Bolivar: American Liberator (55 page)

On June 25, Cuzco
gave Bolívar a welcome unlike any he had ever experienced. Triumphal arches leapt up to greet him along the mountain roads, reminding him of the ones that had welcomed Napoleon to Rome. Cuzco itself was a glorious sight to behold.
Gold and silver ornaments were hung from the houses; rich brocades festooned the streets. But as he climbed toward the city, it was the breathtaking panorama and the hardy mountain folk who moved him. Peru here—unlike Lima—it seemed to him, was
a fierce original; its Indians a noble
breed. The ancient Inca capital had not suffered during the punishing revolution—and yet the Indian civilization had been stalled for three hundred years.

He was presented with a crown studded with pearls and diamonds; golden keys to the city; a horse in a gilded harness, a rich assortment of jewels. In the end,
he sent the crown to Sucre, gave the gold and jewels to his aides, and kept only the horse. He stayed for a month, busily issuing laws and decrees. He
eliminated all titles of nobility held by descendants of the Inca, just as he had eliminated those that were held by whites; he distributed land to the indigenous peoples; he abolished all race-based taxes. He felt drawn to the plight of the Indians.
“I want to do all that is possible for them,” he wrote Santander, “first, for the good of humanity; second, because they have a right to it; and, ultimately, because doing the right thing costs so little and is worth so much.” Every day brought opportunities to undo Spain’s draconian laws:
he ordered roads built, demanded that monasteries be converted into schools, built an aqueduct, established the College of Cuzco. But his sympathies for the people of this mountain aerie seemed to confirm that there was
something repellent about Peru as a whole—a national character he deeply disliked, forged by a bitter history. He spoke of this aversion only privately, but the prejudice he had brought with him to Lima—the profound conviction that wealth and slavery had ruined the country—ultimately defined his Peruvian experience.

By August, he was traveling the vertiginous route to La Paz, the capital of Upper Peru. The ride was grueling, but conspicuously free of enemies. The last of the Spanish generals, the renegade Olañeta, stubbornly prowling those mountains for two years, had died months before, mortally wounded in battle. Word had it that he had met his end
at the hands of his own men; indeed, he had been the only victim in a fleeting skirmish against Sucre’s army. Seeing Olañeta fall from his horse, his soldiers—
a fraction of his original force—rushed to surrender. It was hardly surprising, as royalist defections after the Battle of Ayacucho had been epidemic; everyone wanted to be on Sucre’s side. The grand marshal proceeded to carry out his assignment in Upper Peru admirably.

Sucre met Bolívar on the shores of Lake Titicaca not far from where
the old viceroyalty of Peru ended
and the old viceroyalty of Buenos Aires began. There, at long last, Bolívar embraced Sucre and thanked him for his many momentous achievements: the victory at Ayacucho, the suppression of Olañeta, the successful occupation of La Paz and Potosí. It had been almost a year since they had seen each other.

Sucre’s skirmish with Olañeta represented the last battle against Spain on the American mainland. In the scant year since Bolívar had marched from Trujillo with his hastily improvised troops, an army of eighteen thousand had been brought to ruin. Bolívar’s strategies had been masterful, his preparations meticulous, but it had been Sucre who had brought the patriots to their resounding final victory and it was Sucre who soared to fame throughout Peru. He seemed invincible, a colossus among his Latin American contemporaries. Wherever he went, he was cheered, admired, and Bolívar did not grudge him one bit of the adulation.
From Pichincha to Potosí, the young general had brought the patriots nothing but glory. Bolívar took every opportunity to say so. When, in La Paz, the
Liberator was handed another crown, he passed it—with gallant flourish—to Sucre.
“This belongs to the true victor,” he said.

But as united as Bolívar and Sucre could be about military matters, they often disagreed about the politics of liberation. It was a measure of how well they worked together: Sucre was unafraid to tell the Liberator things he didn’t want to hear, and, from Sucre, Bolívar didn’t mind hearing them. Bolívar had not wanted to hear that Upper Peru should be left to determine its own future. The region was something of an anomaly—not a province, not a people. According to founding principles, a new republic was supposed to follow the contours of the viceroyalty that immediately preceded it, and so, by all accounts, Upper Peru should have answered to Buenos Aires. But Bolívar wasn’t about to forfeit the mineral-rich region to Argentina, and so his solution had been to make Upper Peru a sovereign republic. Bolívar’s thinking seemed to him as just as it was logical:
to deliver the region to war-torn Argentina was to deliver it to anarchy; to deliver it to Peru would be to vitiate the founding principles the revolutionaries had long since established. When he had first arrived in La Paz, Sucre had told its citizens that he wasn’t there to resolve such questions. He was there to liberate,
not govern.
Bolívar soon disabused him of that idea. They were there to liberate, to be sure; but they were also there to fashion a new America.

The vastly wealthy Creole aristocrats who guarded the silver-veined hills of Potosí were all too happy to abide by Bolívar’s decision to declare themselves an autonomous nation. Most Upper Peruvians had been followers of the ultraconservative, quixotic Olañeta—indeed one of their present political leaders was his nephew—and now they were being assured that they would not have to answer to anyone; that all the riches of Potosí, the treasure of so many kings, would be theirs alone.

A hastily gathered assembly of representatives, “elected” by
laws that were clearly arbitrary and racist, met in Chuquisaca on July 10 to formally deliberate the founding. It was hardly a democratic exercise. The Aymara Indians—an overwhelming majority of the population, forty thousand of whom had risen up against their masters forty years before—were given no say, and the pecking order that once had prevailed under Spanish rule was put in place again: the whites would lord over the half-breeds, and the half-breeds would lord over the brown.

On August 6 the members of the assembly officially declared the independence of Upper Peru, changed its name to the Republic of Bolívar, changed it again to Bolivia, and voted to make the Liberator their president. To give him absolute power, they invited the new president to draft their constitution. Bolívar, who was rounding the shimmering, cold waters of Lake Titicaca when he heard of it, was
delighted with the news. In the course of one day, his America had acquired a million souls. As maximum leader of three vast republics, Bolívar now ruled over an area that, taken together, exceeded the size of modern Europe. He hurried to accept the honors.

IF BOLÍVAR WAS AT THE
zenith of his career, Spanish America, as a whole, appeared to be heading toward its nadir. From the deserts of Mexico to the pampas of Argentina, independence had brought not a bright new world, but a dizzying surfeit of obstacles. Fatigue was soon overtaken by irritability, ushering in an era of discontent. Bolívar seemed to sense it before it happened. He pressed for the conference of new American republics, his Congress of Panama, to take place as soon as possible. He wanted to capture the flush of enthusiasm that accompanied
revolution—have his fledgling republics share ideas before they acted on them—and he wanted to be at the vanguard of that process.
“If we wait any longer,” he told the leaders he had invited, “if each of us waits to see what the other will do, we will deprive ourselves of the advantages.” But as 1825 ground on, it was evident that the republics were too mired in their own troubles to think about a wider American ideal. As festivities wound down in Lima at the end of February,
Bolívar noted a viral dread creeping into the Creole population, a sense that freedoms would bring social upheaval, and that anarchy would be democracy’s next step.

Indeed, anarchy had already begun in Mexico. After the spectacular collapse of Emperor Agustín de Iturbide’s reign and his summary execution, the country was in financial ruin: London bankers had stepped in with loans, making the nation a bit player in Britain’s vast economic empire. British foreign minister George Canning was euphoric:
“We slip in between,” he wrote a fellow countryman, “and plant ourselves in Mexico. . . . we link once more America to Europe.” He made no secret that in doing so, he felt he had won a victory over Britain’s former colony, the swiftly expanding United States.

Greater Colombia, too, had its problems. A corrosive peevishness had set in between Caracas and Bogotá. Páez and Santander, whose hatred for one another was evident, were squabbling, readying for a face-off. Bolívar’s proud creation seemed irreparably shot through with fissures. Chile, too, was riven by conflict: its leadership was hesitant, its southern provinces still at war. Argentina was no better. On the verge of declaring war with Brazil over a patch of borderland called the Banda Oriental (Uruguay), the Argentines begged Bolívar to assist them. They courted him throughout his stay in La Paz and Potosí, sending various delegations to convince him to come to their rescue.

Bolívar
toyed with the notion of taking his liberating army to the nethermost regions of the American continent, even wrote to Santander to sound out the idea.
“The demon of glory will carry us to Tierra del Fuego,” he wrote animatedly, “and the truth is: what would we risk?” In many ways, it would have been the apotheosis of Bolívar’s American dream, a campaign to fulfill his grand continental ambition. The celebrations in the extravagant heights of Potosí had seemed to persuade
him that there were no limits to possibility—his words so euphoric that
Sucre had cried like a baby and Bolívar’s old teacher Rodríguez had
leapt in the air with joy.
But when Santander wrote back, exploding in disbelief at the very notion of a march farther south, Bolívar realized the folly of it. The conflict between Brazil and Argentina was full of perils; to enter into it was to declare another war against a colonial empire and alienate all Europe. Santander reminded Bolívar that there was yet another reason to say no: Greater Colombia was in shambles. The letter was unequivocal:

The miserable state of our financial affairs has forced me to suspend all combat. Ten years of peace would set us straight. Today our army has estimated costs of 16 to 18 million dollars. Our income is 7 to 8. From where will we extract the difference? We need to reduce spending unless we want to wither away entirely, and the way to do that may be to shrink the army, get rid of the navy.

He was proposing to collapse the very institution that Bolívar had built so carefully, a military that represented the fusion of all races, the miraculous engine that had won America’s freedom. There was no doubt: times were dire. Santander was proving true to the appellation Bolívar had given him. He was the
“man of laws,” the stern voice of reason. Sucre, on the other hand, had been Bolívar’s “man of war.” And Bolívar, thrashing about to advance an agenda for the hemisphere, had become—in his own mind, at least—America’s “man of difficulties.”

The future would bear this out.

BOLÍVAR HAD TOURED THE SOUTH
for almost a year when he returned to Lima on February 10, 1826, and found the capital in a joyous mood. The royalist forces that had entombed themselves in Callao had just surrendered. Torre Tagle’s minions had consumed the last rat in the fortress, perished by the thousands, and, starved into submission, yielded the last patch of Spanish soil on America’s mainland. The city celebrated for days. When Bolívar stepped ashore, he, too, was met with elation. But anyone who thought all was well now would be sorely mistaken.

Almost immediately, Bolívar was handed
an agitated letter from
Páez, reporting the miserable state of affairs in Venezuela.
“You cannot imagine how ruinous the intrigues have been in this country,” Páez told him. “Morillo was right when he said he did you a favor when he killed all the lawyers.” But according to Páez, the Spaniards hadn’t killed enough of them. It was men of laws, he insisted, who were crippling the republic. He begged Bolívar to return, crown himself king, and wrest a modicum of order from the chaos. Páez didn’t tell the whole tale, but he had been accused of
brutal methods of recruitment. He claimed that he had only responded to duty, that
royalists in Havana were poised to attack the coast and the country was desperate for soldiers. To Páez, and to the many Venezuelans who venerated him, the accusations of violence were only a ruse by lawyers in Bogotá—and, by extension, Santander—to humiliate the army and drive Páez from power. Páez pleaded with Bolívar to return
as Napoleon had returned to France: with a crown on his head and a strong arm that brooked no argument.

“Colombia is not France,” Bolívar replied to Páez, “and I am not Napoleon.” For him, the title of Liberator was far superior to any a monarchy might bestow. But a wider campaign to crown Bolívar was clearly afoot in Venezuela. Bolívar soon received a letter from his sister María Antonia, advising him that if anyone urged him to the throne, he should resist at all costs.
“Tell them you will be Liberator or nothing, that is your true title, the one that honors your hard-won glory.” Eventually,
Sucre told him the same thing. But it was clear that Venezuela was in such turmoil that it was grasping at extreme solutions. Its needs were urgent, and yet his work in Peru was hardly finished. His house in Magdalena had become a hive of Latin American activity. Foreign delegates came and went offering ideas; representatives from new republics constantly appeared with proposals; Peruvians who feared a vacuum of power begged him to stay.

Critics of Bolívar—and Peru is replete with them—say that he should have left Lima there and then. The war was won, the last Spaniard stripped of power, the question of Upper Peru resolved. Why would a lover of liberty with a nation’s best interests at heart remain with a vast army of occupation? Bolívar had his reasons. First, he had been beseeched to stay. Second, and more convincing, the political situation in Peru was tenuous, bordering on ruin. During his travels outside
Lima, he had delegated power to José de La Mar, a Peruvian general born near Guayaquil, or to Hipólito Unanúe, the Peruvian doctor who had nursed him to health in Pativilca. But after the serial treacheries of Riva Agüero and Torre Tagle, he harbored an essential distrust of Peruvians; he was reluctant to leave them to themselves. As the days wore on and he concentrated on putting the finishes touches on the Bolivian constitution, he became convinced that the document he was creating was the answer to all of America’s ills.