Bolivar: American Liberator (53 page)

Bolívar was outraged. What if he had received these missives relieving him of his position when they had actually been sent—before the triumphant Battle of Junín? What pusillanimous withdrawal would they have caused? Nevertheless, he restrained his anger and communicated the
news to Sucre in two memoranda: one was a simple account of Bogotá’s decision; the second, a letter for Sucre’s eyes only,
to be destroyed as soon as it was read. The young general couldn’t help but be appalled by the insult delivered to the Liberator. He dutifully informed his officers of congress’s decision, although the slight to every warrior in the ranks was clear. The liberating army existed precisely because of Bolívar;
to separate the Liberator from it was to separate him from his soul. Sucre and his officers
submitted a heated protest to Bogotá, insisting that their leader be allowed to retain his command, but Bolívar refused to send it. He urged Sucre to put the episode behind him, take
thorough and aggressive command. His instructions to his general were unequivocal: Sucre was to wait for the propitious moment, engage the enemy in decisive battle, and lead the patriot army to victory once and for all. As for himself, Bolívar stopped sending long candid memos to Santander. His
correspondence was clipped, correct, communicating only what was absolutely necessary. On November 10, when the Liberator finally reached the Pacific Ocean at Chancay, a tiny port forty miles north of the capital, he began feverish preparations for a vigorous reentry into Lima.

Bolívar rode into the capital on December 5, 1824, and was met with a jubilant welcome. The people of Lima,
more republican now after his victory at Junín, welcomed their dictator with adoration. He wasted no time in focusing on his priorities. Within hours, he
imposed a siege to starve the royalists in Callao into submission. He ordered his generals to cut down bridges and destroy any road the Spanish might employ in an assault on Lima. He organized a defensive force of three thousand men, almost all of them fresh arrivals from Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama.

Two days later, he issued an invitation to any and all republics of Spanish America to join a confederation of nations. The institution he had in mind would
“serve as a brain trust during major conflicts, a rallying point when facing a common enemy, a faithful interpreter of treaties, a broker of peace when differences between us arise.” It was a blunt rejoinder to the Monroe Doctrine. As far as Bolívar was concerned, the newly liberated countries of
South America did not need a burly neighbor to protect them. He had fought a fourteen-year revolution without United States help;
he had no intention of relying on its muscle now. Banded together as the United States of South America, the former colonies would be self-sufficient, a force for progress, a new world power. It was a dream Bolívar had nursed for more than a decade. “Unity! Unity! Unity!” he had cried five years before at the Congress of Angostura; in the interim, he had changed approach, adjusted strategy, but he had never lost sight of that shining goal. Eventually, his call to union would give birth to a landmark meeting in Panama eighteen months later, the foundations of Pan Americanism for years to come and the modern-day Organization of American States. And for the moment,
at least, it allowed the Liberator to rise above the sting of Colombia’s ingratitude. His eye was on a higher role.

IN THE RUGGED PERUVIAN LANDSCAPE
that lies between the rolling, brown Apurimac River and the mountains of Huanzo, the royalist and patriot armies were stalking each other, moving swiftly, in a constant state of alarm. Sucre’s spies had determined that the great mass of the king’s army was on the move, with Viceroy La Serna himself at the head, and his two infamously squabbling generals, Canterac and Valdés, close behind.
Nine thousand royalists in bright red and gold uniforms—the last bulwark of Spanish rule in America—streamed north of Cuzco, over mountain and vale, in pursuit of the rebel enemy. Valdés had been reined in from battling the ultraconservative Spanish general Olañeta to join La Serna’s campaign against the liberating army. After six weeks of a vigorous chase, seven thousand royalists outdistanced Sucre’s army and circled around to its flank about thirty miles south of Huamanga.

Sucre, ever unflustered, was
not worried by those maneuvers. He had only 5,700 men, but was confident they were superior in every way to the royalists. Mobilizing his troops
in a torrential rain, he retreated from a grassy ravine to a more advantageous position. The Spaniards pressed on after them, eager to present battle. Moving with lightning speed, they overtook the patriots again on December 3, nipping them in the rear and annihilating half of the famed British battalion, the “Rifles.” Days passed as both armies sought positions for a final conflict. Nearly all the Spanish and patriot forces in Peru would take part in it; there was no doubt it would be the determining battle of Peru’s revolution. As December 6 came and went,
frantic defections occurred—war prisoners who had been pressed into service on opposing sides ran through the night to rejoin their former cohort.

By December 7—the very day that Bolívar reentered Lima—the two opposing armies had marked their ground. But by then the royalist soldiers had traveled longer, faster, over more precipitous terrain, suffering many privations. They had been marched in strict columns to prevent wholesale desertions; they had not been allowed to enter valleys or villages where provisions (and escape routes) might be found; they had been forced by hunger to eat the flesh of their mules. But on December
8, they took, at least on the face of it, the stronger position. The soldiers of the King lined up on the majestic heights of Cundurcunca, overlooking the broad, flat plain of Ayacucho. Circling the area were Indian tribes that had pledged to help them; for weeks the local mountain Indians had been raiding patriot encampments and killing men and cattle; now they vowed to slay any republicans they saw fleeing the field.

Sucre, sighting the royalists as they progressed along the ridges, had brought his troops to the plain of Ayacucho itself, a dusty mesa surrounded by hulking promontories, more than ten thousand feet above the sea.
His notion was to keep the Spaniards from descending to the battlefield until the action started, to destroy them as they spilled down from their perches. The evening before the battle, as dusk cast its long, dark shadows over the Andes, his troops
pressed close to the foot of Cundurcunca to prevent the enemy from descending in the night. Surrounded on every side by inhospitable nature, the patriots were
exactly where Bolívar would have wanted them to be—in terrain that would force them to fight with desperate courage.

Dawn on December 9 over the heights of Cundurcunca
brought a resplendent sun. It was one of those cool, crisp Andean mornings in which the air is a brisk tonic and the land seems suspended in blue. It was,
according to one soldier, the sort of daybreak that lends a warrior wings. Directly before them was the abrupt rise of Cundurcunca,
a scruffy behemoth of dirt, rock, and shrubbery. To the right, mounting hills; to the left, a stream; behind, a sheer drop to another plain, and long vistas as far as the eye could see. There was no place to hide on that grim plateau. The terrain allowed for no cowards or laggards, no long, attenuated battle. As
the sound of cornets and drums began to resonate through that theater of war, reechoing against the mountain walls, Sucre’s soldiers were well aware that there was
no choice for them but to win. Riding through neatly formed columns of men from every station of life, every corner of the Americas and beyond, the young general in chief—then but twenty-nine—was visibly stirred by the significance of the moment. He stopped and, with a voice brimming with emotion, shouted words they would never forget:
“Soldiers! On your efforts today rests the fate of South America!” They answered with a resounding roar.

At eight o’clock, as the sun warmed the morning air, one of the Spanish generals, Juan Antonio Monet, a tall, sturdy man with a russet beard, approached the patriot lines and called out to General José María Córdova, whom he knew from former days. Monet told Córdova that in the royalist ranks, as in the patriot, there were soldiers with relatives on the opposite side: would he allow them to greet each other before hostilities began? When General Córdova consulted with Sucre, the general in chief agreed immediately. And so it was that fifty men of opposing sides met on the slopes of Cundurcunca, among them a number of brothers, to embrace and weep—
as one chronicler put it—in a heartbreaking display of farewell. Indeed, for Peruvians as for Venezuelans and Colombians before them, revolution meant fratricide, and men who spoke the same language, held the same religion, even shared flesh and blood, would now set upon one another in defense of an idea. Seeing the heart-wrenching scenes,
General Monet asked Córdova if there wasn’t some way to come to terms and avoid the bloodshed. Córdova answered: Only if you recognize American independence and return peacefully to Spain. Monet was taken aback and said as much: Didn’t the young patriot general realize that the Spanish army was vastly superior? Córdova responded that combat would determine whether that was true. Monet walked away shaking his head. There was no turning back.

The battle was fierce, short. The royalists clambered down Cundurcunca in their red, gold, and blue regalia, laboring mightily under the banners, their
helmets glinting in the sun. Republicans in
dark, somber overcoats lined up to meet them. Cries went up as they watched the enemy troops descend:
“Horsemen! Lancers! What you see are hardly warriors! They are not your equals! To freedom!”—and so on, up and down the lines. Before the battle officially began,
a young Spanish brigadier was first to attack and first to fall; even so, the royalists took immediate control of the action. General Valdés and his men descended on the republicans like a horde of punishing angels,
splitting their formation so wide that it gaped, momentarily helpless. But patriot morale was strong and the setback spurred them to higher resolve. When Córdova cried out,
“Soldiers! Man your arms! Move on to victory!” his battalion scrambled to mount a fierce retaliation and soon the course of battle changed. The patriots bayoneted royalists left and right,
snatching their
silver helmets as trophies. By one in the afternoon, they had taken the heights.
By mid-afternoon the field was littered with the fallen. Before sundown, Canterac offered Sucre his unconditional surrender.

Almost
three thousand royalists were taken prisoner, surrendering in the face of a daunting republican fervor. Perhaps it was the exhaustion after so many weeks of forced marches; or a terror of Bolívar’s famed barbarian hordes; or the dizzying altitude, which, at thirteen thousand feet, can steal the very breath from a man. Or perhaps what prevailed in the end was Sucre’s brilliant strategy to make the soldiers of the king work harder, climb higher, march longer; and then strike them with a virulent force. The white-haired viceroy La Serna, fighting bravely to the last, had to be carried off the field with injuries; General Miller, who
found him by chance in one of the huts where the wounded were nursed, offered the gallant old soldier tea from his saddlebag and insisted that medics attend to him promptly.
The dead amounted to 1,800 for Spain; only 300 for the republicans.

The terms Sucre offered the vanquished were generous, granting every royalist safe passage to Spain, although many chose to transfer to the republican army. But as much as his treaty gave, it extracted. The patriots appropriated Spain’s garrisons throughout Peru, confiscated all weapons and supplies, and secured the surrender of Spain’s last citadel in the New World, the fort of Callao. When Sucre insisted that General Valdés have lunch with him the next day, the old grizzled Spaniard arrived in full battle dress, in bold contrast to the scarlet and gold of his troops.
His heavy wool socks reached high over his knees; his boots were short, his jacket frayed, his vicuña hat pulled low over his skullcap. A long faded white coat reached to his heels, a white poncho was slung over his shoulder.
“I drink,” said Sucre, “to the man who would have been America’s greatest defender, if only he had been born on this side of the sea.”

Sucre sent a report to the Liberator immediately, but his messenger was
ambushed and killed by Indians.
“The battle for Peru is complete,” Sucre had written, “its independence and the peace of all America have been signed on this battleground.” The news eventually reached Bolívar in Lima more than ten days later, as he was preparing for Spaniards to swarm the capital for a final confrontation—even as he struggled with
the Pandora’s box that Peru had become. It is said that when he read of his general’s victory in Ayacucho, he abandoned all decorum, leapt in the air, and danced through the room, shouting,
“Victory! Victory! Victory!” Sucre had won it for him, and Sucre would have his undying gratitude. With Ayacucho, Spain would be evicted from America’s shores forever. It was Yorktown, Waterloo. With one single, resounding triumph, all South America would be free.

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