Bolivar: American Liberator (33 page)

In the end, Bolívar decided to forgive Mariño.
“I’ve resisted writing a single word or saying anything critical about that so-called federal government,” he told his friend. “Here, men take charge not because they want to, but because they can.” To Mariño, Bolívar was cuttingly direct, singularly chilly. “If you insist on disobedience,” he warned him in a letter, “you will no longer be a citizen of Venezuela but a public enemy. If you are determined to quit serving the republic, just say so and the government will gladly issue you permission to go.” That was a month before the execution of Piar. A month after it, when Mariño might have feared the same ignominious fate, he received a surprisingly different message from one of his former officers. Colonel Sucre appeared at the wayward general’s door, telling him that Bolívar wanted to reenlist him. Bolívar had urged Sucre to employ all the delicacy he could muster to win back Mariño. If he resists, Bolívar instructed, then bring him by force. But
“if he submits voluntarily, treat him with the utmost dignity, as you would a man who has just done his country the greatest service by refusing to stain it with civil war. To right one’s wrongs can only be considered a good deed, and good deeds should be rewarded.”

It took several months to bring Mariño around, but when the renegade
finally agreed, Bolívar made him general in chief and placed
two of the most capable generals in his service. Slowly, painstakingly, Bolívar was imposing some order over the rebellious warlords who had nettled him for so long. Now with Bermúdez and Mariño on his side—and Piar well out of the way—the east was firmly under Bolívarian rule. It was left to do the same in the west, with Páez.

CHAPTER
9

A lightning bolt doesn’t fall from the sky as swiftly as General Bolívar descended on the capital.

—Francisco Santander

B
olívar received news of José de San Martín’s mounting victories with a mixture of joy and alarm. The soldier who had helped rid Argentina of Spanish rule was working his way north, cutting a triumphant path for liberty. In February of 1817, just as Bolívar was struggling to raise a few hundred troops in the seaside town of Barcelona, General San Martín had surprised the Spaniards by leading an army of thousands—half of them former slaves—over the ice-capped Andes into Chile. The Spanish generals responsible for defending the region hadn’t imagined such a feat was possible. By year’s end, San Martín was routing them in battle after battle. That was the happy news; the unsettling part was that he was headed for the prize
Bolívar had dreamed of so often with his men—the viceregal heart of Peru.

Now that Bolívar had the Venezuelan east mostly under his command, he focused on moving west, over the plains to New Granada. Eventually, with inspired strategy and a bit of luck—as he wrote in a letter to the new republican chief of state in Argentina, Juan de Pueyrredón—he might push his way south, meet San Martín’s effort,
and create
a seamless, unified America. “An America thus united,” he told Pueyrredón, “if heaven grants us this favor, will call itself the queen of nations, mother of all republics.” What he needed most of all now, however, was to win over allies close by, chief among them the formidable warlord of the western plains, José Antonio Páez.

Páez’s astonishing victory at the Battle of Mucuritas almost a year before had been a turning point in the war. It had been General Morillo’s first defeat since he had begun his campaign of pacification. Páez had won by sheer force of will: eleven hundred plainsmen and Indians—barefoot, naked except for loincloths, armed with arrows and spears—had charged against four thousand well-equipped, handsomely uniformed veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. Using fire, dust, wind, and a terrifying ferocity, they had outsmarted the Spanish hussars, scattering them over the burning plains like a herd of sheep. It was a hallmark victory, and it made Páez famous. His ranks soon swelled with men wanting to fight under his flag and share in the Spanish booty.

At twenty-eight years of age,
Páez could neither read nor write, had not learned to
eat with a knife and fork, had never seen anything that resembled a big city. The
child of indigent Canary Islanders, he had grown up in a small village in the backlands of Barinas. By fifteen, he had killed a man in self-defense and fled into the wilds of Casanare to avoid Spanish justice. There, in that sea of grass known as the llanos, he found work as a ranch hand for
a paltry few cents a week; and in that punishing terrain he learned the skills of a horseman. His cohort were pardos, Indians, mestizos—the chaff of Venezuelan society—many of them, like him, fleeing to escape poverty or the dungeon. They called him “the fair Páez,” for although his hair was brown, his skin was moon white, his cheeks pink in the relentless heat of the savanna. From rougher men, he learned how to survive the harsh land. Meat became his diet, river water his drink. His bed was a hammock of pineapple twine or a length of dried hide. By three in the morning, he would be up and out on the plains, rounding up the livestock, branding them, castrating them, moving them to pasture. Páez’s overseer was a towering black slave with a long, scruffy beard named Manuelote. He was taciturn, demanding, severe; but he taught Páez the trade: how to break horses, kill crocodiles, cajole cattle into crossing rivers, flip cows by their
tails. In the evenings, after a hard day’s work, and as an extra dose of discipline, Manuelote would call Páez to wash his feet and swing his hammock until he nodded off to sleep.

Eventually, Manuelote took him to another ranch, and Páez, a hardworking, amiable young man, won the notice of its owner, who taught him the business and helped him establish his own herd. That is, until war intervened. By the time he was twenty-four, Páez had served in both the royalist and patriot armies and was quartered in Mérida, fighting with General Urdaneta’s guerrilla forces. But he quit in disgust when
one officer commanded him to give up his horse and surrender it to another officer. Páez decided to cross the Andes on foot, return to the llanos, and raise his own legion of horsemen. He undertook that arduous trip with his young wife and child, arriving on the plains of Casanare in mid-1814, just as Boves was charging into Caracas and Bolívar was decamping from the capital with twenty thousand panicked citizens. Páez was convinced he could raise a cavalry as powerful as Boves’s and, although his fellow patriots laughed at the notion, he soon commanded a
regiment of more than a thousand men. When Boves was killed in battle a few months later, Páez was in a position to attract the dead man’s multitudes. As Páez’s Army of the Apure began to gather victory after victory, that was exactly what he did.

Páez’s army rode at night—sometimes sixty miles at a time—in order to avoid the scorching sun. They rode against the wind whenever possible, so that the Spaniards could not see or smell the dust of their approach.
They sat on skulls of bulls, for that was their furniture; they had Spartan needs and Bedouin fortitude. Even in torrential rains, they worked, ate, slept under the open skies. When rivers flooded, they rode into the muddy waters, their worldly possessions perched on their heads. They were masters of their terrain, well accustomed to the jaguars, vultures, vampire bats, and flesh-devouring insects that terrified the more urbane soldiers of the king. Chasing Páez, Morillo’s armies grew exhausted, and in the effort thousands of soldiers died. If they weren’t felled by malaria, typhoid, or yellow fever, they succumbed to sunstroke, skin rot, or starvation. Páez’s men, in turn, pursued Morillo like an avenging shadow,
making lightning incursions into his camp by night, slaughtering all men and animals in their way, and suffering
only trifling losses. Or they would strike Morillo’s forces after a march, sweeping in when the Spaniards were exhausted; thundering through their camps, the llaneros would scare off the Spaniards’ cattle and pack animals, leaving them with no provisions. Little by little,
as Morillo later admitted, Páez began to wear him down.

Páez, known as the invincible Lion of the Apure, had never been inclined to accept another’s authority. He was ambitious, inconstant, and voracious when it came to power. But he was also shrewd and capable of compromise: If it behooved him to make an alliance, he made it; if allies crossed him, he exacted a costly revenge.
When Bolívar sent two colonels to suggest to Páez that he recognize Bolívar as supreme chief, Páez’s antiroyalist fervor was such that he agreed.
He explained to his army that Bolívar’s achievements were many and known throughout the world, and that the Liberator’s intellectual acuity alone entitled him to the command. He even insisted that they pledge their undying allegiance to Bolívar in a religious ceremony. In truth, Bolívar was as necessary to Páez as Páez was to Bolívar. The Liberator offered the unschooled warlord a wider knowledge of strategic possibility, a more sophisticated approach to war. There didn’t appear to be a risk to allying with such a man. Bolívar may have harbored many ambitions—he, too, could be voracious when it came to power—but he could not be accused of lusting after a horseman’s empire. The two simply wanted to use each other for a while.

Páez set out to meet Bolívar in January of 1818 with
a company of Cunaviche Indians. On his way to San Juan de Payara, where the meeting was to take place, he decided to descend on the town of San Fernando and scare off the Spanish regiment that was occupying that crucial crossroad. Worried that whizzing musket balls would unnerve the Cunaviche, he plied the Indians with strong drink. The
aguardiente
had the desired effect. The Cunaviche, dressed in leather loincloths and brilliantly colored feathers,
stormed the Spanish encampment fearlessly, piercing their tongues with their own spears and smearing the bright blood across their faces. The orderly Spaniards, as startled as they were horrified, scrambled in retreat.

On January 30,
Páez finally met the supreme chief. As soon as Bolívar saw Páez approaching from the distance, he leapt on his horse
and rode out to welcome him. They dismounted, embraced heartily, and greeted one another with warm compliments. Yet clearly they were from alien worlds. To Páez, Bolívar seemed the embodiment of an intellectual—refined, highly animated, with a slight frame, delicate features, and quick, luminous eyes. For Bolívar, Páez was like no general he had ever commanded: no Mariño, no Urdaneta, no Sucre or Santander—no Creole aristocrat, nor even a worldly Piar—but a burly plainsman with a coarse appearance and coarser ways. Nevertheless, Bolívar understood his kind; he had known rough Canary Island boys like Páez since his childhood in Caracas, kicked stones with them in the back alleys of town.

Páez was thirty by that time, and in the full flower of his vigor. He was not tall, but he was broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, built like a bull—the upper half of his body at odds with his spindly legs. His hair was wavy, leonine, bleached by relentless sun; his neck thick and muscular. He was robust and florid where Bolívar was thin and gaunt.
He was given to epileptic fits, especially in the heat of battle when blood was flying; he would become so excited by the carnage that he would foam at the mouth and topple from his horse, flailing helplessly until his giant black manservant, “El Negro Primero,” would hoist him up and ride away. Bolívar, on the other hand, was a man of consummate control; he didn’t drink much, was not intrinsically violent, and uncannily managed to avoid physical injury, even when he was leading a charge. Looking upon them there as they met for the first time, a casual observer might have assumed that each would be incapable of coping in the other’s domain: one had come of age playing tennis with princes; the other had come of age washing the feet of a slave. But the assumption would have been wrong. Páez may have been a rube, a ruffian, the untamed Lion of the Apure, but in time he would become a national figure, world diplomat, habitué of the salon. Bolívar, on the other hand, despite his small frame and wiry body, would go on to perform Herculean feats of physical endurance. Within a year, he would be riding longer and harder than any horseman of the Apure, so superhuman in that ability that his troops admiringly named him Iron Ass.