Bolivar: American Liberator (21 page)

THE THEME OF BETRAYAL IS
never far from any story of revolution; deceit is at the very heart of radical upheaval. But history has not looked kindly on the events that unraveled on that early morning in La Guaira. For all the glory that would accrue to Bolívar, he would never be free of the stain of Miranda’s fate. He had lured an old man to a revolution, and, after its failure, delivered him into enemy hands. There can be no doubt that it was a monstrous act of deception.

But there was no shortage of deceit on all sides. The patriots had been taken in by Miranda’s swagger and braggadocio—had invested all their hopes in him—and they reacted now with all the fury of the betrayed. The leader they had trusted to guide them through the vicissitudes of revolution had turned out to be more comfortable with failure than with victory. Faltering and indecisive in the face of clear advantage, he always managed to be magnificent in the face of defeat. His fellow rebels believed they were seeing him now as he really was: a fraud who could only shrink from battle; a tinhorn general incapable of a strong will. Alexander Scott, a special consul from the United States, overseeing relief supplies after the earthquake, sent a report to Secretary of State James Monroe that reflected the common view:
“Miranda by a shameful and treacherous capitulation surrendered the liberties of his country. Whether he was an agent of the British Government as he now states, or whether this conduct resulted from a base and cowardly heart, I cannot decide. . . . He is a brutal, capricious tyrant destitute of courage, honor, and abilities.” Miranda’s minions were equally scathing,
labeling him an outright coward whose behavior, when not absurd, was nothing
short of treasonous. To them, the secret negotiations had been unforgivable.
The reward of money, obscene.

With time, historians have grown more generous toward Miranda. He is considered the
“Proto-leader” or Grand Precursor—a visionary without whom Latin American dreams of independence might never have begun. Certainly, he was, as many biographers have depicted him, a master of promotion, far more
skilled at plotting grand schemes than effecting their practical implementation. For him, as one biographer put it, the
hatching of revolutions was a profession, and he performed it well. No one can doubt Miranda’s love of country and his lifelong efforts to see it free. It is why, today, he is a beloved if complicated figure of Latin American history. His splendid memorial in the National Pantheon of Caracas is a triumph of resurrection.

But in Miranda’s own time, Caracas received the news of his surrender with resounding invective; in Valencia and Coró, royalists celebrated in the streets. Bolívar, having lived and relived the anguish of his failure in Puerto Cabello, felt the general’s defection all the more keenly. Had Bolívar suffered the torments of the damned—begged for an
opportunity to clear his honor—only to see all hopes dashed with a craven signature? He could not forgive Miranda, and, unlike future generations of Venezuelans, he would never change his mind. To him, Miranda was
“a loathsome leader, despot, arbitrary in the extreme, obsessed with his own ambitions and cravings, who either never understood the stakes or was all too happy to relinquish his country’s liberty.” Bolívar was so convinced that the generalísimo deserved to rot in Spain’s dungeons that he never ceased to trumpet his part in the deed. Twenty years later, one of his aides, Belford H. Wilson, wrote to another aide, Daniel O’Leary:
“To the last hour of his life he rejoiced of that event, which, he always asserted, was solely his own act, to punish the
treachery
and
treason
of Miranda in capitulating to an inferior force, and then intending to embark, himself knowing the capitulation would not be observed.” Later, Wilson wrote again:
“General Bolívar invariably added, that he wished to shoot Miranda as a traitor, but was withheld by others.”

As ironic as it seems—and those days were rife with irony—when Bolívar slipped past the Spanish sentinels that night, into the heart of Caracas, he found himself seeking refuge in the house of the very man who
had negotiated Miranda’s surrender to Monteverde: the Marquis de Casa León. He had known the marquis and his brother since childhood and was confident he could find shelter there. He also knew that, for a leader of the republican effort, there was no safer place in all Caracas than the home of a Spaniard who had ingratiated himself with the crown.

The marquis welcomed him and immediately confided his whereabouts to a fellow Spaniard, Francisco Iturbe, who not only was an old family friend of Bolívar’s, but an official of the crown and, so, on excellent terms with Monteverde. Iturbe was also a
kind man with a large heart, and learning of Bolívar’s predicament put all politics aside to approach the new governor and request a passport for the young lieutenant colonel. It was a bold request in a roiling time: Caracas was under siege, its houses raided for goods, its patriots snatched from their beds and marched off to prisons in chains. Conditions became so crowded in the prisons that, to make room for more, guards
flung alkali against the walls, asphyxiating prisoners in their cells. The day after Miranda was taken prisoner, the proud canon Cortés de Madariaga was
pulled from a fleeing boat and severely beaten. The author of the republic’s constitution, Juan Germán Roscio, was bound hand and foot and thrust into stocks to be publicly humiliated.
Six of the most respected republican leaders were tied to mules, dragged through the mud, and cast unceremoniously into the foul cells of La Guaira. Eventually, they were shipped to the dungeons of Cádiz along with a document that described them as
“eight monsters—root and spring of all the new-fangled evils in America that have terrorized the world.”

This was the Caracas through which Iturbe spirited Bolívar to a meeting with Monteverde.
One thousand five hundred revolutionary leaders would be hauled off to prison in the time it would take for Spain to reestablish itself in the colony. If the earthquake had demolished the city, the reconquest would extinguish its spirit. Bolívar, too, might have been marched off to die in the dungeons of Puerto Cabello or Cádiz, but for the long and complicated relationships between his prominent family and the royalists of Caracas. As it was, Iturbe saved his life.

When Iturbe first spoke on Bolívar’s behalf,
offering himself as a guarantee, Monteverde waved him away, claiming to have in his hands a report that described Bolívar as a rabid patriot who had held Puerto
Cabello against Spain. But Iturbe persisted, bringing Bolívar into Monteverde’s office and introducing him in the most passionate terms,
“Here is the commander of Puerto Cabello, Don Simón Bolívar, for whom I have offered my personal guarantee. If he meets with any harm, I will suffer. I vouch for him with my life.”

“All right,” Monteverde replied, and then, eyeing Bolívar, told his secretary, “Issue this man a pass as a reward for services rendered the King when he imprisoned Miranda.” Bolívar had pledged to be quiet and let Iturbe do all the talking, but he found it impossible now to hold his tongue. “I arrested Miranda because he was a traitor to his country, not in order to serve the King!” he said emphatically. Monteverde was taken aback and, in a pique, threatened to cancel the pass. But Iturbe gently insisted that the governor had already agreed to it, and then he added good-humoredly to the secretary, “Go on! Pay no attention to this scamp. Give him his passport and be done with it.”

On
August 27, Bolívar sailed for Curaçao on the Spanish schooner
Jesús, María y San José
, accompanied by a manservant, a few trunks, and his young uncles José Félix and Francisco Ribas. He had left all his property, or what remained of it, in the hands of his sister Juana. The royalists, drunk with success at their easy victory, rang down a final curtain on the first republic. As they applied themselves to the bloody work of purging the colony of its rebels, Monteverde had no notion that, in releasing Bolívar, he had unleashed the most dangerous rebel of all. It is said that whenever Bolívar’s name was mentioned in the chaotic months that followed, the governor’s
face turned a deathly white.

CHAPTER
6

The art of victory is learned in failures.

—Simón Bolívar

E
ven as the troubled coast of his homeland receded in the distance, Bolívar began plotting his return. But the sea itself reminded him how tenuous his life had become:
Storms bedeviled his journey, and when at last his ship dragged into the British port of Curaçao, he was met with yet more turmoil. The customs officials were singularly inhospitable;
they confiscated his baggage, took his money, and held him liable for a debt owed the ship that had ferried him away from Puerto Cabello. Worse, he learned that Monteverde had violated the conditions of Miranda’s surrender by appropriating all Venezuelan property owned by rebel leaders. His mines, his land, his haciendas were no longer his. Bolívar wrote to Iturbe, asking him to intercede on his behalf. He was
beginning to see his straitened circumstances “with no little horror.” His personal wealth had bought him a way into the revolution; he needed his properties in order to fund his way back.

Two months of enforced idleness on the dry, torrid shores of Curaçao had a profound effect on Bolívar. For the first time, he was in a foreign place that had few entertainments. In the sleepy capital of Willemstad, there were no salons with bracing conversations, no stimulating
sights apart from the dazzling carmine sunsets, no men of wide influence or matters of historical moment. Marooned with his fellow soldiers, he had little to do but contemplate their failed attempt to defend the new republic: Why had it gone so wrong? What might have been?

By late October,
he had secured a loan from a friendly merchant and, with his small band of warrior comrades, set sail for New Granada, where, as they understood it, the flag of independence still waved. The Bolívar who stepped off the boat in the port of Cartagena was an entirely different man. Tempered by war, sobered by defeat,
he seemed more deliberate, judicious, mature. It was as if all the missteps and catastrophes of the past two years had brought the realities of liberation into sharp relief. In light of this hard-won wisdom, he had begun to organize his ideas and—following a rigorous discipline he would maintain for the rest of his life—set them down on paper. Along with the few personal effects he carried onshore on that crisp November day in 1812 was the full awareness that, in the heat of a revolution,
words were as valuable as weapons.

On arrival in Cartagena,
Bolívar lodged in a modest house on San Agustín Chiquito Street. Diminutive, white, resplendent in the Caribbean sun, it was all of ten paces wide. The bedrooms and alcoves were hung with hammocks; a tiny wood balcony opened onto the street from one of the windows. The breeze, the blue vault of sky, the clear nights strewn with stars, the vibrant port with its raucous comings and goings—all served to fill the young traveler’s heart with promise and possibility.

In New Granada, the revolution was indeed alive, if chaotic—defended by a number of vying independent governments. Granadans wanted their freedoms, but had countless opinions on how to win them and who should govern. The result was an unruly splintering of regions and factions.
La patria boba
, they would come to call it, a republic of fools. The city of Bogotá, under the government of President Antonio Nariño, had declared itself the capital, and a loose federation had been established at Tunja under the leadership of Camilo Torres, but the fortified port city of Cartagena had risen against both, proclaimed its sovereignty, and established its own constitution. Drunk on
illusions
of grandeur, other communities, cities, provinces were following suit. The region had become a cauldron of discontent, a din of quibbling functionaries, a
hotbed of pirates and opportunists. For all its
wealth and abounding whiteness, New Granada was on the verge of a civil war. Rather than be discouraged by this ruinous state of affairs, Bolívar was eager to join it.
He and his fellow Venezuelan revolutionaries—his uncle José Felix Ribas, his firebrand neighbor Antonio Nicolás Briceño, the Carabaño and Montilla brothers—
assumed that their military experience would be in demand.