Bolivar: American Liberator (51 page)

When he heard of the Argentine mutiny in Callao, Bolívar had no doubt that royalists would take back the capital. In the darkest of moods, he wrote to his aides in Lima, telling them to send all his possessions to Trujillo.
He wrote to his generals in Quito and his vice president in Bogotá, warning them to prepare for a terrible war: Peru was irretrievably lost; the Spanish reinfestation would creep up the coast, work its way overland, and threaten the security of Colombia itself. He wrote to President Torre Tagle—unaware that the president was an embezzler and might well have been party to the mutiny—to warn him that certain Peruvians had stolen government money and others were shamelessly seeking power. It would be weeks before he learned of Torre Tagle’s breathtaking betrayal and the defection of so many of Peru’s elites to the royalist side.

In defense of Peru, its historians have explained that the four years spent under San Martín and his foreign militias had deeply worried the aristocrats of Lima; they had emerged from the experience persuaded that they had
stronger ties to Spain than they did to South America. Certainly they felt they had more in common with their colonial masters than with the
mixed-race ruffians of the Chilean and Argentine armies. But in the main, it came down to this: the majority of Lima’s Creoles wanted independence handed to them without a fight. They had never wanted to sever their connections to Spain; they had only wanted more economic freedom. And they certainly hadn’t expected to forfeit their old privileges in the process.
They had learned to be patriots, as one historian has put it, whenever it looked as if Spain was losing, and royalists when the patriots were on the run. But Lima was not Peru, and, convalescing in Pativilca, Bolívar began to realize that the only way he was going to win Peru was to take firm control of the outlying areas and forge his way back into the capital. This was the strategy he had used in Caracas, the one that had worked in Quito. There was something else. Bolívar’s battle cry was no longer “Liberate!” It was “Triumph!” A curious thing had happened to his revolution since he had fought his way up from Pasto. The butchery had hardened him. It was less a war
of independence now than a crusade; less a call to freedom than a call to win at all costs. He was not unaware of that fundamental sea change. At the nadir of his depression about the loss of Callao he wrote Santander:
“I’m through making promises . . . I can’t very well tyrannize them into saving their own necks.” But within two days, he was telling Santander that he would set up an
“itinerant government” in Trujillo. Within three, he was writing out a
full battle plan for General Sucre.

By March, the profound depression that had accompanied his disease had lifted. Perhaps it was because of the company of his mistress. Perhaps because world recognition for his struggle had filled him with renewed purpose. Gradually, his health improved, his energy returned. It was summer, and the sun-drenched days and mild sea breezes combined to renew his spirit. He established his headquarters in the main plaza of the city, organized his staff, and made efforts to build a judicial system, lay the groundwork for a university. But rebuilding his army was his major objective and he knew that every day the royalists did not attack was a day he could use toward strengthening military readiness. He instructed Sucre, who had taken his army north of Lima to the mountain city of Huaraz, to hold back from engaging the enemy just yet; he badgered Santander with the endless refrain,
“Send troops and we’ll win.” Almost overnight, he
turned Trujillo into a teeming arsenal. Every citizen became a laborer, every metal object a potential weapon. Trujillo’s men were assigned to work in improvised forges and factories; women were expected to sew. Highborn señoras along with their servants collected fabric, formed sewing circles, and produced uniforms, flags, tents; no one, no matter how delicate her hands, was exempt. Indians in nearby villages were instructed to produce heavy ponchos and blankets. All available metal was confiscated and melted down for canteens, stirrups, horseshoes.
Silver was seized from church altars to melt, mint, and pay for munitions and salaries. Taxes were levied to raise money for food. By force, by persuasion, by whatever means necessary, including outright appropriation, Bolívar made citizens of the north contribute to the war chest. The churches of Piura alone rendered
more than 100,000 pesos in silver. Trujillo contributed 300,000 pesos in taxes for the treasury and then went on to give Bolívar 100,000 a month for his liberating army.

Bolívar threw himself into the task, leaving no detail of preparation unattended. He
ordered seamstresses to cut patterns in ways that would conserve fabric; he worried about the precise kind of horseshoes needed for mountainous terrain; he oversaw ironworkers forging weapons. Ripping his trousers on a nail as he rose from a chair one day, he was inspired to harvest all nails from Trujillo’s furniture for solder. He issued directives about gunpowder, soap, cooking oil, rope—even the number of
cattle necessary to feed his troops, the kilos of corn needed to feed the cattle.
Lambayeque and Piura produced boots; Huamachuco, belts and saddles. Trujillo milled linen for shirts; Cajamarca, broadcloth for trousers. He sent soldiers off to march thirty miles a day: with Sucre up in the mountains, with General Lara on unforgiving sand. As weeks passed, more and more arrived from Colombia, sent by Santander and Páez. Soon he was expecting them from
Panama, greater Guatemala, Mexico. By mid-April he had transformed his war machine. It was, as one aide said,
as if Mars had sprung from Jupiter’s head, but in place of a single, fully outfitted warrior-god, there was
an army of eight thousand. The ranks were overwhelmingly Colombian, heavily reinforced by Peruvian recruits from the countryside; and the army they formed had two distinct advantages: a superb cavalry, made up of horsemen from as far away as Patagonia or Guayana; and a high morale, largely attributable to the fact the men were being paid. Bolívar had insisted on it.

In April, it became evident that they had a third advantage. The Spaniards had been thrown into confusion by the defection of one of their generals, Pedro Olañeta, a diehard conservative who had carved out a principality of his own in the south of Peru. Olañeta accused Viceroy La Serna of being too liberal; he refused to follow orders, marched his divisions south, and proclaimed himself the “only true defender of the crown.” La Serna, headquartered in Cuzco, had no choice but to send off a good third of his army to muzzle him. Olañeta’s defection had occurred on January 15, just as Bolívar was emerging from the deliriums of his fever, but the news had taken three months to reach him. By then, La Serna’s troubles with Olañeta had only multiplied. The viceroy’s most talented general, Valdés, was locked in a series of bloody battles with the renegade. The army of the crown, which should have pointed north to Bolívar, was now pointed firmly south, at itself. Here,
then, was the reason the royalists hadn’t attacked when Bolívar was at his weakest. Olañeta’s rebellion turned out to be exactly the diversionary maneuver Bolívar needed. Its chaos became his second chance.

Bolívar eventually wrote to Olañeta to try to persuade him to join the republican side, but speed was of the essence now and he needed to move quickly to win the strategic advantage. He instructed Sucre to meet him in the ancient town of Huamachuco, due east of Trujillo, nestled in the periphery of the Andes. As he left Trujillo, he called for the city to send him more forges, more ironworkers, more nails. The people were to surrender every conceivable military necessity: needles, thread, paper, every last fragment of lead—including whatever could be obtained from the city’s statues—every last family jewel.
“For God’s sake, send me everything, everything, everything!” he implored his secretary-general.

Establishing his quarters in a house of many arches in Huamachuco, he wasted no time. He gathered his war council at the first opportunity,
spread out a map of Peru, and posed the strategic question: The enemy was in disorder. Olañeta was on the run; Viceroy La Serna had sent General Jerónimo
Valdés and five thousand men against him. Should the patriots strike or should they wait for reinforcements? Bolívar looked around the room at his officers, every one a seasoned general save one, the Irish colonel Francis Burdett O’Connor. He called on O’Connor first. The young officer stood, pointed to the viceroy’s position, and then to where a good portion of his army had gone.
“As far as I can see,” O’Connor said, “our campaign must begin without delay.” Bolívar promptly folded up the map.
“This youngster has just given us a valuable lesson in the art of war,” he said. “There is nothing more to say; nothing more to hear. Tomorrow, we march.”

He had already made up his mind. They would follow the Andean cordillera south, tracing the fertile valleys that skirted its base. At Huánuco, they would begin the climb, cross the frigid heights of Cerro de Pasco, and provoke the Spaniards to battle where their garrisons stood thick and fast, protecting their hold on Cuzco. He put his army on the move immediately. At some point in mid-May, Bolívar entered the corridor of green known as the Callejón de Huaylas, which lies at the feet of the towering Cordillera Blanca. All around were the
rich fields of
sugarcane, corn, wheat, barley carpeting the hills with their abundance. Orchards hung with oranges, guava, and cherimoya surrounded the mud huts that lined the roads. Manuela Sáenz was not at Bolívar’s side, but she was
only a day’s ride away, and by a route that was always kept secret. It was a hellish journey for a woman—through bogs, over rock, in the glacial mountain nights—riding alongside rough men of war and her fearless black female servants, Jonatás and Natán. A superb horsewoman, Sáenz was up to the challenge and, by all accounts, never complained about the hardships. It was a measure of how crucial she felt it was to accompany Bolívar. But she was not with him when he entered the little village of Huaylas to be met by a girl in virginal white.

Manuelita Madroño was ravishingly beautiful, as a writer of the day called her:
“an irresistibly fresh doll of eighteen springs.” She had been designated by the town council of Huaylas to welcome the Liberator with a crown of flowers. Bolívar was captivated. In high spirits, galvanized by the prospect of war, renewed by his army’s remarkable transformation, he pursued the girl with his customary élan. It is said that within forty-eight hours they were inseparable. For a few weeks, she traveled with his troops, brightening his days with her girlish enthusiasms. From Huaylas to Caruaz to Huaraz, as the patriot army advanced through the bosky abundance that bordered the snowcapped Andes, as Bolívar fretted about lances, hooves, flint, and guns, Manuelita was an undisputable tonic.
“You will note that though I beg,” he wrote Santander, “I am hardly sad.” He gamely asked his vice president to give his warm
regards to the unattainable Bernardina. On the whole, Bolívar’s good cheer was evident in many letters of that time, which are among
the wittiest, most profoundly human of his life.

Inevitably, given the garrulousness of men—given the Liberator’s roguish fame—news of his sexual infidelity soon reached Manuela Sáenz. She fired off a letter to Bolívar’s personal secretary, Juan José Santana, a young soldier she had befriended.
“The general has written me only twice in 19 days,” she groused. And then, mired in self-pity: “He no longer thinks of me.” She asked the secretary for an explanation, accused him of hiding the truth. Was the general indulging in a romantic affair? “You sin by your silence,” she huffed, “and it’s making me
insane.” To Bolívar she was more cautious,
“My sir. . . . You, who constantly speak of your genial correspondence with friends, fail to write me even one line, and have consigned me to deadly misery. . . . Show me a little love, if only for a fellow patriot.”

It isn’t clear whether he ever answered that letter. But it’s very probable that
they reunited at the end of June, when he reached Huánuco, before his army climbed the summit of Cerro de Pasco to meet the Spaniards on the other side. His memory of the Madroño girl, left behind in the valley, was quickly overcome by history—and history would remember her as one more pretty conquest for the Liberator. But she would never forget him, shunning all men until she died of old age,
seventy-four years later.
“So, how is Bolívar’s old lady?” villagers would ask the bright-eyed crone. “As fresh as a little girl,” she always answered.

THERE ARE FEW LANDSCAPES AS
magnificent or unforgiving as the geologic exuberance that lies between Huaraz and Huánuco. The mighty peaks of Huascarán and Yerupajá pierce the skies and send their melted snows to feed the largest waterway in the world—the Amazon. Like a colossal spine, the Andes run up the very heart of Peru, and there, like a vital organ nestled against bone, lies Cerro de Pasco, the mine that sustained an empire. By 1800, its silver-veined earth had surrendered
the equivalent of $12 billion for Spain; a vast indigenous population was enslaved to exhume it. Stalled by revolution and blockade, the town remained the gateway to La Serna’s mountain strongholds in Ayacucho and Cuzco. It was through here that Bolívar meant to go.

At more than fourteen thousand feet above sea level, it was neither an obvious nor easy thoroughfare. The approach was a grueling labyrinth of cliffs and gullies; the air was thin, hardly breathable.
But Sucre had prepared the way. For more than six months, his troops had combed that treacherous terrain, scouting the best routes, establishing trails, building barrack huts along the way—even stashing cartons of sweets for the officers. There seemed to be little he hadn’t thought of in his tireless climbing and reclimbing of that cordillera. He had posted trumpeters at strategic points to help stragglers stay the course; he had stored firewood along the roadside to keep soldiers warm in subzero
nights. He had positioned one of his most skilled generals, William Miller—a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars—on the frigid heights of Cerro de Pasco. And he had established depots replete with provisions on the other side.

But as Bolívar’s armies advanced over that wasteland there was no avoiding the perils and discomforts. At times, the pathways along precipices were so narrow that they admitted only one person at a time; often, soldiers were overcome by debilitating bouts of altitude sickness, sun poisoning, radiation. A march through a stinging snowstorm could cause temporary blindness; a slippery path could send a soldier into a chasm. Often, in harsher terrain with gorges or waterfalls, night would fall before troops could cross to safety. Some might stray from the march, get lost in the dark; it was not unusual to hear a
strange concert of anxious calls, as man and beast wandered adrift in the black and bitter cold.