Bolivar: American Liberator (50 page)

At first, Bolívar
refrained from saying much of anything publicly to his Peruvian hosts, aware that the political situation was fragile and that no one was really sure who was in power, nor had anyone said with any specificity what Bolívar’s role would be. Sucre had warned him of vicious rivalries:
“You could probably get Congress to give you all the power, if that’s what you want,” he had written Bolívar months before, “but I wouldn’t advise it. . . . A son of the soil should govern, and you should dedicate yourself to war.” Bolívar followed that advice religiously. The rich Creoles of Lima had worried about the advent of the Colombians.
Rumor had it that Bolívar was a mulatto, that
his army was a thundering horde of blacks and Indians wanting nothing so much as booty. He was all too conscious of those anxieties. But the expectation that he could save the Peruvian revolution without wielding ultimate power was an illusion. Those who had called for Bolívar’s help—first Riva Agüero, then Torre Tagle—thought of him as a brilliant general for hire, a liberator who would serve their interests, not a president of a
vast territory with a concrete vision of his own. It was the same error of judgment San Martín had made when he had tried to engage Bolívar’s assistance in Guayaquil.

Bolívar understood this. On September 2, when he was offered the supreme military command, he accepted it for what it was. He assured the Peruvian congress that it could count on his service and support. But he warned that he would require radical reforms to be introduced into every branch of the administration—including congress—
to address the corruption that plagued it. Those were ominous words. His listeners nodded in agreement, but the demand did not augur well for many of them. President
Torre Tagle had raided the public treasury to buy every congressman in the room.

As far as the Peruvian public was concerned, Bolívar seemed the antithesis of the sullen San Martín.
He spent those first few days attending the theater, laughing heartily at opera buffa, enjoying a bullfight in the long-neglected ring. He attended parties in his honor, admired the women with their elegant gewgaws and bewitching eyes. He had been at sea for twenty-five long days and the pleasures of a cosmopolitan city were not lost on him.
“The men seem to admire me . . . the women are lovely,” he wrote Santander, “and that is all very nice.” But within days in that city of delights, he was hard at work, addressing the Peruvian juggernaut. There were two presidents to contend with, four patriot armies, a vast and demoralized indigenous population, a seemingly unbridgeable ravine between rich and poor. In private, he called Peru
“a chamber of horrors.” His closest aide, Daniel O’Leary,
called it “a corpse.”

He
sent Riva Agüero in Trujillo a letter, urging him to give up his misguided efforts to hold on to the presidency; a president and congress were operating perfectly well in the capital. Riva Agüero’s act dissolving congress had been a travesty, and Bolívar told him so: the institution was larger than any one man; it had given Riva Agüero the power in the first place—
“Stop conducting a war against your nation’s offices,” he scolded. In an attempt to be conciliatory, Bolívar offered him a way to save face: a role in the military, perhaps, or a diplomatic appointment. But Riva Agüero, in the meantime, had
approached the viceroy himself. He had offered La Serna a plan to eject Bolívar and Sucre from Peru
altogether—even rid the arena of San Martín, if the Argentine general were to reappear. Riva Agüero had offered the Spaniards an armistice of eighteen months, during which time a permanent peace would be negotiated between Spain and Peru. It was blatant treason. There was no choice now but to forcibly arrest the ex-president. Riva Agüero was apprehended by his own general, sent to prison, and exiled to Chile.

Everywhere Bolívar looked there was evidence of bad faith and duplicity. The Peruvian general Santa Cruz—whose loyalty to Sucre had been so crucial in winning Quito—
now marched his army south to devastating losses, spurning all offers of assistance from the Colombian legions. Indeed, since the Colombians’ arrival in Peru, Santa Cruz had changed his attitude toward Sucre entirely.
He was jealous of his former general, suspicious of his six thousand men, wary of some larger, nefarious design in the Colombian offer. But in that maelstrom of mistrust, even Santa Cruz was accused of questionable ambitions—he had overreached, thought himself a greater general than he had proved to be. His officers worried that he was a puppet of the renegade ex-president Riva Agüero. Some even alleged that Santa Cruz wanted nothing more than to create a personal empire in his native La Paz, in the southern reaches of Peru, where he could control the coveted silver mines of Potosí. No one in this Peruvian enterprise, it seemed, could be trusted. The politics and loyalties seemed utterly alien to Bolívar. Questions of pecking order and jurisdiction were harder to parse. The germ of suspicion that had surfaced between Bolívar and San Martín in Guayaquil seemed to have spread like a contagion in Lima. For the first six months of his tenure in Peru, the Liberator was just as vexed, just as paralyzed as his predecessor had ever been.
“I shall always be a foreigner to these people,” he wrote gloomily, registering Peru’s palpable xenophobia. “I have already regretted that I ever came.” But in more sanguine moments, he refused to be cast as another San Martín:
“If we lose Peru,” he confided privately, “we might as well say adios to Colombia. . . . I’m riding out this storm.”

Bolívar noted right away that
San Martín’s likeness was not on display in the palace in Lima and he commented on it. He was told that Riva Agüero had removed the portrait when San Martín had departed a year before. The Liberator insisted that it be hung again. He made
a
point to toast San Martín at the first available opportunity, but quickly separated himself from his strategy: America, he insisted, would not tolerate a throne or a king. Nor could Peru afford to be passive in the face of a determined enemy. He made it clear that he would wage an all-out war against the colonizer. It was, as far as he was concerned, a battle for survival: Caracas and Bogotá would not be free until Peru was free; Peru would not be free until La Paz was free; and so on, all the way down the continent. The chain of republics from Venezuela to Argentina had to be defended at all costs, for one weak link might destroy the whole. It was the essence of his revolutionary theory and it could be synthesized in
two words: attack and unite.
“The soldiers who have come from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela will not return to their fatherlands unless they do so covered with laurels,” he told congress. “They will either triumph and leave Peru a free nation or they will die.”

It was in this spirit of resolve that Bolívar set out to reconnoiter the very heart of Peru—Cajamarca, Huaraz, and the fertile valley between the two cordilleras of the Andes. He wanted to salvage any damage Riva Agüero might have created, spread word of his liberating mission, and learn something about the potential fields of war. But the links in his chain were already beginning to give way. Argentina pulled out of the Peruvian effort quietly, wanting to expend no more soldiers or funds. A fleet of Chilean ships, which had been making its way up the coast to assist the Liberator, decided to turn around and abandon the operation altogether. Bolívar was now truly alone in Peru. The news from Greater Colombia in recent weeks had been uniformly good—Páez and his plainsmen had finally dislodged the Spaniards from their last bulwark at Puerto Cabello—but here, in this most vital of revolutionary theaters,
anarchy reigned. There seemed to be no hope for foreign assistance. His optimism gave way to desperation. He wrote to Santander,
expressing grave doubts about the reliability of Peruvians: they lacked mettle, dedication, patriotism. He pleaded with his vice president for
a solid battalion of horsemen, a modest contingent of five hundred men from Páez’s hordes; within a week he was pleading for an
army of twelve thousand. The man called
“victory’s favorite son” had become a general without any legions.

Sailing back to Lima from Trujillo, he fell ill. On January 1, 1824, his ship found harbor in Pativilca, a tiny village thirty miles north of the capital, and Bolívar was carried ashore, racked with chills and high fevers. In that deserted hamlet, far from hope of medical attention, he slipped in and out of consciousness, struggling for life. He was
thought to be suffering from typhus, but it may have been an early manifestation of the tuberculosis that would never leave him. The fever lasted seven days, and he emerged from it a phantom of his former self. Weak, scrawny, he began dictating letters as soon as he could sit up. Officers were brought into his room for conferences, but he insisted they talk to him
from the other side of an enormous curtain; it would be weeks before he would allow them to see his face.
“You would not recognize me,” he wrote to Santander. “I am completely wasted, old. . . . At times I even have episodes of dementia.” The envoy from Colombia to Peru, Joaquín Mosquera, stopped in to visit the Liberator a few days later and reported a heartbreaking sight:

He was so gaunt and skeletal that it almost brought me to tears. He was seated in an old wicker chair, propped up against the wall of a little garden, with his head swaddled in a white kerchief. His trousers were so flimsy that I could see the pointy knees, bony legs; and his voice was hollow and feeble, his face cadaverous. You’ll recall that the Peruvian army under Santa Cruz had just fallen to pieces; they’d had to flee the Spaniards. . . . It all seemed a battery of ills designed to finish off the half-dead hero. With a heavy heart, fearing the ruin of our army, I asked him, “And what will you do now?” His cavernous eyes lit up, and he said without hesitation, “Triumph!”

Bolívar stayed in Pativilca for two months, unable to travel, and it was during that time—for all his ordeals—that there were signs that the world, too, was convinced he would triumph.
In France, the revered bishop and diplomat Dominique de Pradt urged North Americans to support Bolívar’s revolution: South American independence, he insisted, was as important to the United States as its own. Of the Liberator, he had this to say:
“When one considers how he began, the obstacles he has
overcome and the results of his labors, one has no choice but concede that he has played one of history’s most glorious roles. . . . Posterity will exalt his name.” If Pradt had worried that President James Monroe wasn’t paying attention, he needn’t have. Monroe had just issued a warning to the rest of the world that the United States would not tolerate further interference in Spanish America. Any attempt to impose a foreign will on the hemisphere would be considered an act of aggression and would trigger immediate intervention. The Monroe Doctrine had been the brainchild of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, but it had been prompted by Britain’s foreign minister
George Canning, who had made it known that his government considered the future of the Spanish empire hopeless. As far as two great world powers were concerned, Spain was on its way out of America. Liberty was on the ascendant. It was all the medicine Bolívar would require.

ON HIS WAY BACK TO
Lima before he had fallen ill, Bolívar had eagerly anticipated a reunion with Manuela Sáenz. She had returned from Quito several months before, allowing them to resume their love affair. The Liberator had a roving eye, to be sure, but the love between them was deep and abiding—made all the more ardent by months of separation. Manuela had never been one to shrink from society’s censure and she did not hesitate now to raise a collective eyebrow. Her acquaintances were largely artists, liberals, even libertines—she had been seen accompanying
a viceroy’s courtesan to the theater—and it was whispered that Manuela’s closest friend, the actress Rosa de Campusano, had spent nights in San Martín’s bed. For propriety’s sake, Manuela continued to live in her husband’s house, but at night she would hurry to her lover’s, where they would spend long, happy hours alone. By then, he had taken up residence in the villa that San Martín had occupied in Magdalena, a quiet suburb far from the hubbub of the city.
It was a stucco house with large, comfortable rooms, spacious windows, and a pretty garden that led out to the stables. With a fig tree, a large cherimoya, and clusters of verbena all around, the air seemed perpetually filled with perfume.

By then, Sáenz had persuaded Bolívar to admit her to his entourage. Certainly by December, as he traveled north, she was a permanent
member of his staff, maintaining his personal archives. The arrangement was clearly a departure from the ordinary. Women often accompanied their husbands and lovers into battle; they
might even take up arms, dress as men, argue for justice in military tribunals; but they
rarely were brought into the bureaucracy and paid a salary. Manuela Sáenz had become a full employee of the liberating army—
a cavalry soldier, a hussar. That official role would allow her to stay in contact with her lover, communicate with his secretaries and aides, and, most important, keep track of his whereabouts. It was how she came to know that he was ill and convalescing in Pativilca.

When she read of it in a routine report, she had wanted to fly to his side and nurse him back to health, casting her husband’s reputation to the winds. But in due course, war itself conspired to bring her north to Bolívar. It had happened in the most unexpected way. Bolívar, struggling with his disease and trying to buy time to rebuild an army, had
called on President Torre Tagle to negotiate an armistice with the viceroy. But Torre Tagle had grown thoroughly weary of Bolívar, and, although he agreed to approach the viceroy, he decided to use the conversations as an opportunity to better his own position. He told the Spaniards that he was prepared to change his allegiance altogether, work for them. He had done it before, as had many of his cronies—politicians whose loyalties were so divided between Spain and Peru that they had switched sides again and again, whenever it seemed the other was gaining power. Torre Tagle’s strategy began to unfold on February 5, when the demoralized Argentines guarding Callao decided to mutiny and hand over the fortress to Spanish generals. In a panic, the congress declared Bolívar dictator of Peru—
a title he found odious, although at the time the word was
still hallowed by a republican aura. Passed over entirely by the republican leadership, Torre Tagle now moved to complete his defection.
On February 27, he and his top ministers, along with nearly 350 officers of the Peruvian army, declared themselves on the side of the king. The Spaniards issued an ultimatum, announcing that they would retake Lima. Accustomed by now to mercurial transformations, the capital prepared once again to welcome them. In a flight for their lives, the republicans—
including Manuela Sáenz—evacuated the city,
swarming north along the dunes, toward Pativilca and Trujillo. Two days later, the royalists reentered Lima and the City of Kings swung back under Spanish rule.