venezuela in 1807 and began, cautiously, meeting with other wealthy criollos to discuss independence. He found himself far more radical than most of Caracas high society, which was content to grumble about Spanish rule while enjoying their plantations and enslaved labor forces. For the next few years, he occupied himself with mundane affairs, including a property dispute with a neighbor.
The spark came from an unexpected direction: Napoleon.
In 1807-08, the French emperor invaded the Iberian Peninsula and forced the Spanish king to abdicate, replacing him with Napoleon's own brother Joseph. This created an extraordinary situation in Spain's American colonies. The legitimate king was gone, imprisoned by a foreign usurper. To whom did the colonies owe allegiance? The puppet king Joseph? The Spanish resistance fighting the French? Or perhaps—and this was the dangerous thought—to themselves?
News of the invasion reached Venezuela in July 1808. The Spanish captain-general arrested a group of criollos who had petitioned for self-government. Bolívar wasn't among them, but he was warned to stop hosting seditious meetings. The colonial authorities could feel something shifting, even if they couldn't quite name it.
By April 1810, the situation in Spain had deteriorated completely. The anti-French resistance had collapsed, leaving only a weak regency council claiming to govern in the name of the captive king. When this news reached Caracas, the criollos finally made their move. On April 19, they deposed the Spanish governor and created the Supreme Junta of Caracas.
They were still careful to declare loyalty to Ferdinand VII, the imprisoned Spanish king. Full independence remained too radical for most. But the door was open.
The Diplomat
Bolívar's first contribution to the independence movement was diplomatic rather than military. In June 1810, he sailed for Britain on a mission to secure recognition and support for the new Venezuelan government. He funded much of the expedition himself.
In London, he met Francisco de Miranda.
Miranda was already a legend—a Venezuelan revolutionary who had spent decades in exile, fighting in the American Revolution, serving as a general in the French Revolutionary Wars, and scheming endlessly to liberate South America. He had attempted an invasion of Venezuela in 1806 with American volunteers, and it had failed spectacularly. The Supreme Junta had specifically instructed Bolívar to avoid him.
Bolívar ignored those instructions.
The two men found they had much in common. Miranda had the experience and the international reputation; Bolívar had the money and the connections to Caracas society. Together, they met with the British Foreign Secretary, Richard Wellesley, at Apsley House. Bolívar argued passionately for Venezuelan independence, but Wellesley refused. Britain was allied with the Spanish resistance against Napoleon; recognizing a breakaway Spanish colony would undermine that alliance.
The diplomatic mission failed to secure British support, but it succeeded in another way. Bolívar convinced Miranda to return to Venezuela with him, bringing decades of revolutionary expertise to the cause.
The First Republic Falls
Back in Venezuela, the independence movement was accelerating. Bolívar and Miranda co-founded the Patriotic Society, a political organization pushing for complete separation from Spain. When a congress met in Caracas in March 1811, it initially declared loyalty to the imprisoned Ferdinand VII. But when it emerged that one of the congressional leaders was actually a Spanish agent, the mood shifted dramatically.
On July 5, 1811, the congress declared independence. Venezuela became the first South American nation to break from Spain.
It also became the first to learn how difficult it would be to keep that independence.
The new republic faced enemies on all sides. Conservative whites feared the radicalism of the independence movement. People of color—free blacks, mixed-race people, indigenous communities—had no particular loyalty to criollo landowners who had enslaved and oppressed them for generations. Several Venezuelan provinces rejected the republic entirely and remained loyal to Spain, receiving troops and supplies from Spanish strongholds in Puerto Rico and Cuba.
The military situation was grim. Bolívar began his combat career in this desperate period, fighting royalist forces in what would prove to be a losing war. An earthquake in March 1812 devastated the republican-held areas while largely sparing royalist territories, which the Catholic Church interpreted as divine judgment against the godless revolutionaries. By July 1812, Miranda had been given dictatorial powers, but it wasn't enough. He negotiated a surrender to the Spanish.
Bolívar was furious at what he saw as Miranda's betrayal. In a controversial episode, he was part of a group that arrested Miranda and handed him over to the Spanish, who shipped him to a prison in Cádiz where he would die four years later. Bolívar himself escaped to Cartagena in New Granada (modern-day Colombia), where the independence movement was still fighting.
The Manifesto
In December 1812, from the safety of Cartagena, Bolívar wrote the first of his major political documents: the Cartagena Manifesto. It was a scathing analysis of why the first Venezuelan republic had failed.
The answer, Bolívar argued, was weakness. The republic had been too democratic, too decentralized, too tolerant of internal dissent. It had granted its enemies freedom to organize against it. It had created a weak federal system when it needed a strong central government capable of fighting a war.
This would become Bolívar's consistent political philosophy: liberty required order, and order required power concentrated in capable hands. He never quite resolved the tension between his commitment to ending colonial tyranny and his conviction that South Americans weren't ready for full democracy. It would haunt him until his death.
War Without Mercy
Over the next several years, Bolívar fought his way back and forth across Venezuela and New Granada in a series of brutal campaigns. He won stunning victories and suffered crushing defeats. He declared "war to the death" against the Spanish, promising to kill any Spaniards who didn't actively support independence—a policy of mutual atrocity that both sides embraced with horrifying enthusiasm.
In 1813, he led the Admirable Campaign, a lightning march from the border to Caracas that conquered Venezuela in a matter of months and established a second republic. It lasted barely a year. A royalist counteroffensive led by the ferocious José Tomás Boves, who recruited soldiers from the mixed-race plainsmen of the Venezuelan interior, swept the republicans away. The second republic fell in 1814.
Bolívar retreated to New Granada, then watched as Spanish forces reconquered that territory too. By 1815, he was in exile in Jamaica, writing another famous document—the Jamaica Letter—that outlined his vision for independent South America while acknowledging how far that vision was from reality.
The Haitian Connection
What happened next changed everything.
Bolívar made his way to Haiti, the Caribbean nation that had won its own independence through the world's only successful slave revolution. There he met Alexandre Pétion, the president of the southern half of Haiti.
Pétion offered Bolívar what no one else would: guns, ships, soldiers, and money. In return, he asked for one thing: that Bolívar abolish slavery in the territories he liberated.
This was a profound moment. Bolívar himself came from a slaveholding family. He had been raised by enslaved people and owned them himself. The Venezuelan independence movement had largely avoided the question of slavery because so many of its criollo leaders depended on enslaved labor for their wealth. Now a black revolutionary was offering to save the independence movement on the condition that it actually live up to its proclaimed ideals of liberty.
Bolívar agreed.
He returned to Venezuela in 1816 with Haitian support and proclaimed the abolition of slavery. It was a complicated abolition—he offered freedom to enslaved men who joined his army, not immediate universal emancipation—but it changed the character of the war. Suddenly the independence movement was offering something to the very people who had fought against it under Boves. Slowly, the tide began to turn.
Crossing the Andes
By 1817, Bolívar had established a third Venezuelan republic in the eastern part of the country, with his headquarters at Angostura (modern-day Ciudad Bolívar) on the Orinoco River. But Venezuela remained contested, with royalist forces controlling much of the territory.
Then Bolívar did something audacious even by his standards.
In 1819, he marched his army across the Andes.
To understand what this meant, imagine crossing the Rocky Mountains in winter with a nineteenth-century army—no roads, no supply lines, altitude sickness killing men and horses, freezing temperatures at the high passes. Bolívar took roughly 2,500 soldiers over the Andes from the Venezuelan plains to the Colombian highlands. Many died on the march itself. Those who survived emerged into a region where the Spanish weren't expecting them.
The gamble paid off. Bolívar's forces won a decisive victory at the Battle of Boyacá on August 7, 1819, and entered Bogotá three days later. New Granada—modern Colombia—was liberated in a single stroke.
Gran Colombia
Now Bolívar's vision expanded. In December 1819, a congress at Angostura created the Republic of Colombia—later called Gran Colombia to distinguish it from the modern nation—uniting Venezuela, New Granada, and eventually Ecuador and Panama under a single government. Bolívar was elected president.
This was the dream: a federation of South American nations powerful enough to resist any attempt by Spain or other European powers to reconquer them. Bolívar imagined something like the United States of South America, though with a stronger central government than the North Americans had chosen.
The military campaigns continued. In 1821, Venezuelan forces finally defeated the royalists at the Battle of Carabobo, effectively ending Spanish rule in Venezuela. Panama declared independence from Spain and immediately joined Gran Colombia. In 1822, Bolívar's lieutenant Antonio José de Sucre won the Battle of Pichincha, liberating Ecuador.
Then came Peru.
The Meeting at Guayaquil
Peru was the jewel of the Spanish Empire in South America—the seat of viceregal power, the location of the silver mines that had enriched Spain for centuries. It was also where another liberator was operating: José de San Martín, who had led the independence of Argentina and Chile and had invaded Peru from the south.
On July 26-27, 1822, Bolívar and San Martín met at Guayaquil, Ecuador, in one of the most mysterious encounters in Latin American history. What exactly happened in their private conversations remains unknown. What is known is that San Martín left the meeting, resigned his command, and went into exile in France, where he lived quietly until his death in 1850.
The most likely explanation is that San Martín recognized he couldn't finish the liberation of Peru without Bolívar's help, and Bolívar was unwilling to share command. Rather than fight or accept a subordinate position, San Martín stepped aside. It was an act of extraordinary selflessness—or perhaps of pragmatic recognition that Bolívar's ego would not permit partnership.
The Liberation of Peru and Bolivia
With San Martín gone, Bolívar entered Peru to complete the liberation. The campaigns of 1824 were among his finest military achievements. At the Battle of Junín in August, his cavalry won a remarkable victory fought entirely with swords and lances—not a single shot was fired. At the Battle of Ayacucho in December, Sucre defeated the last major Spanish army in South America.
Peru was free. And in 1825, the region known as Upper Peru declared independence as a new nation, naming itself Bolivia in honor of its liberator. Bolívar wrote the constitution himself, creating a system with a president-for-life who could choose his own successor—essentially a republic designed to transition into a monarchy in all but name.
Bolívar was now president or supreme authority over an enormous swath of South America: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Bolivia. He was "El Libertador"—the Liberator—the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere.
He was also increasingly alone.
The Dream Unravels
The problem with liberating six countries is that someone has to govern them afterward.
Bolívar had always believed in strong central government, but the nations he had created were resistant to centralization. Venezuela resented being governed from Bogotá. Ecuador and Panama had their own regional interests. Peru and Bolivia, despite their constitutions, were barely functional. Everywhere, local strongmen and rival politicians challenged Bolívar's authority.
His personal life was no more stable. He had never remarried after María Teresa's death, but he had numerous affairs, most famously with Manuela Sáenz, an Ecuadorian revolutionary who became his mistress and, on at least one occasion, saved his life by helping him escape through a window during an assassination attempt.
By the late 1820s, Gran Colombia was falling apart. Venezuela seceded in 1829. Ecuador followed. The grand federation Bolívar had dreamed of building dissolved into the separate nations that exist today. His health was failing—probably tuberculosis, the same disease that had killed both his parents.
Death and Legacy
In March 1830, Bolívar resigned the presidency of Colombia. He planned to go into exile in Europe, but he never made it. His health deteriorated as he traveled toward the coast. On December 17, 1830, at the age of forty-seven, Simón Bolívar died at a farm near the city of Santa Marta, Colombia.
His last proclamation was bitter:
"All who have served the revolution have ploughed the sea."
It was the despair of a man who had spent twenty-five years fighting for a vision that seemed to be collapsing around him. The nations he had liberated were already fighting among themselves. The unity he had dreamed of was gone. The strong, stable republics he had wanted were instead weak, factional, and plagued by the same problems that had doomed the first Venezuelan republic.
But despair is not the whole story.
Bolívar liberated six modern nations from three centuries of colonial rule. He fought in more than 100 battles. He crossed the Andes with an army. He created constitutions, wrote political philosophy, and inspired generations of Latin American leaders who would invoke his name—sometimes for good causes, sometimes not.
Today, Bolivia and Venezuela (officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela) bear his name. His image appears on currency throughout Latin America. Statues of him stand in capitals from Bogotá to Washington, D.C. Whatever his failings—his authoritarianism, his inability to build lasting institutions, his arrogance—he remains the central figure in the story of South American independence.
The young widower on the Roman hilltop kept his vow.
The Complicated Revolutionary
To understand Bolívar fully, you have to hold contradictions in your mind.
He proclaimed liberty while believing most people weren't ready for democracy. He freed enslaved people while having grown up in a slaveholding household that shaped his entire worldview. He created republics while drafting constitutions that concentrated power in a president-for-life. He dreamed of South American unity while his own personality made compromise nearly impossible.
He was a product of the Enlightenment, deeply influenced by Rousseau and Montesquieu and the example of the American and French revolutions. But he was also shaped by the realities of governing people who had never known anything but colonial rule, in societies divided by race and class in ways that the North American or European revolutionaries never had to contend with.
His solution—strong central government led by an enlightened elite—was born from genuine experience of what happened when weak governments tried to fight determined enemies. The first Venezuelan republic fell partly because it was too democratic, too tolerant of opposition, too federal in structure. Bolívar learned from that failure. Whether he learned the right lessons is another question.
What's undeniable is that he shaped the history of a continent. The borders of South American nations, the political cultures of those nations, the very possibility of independent Latin American states—all of this traces back, at least in part, to the Venezuelan aristocrat who swore an oath on a Roman hillside and then spent his life fulfilling it.
Simón Bolívar ploughed the sea. But he also changed the world.