Bolivar: American Liberator (67 page)

Although Bolívar had saved Santander from the firing squad and commuted his sentence to exile, the former vice president had been made to suffer
a seven-month internment in the dank, grimy dungeons of Bocachica. This was not without its logic:
Bolívar’s council of ministers had feared Santander might seek revenge, join Peru, and march against the Liberator. Manuela Sáenz, too, had a deep, unshakable distrust of the man; so much so that
she engaged a spy to ferret out whatever information he could about Santander’s intentions. But Santander, desperate to free himself from the miseries of internment, denied he had any such reprisals in mind. He wrote an impassioned plea to Bolívar, promising he would not go to Peru or anywhere else in Latin America for that matter.
He swore that he had opposed the would-be assassins with tears in his eyes, beseeched Carujo not to carry out his nefarious plot against the Liberator. Santander even went so far as to beg
protection from Andrew Jackson, a fellow Freemason who had just been elected president of the United States; he told Jackson that he, too, had once been a head of state, reduced now to wretched prisoner of fortune. He needed a powerful champion to plead his case.

President Jackson never responded to Santander’s plea. But the former vice president turned out to have plenty of champions in Colombia itself. Sucre and Mosquera, Bolívar’s most loyal henchmen, had long respected Santander and had both
corresponded with him in jail. They now began to entreat Bolívar to grant him his freedom.
Even Páez, Santander’s archenemy, seemed to take pity on the man. When the captive of Bocachica—reduced to illness and terror—was finally taken from his dungeon cell, shipped to Puerto Cabello, and forced to look out at the very bay from which Miranda had started his voyage to ignominious death, he made a heartfelt appeal for Páez’s mercy.
The Lion of the Apure assured Santander that he would be given safe passage. He was as good as his word and had reason to be: no one agreed with Páez more than Francisco Santander. For all the acrimony that had passed between them, for all their conspicuous attempts to foil one another,
Páez and Santander concurred single-mindedly on one thing: secession. They both sought to disband the republic; they both yearned to reduce their nations to manageable regions they could command freely. As one historian put it,
they wanted fiefdoms equivalent to their aspirations—Cundinamarca for Santander, the Apure for Páez—provincial patches with little influence in a larger world. It was not magnanimity but unbridled ambition that led Páez to allow Santander to sail off into the Caribbean.

As Santander floated out to sea, Bolívar proceeded north toward Bogotá, racked not only by disease but by the small-mindedness of his generals, who prepared to carve up the republic just as Alexander the Great’s generals had done when Alexander lay dying. Stopping in Quito to catch his breath, Bolívar published his deeply pessimistic “Panoramic View of Spanish America,” in which he described the rampant lawlessness that prevailed from Mexico to Argentina. But his own land was most on his mind, and his despair about it was evident; he claimed he had been as good as assassinated: “Colombians,” he grieved,

The second man to head the Republic has assassinated the first; the Third Division invaded the south; Pasto rebelled against the Republic; Peru laid waste to her liberator’s homeland; and there is hardly a province that has not exceeded its powers and prerogatives. Throughout this ill-fated time there has been nothing but blood, chaos, and destruction. There is nothing left for you to do but muster your spiritual strength and establish a government vigorous enough to curb ambition and safeguard freedom. Otherwise, you will become the laughingstock of the world and the victims of your own undoing.

The constitutional congress scheduled for January was only two months away and, as far as Bolívar was concerned, it couldn’t come soon enough. He called on Colombians to rise to their better natures and prepare for it.

Páez knew well that he needed to make a move before congress convened and, seeing an advantage now that Santander was out of the way, dispatched a letter to Bolívar via personal messenger. It reached him in Popayán in the early days of November.
Páez’s missive was respectful,
querying Bolívar about the monarchical plan, the health of the republic, the succession. But anyone could read his meaning between the lines: he would preserve the union only if he could rule it. He had suffered indignities visited on him by Santander; he had stood by for almost a decade while his nemesis had run Greater Colombia. It was his turn now.

Bolívar rallied all the diplomacy he could muster and answered Páez in the clearest terms: a monarchy was out of the question; he had always fought against it, and he was fighting against it now. Moreover, he was leaving the presidency for good.
“I give you my word of honor,” he told his old comrade, “I will happily put myself at your orders if you are elected our chief of state, and I’d like you to make me the same promise if someone else is chosen to lead us.”

From Popayán, he also wrote an unequivocal response to his council of ministers, scolding them for going too far with the monarchical nonsense. Everything he had heard to date had been mere rumor and insinuation, but in Popayán hard evidence of efforts to make him king awaited in the form of official documents.

“You will now suspend completely all negotiations with the governments of France and England,” he wrote back in high dudgeon. To Urdaneta, he was gentler:
“Just leave congress to do its duty,” he urged Urdaneta; “it will be easier for them to appoint a president than a prince.” This dressing-down was not taken lightly in Bogotá.
Ministers proffered their resignations, claiming they had only followed orders. His orders had not been vague: he had directed his diplomats to seek European protection, which he saw as essential to the fledgling status of the republic; by no stretch of the imagination had he meant them to seek a European prince. He had been too much on the move, too plagued by illness, too busy battling the Hydra of chaos to see the damage a monarchical smear might inflict on him.
Both Páez and Santander, though ardent enemies, had tarred Bolívar with an imperial brush.
If he had been more decisive on the question—clipped back suspicion at the very start—history might have played out differently. But history, as we know, is impossible to foresee.

Being South America’s roving defender of liberty, he now admitted,
had exacted a punishing price. For all the laurels and dictatorial authority he had garnered, he had no power to speak of. He had left it
behind at every turn, relinquished control to deputies who simply didn’t understand or endorse his vision. Ruling from a remove had proved impossible in a republic whose cities were separated by jungles, savannas, a towering cordillera. Information about statecraft had been scant, slow; by the time it arrived, the political landscape had changed, the national mind-set shifted. Improvisation, so crucial in war, was proving to be deadly when it came to government.

BY THE TIME BOLÍVAR REACHED
Popayán, there was more to engage him than a stack of pressing dispatches.
An uprising had come and gone in Colombia, rattling through like a row of collapsing cards. Córdova’s rebellion had reached a fever pitch, growing more in renown, perhaps, than in strength of numbers. But it tumbled as quickly as it rose, and then it shocked everyone with its terrible, final resolution.

As Córdova galloped through the lush valleys of Medellín, Páez realized that this could well be the opening he had waited for. Circumstances couldn’t have been more ideal. Santander was at sea, well removed from the competition, and Córdova’s pugnacity seemed to serve Páez’s purpose. Like Páez, the feisty young general was unwilling to bow to a European prince; and, also like Páez, he wanted to separate Venezuela from New Granada. But it was Bolívar himself who
gave Páez the most felicitous opportunity of all, the plebiscite in which he had asked citizens to stand forth and say what they truly wanted from government. The wily plainsman seized that opportunity with two fists. Even before he received Bolívar’s reply to the letter he had sent by messenger, he began rallying politicians to respond to Bolívar’s call.
He sent his agents out into the provinces, insisting on signatures for three demands: total rejection of any union with New Granada, Páez’s elevation to president of the independent nation,
“and down with Don Simón. Everybody must ask for this or be treated as an enemy.” Soon Páez had the support of some of Bolívar’s most loyal generals, fervid Venezuelans all: Arismendi, who had joined the revolution in its earliest days; Bermúdez, the intrepid hero of Cumaná; Soublette, who had fought alongside the Liberator since the Admirable Campaign; Mariño, who after years of sparring with Bolívar for control of the east, had become his trusty defender. On November 25, in the convent of San Francisco, the
old, venerable church where Bolívar had been named Liberator sixteen years before, Páez announced what it was that the citizens of Venezuela truly wanted. Total independence. From Bolívar, from Colombia, and from the impossible gossamer dream of Latin American unity.

By the time Páez announced secession, Bogotá had dealt with Córdova’s rebellion. Urdaneta had sent
O’Leary and a thousand seasoned veterans to hunt down Córdova in the hills outside Medellín. They found him in Santuario with a motley band of three hundred—a hasty coalition of craftsmen, students, and peasants. The rebel Córdova could see that his cobbled-together little militia would be no match for Colombia’s legions. As the army troops drew near, he called out to O’Leary, appealing to their old friendship, hoping to convince former comrades to join his side. Seeing the provocation for what it was, O’Leary ordered a full-fledged attack. Córdova fought fiercely, but there was no hope against a hardened war machine. His rebels dispersed in alarm. Badly wounded, Córdova managed to drag himself to safety in a nearby hut.
O’Leary was quick to act when he learned of it; he directed one of his most fearless mercenaries,
a notorious drunk named Rupert Hand, to storm the hideaway and rout the rebel. The Irishman burst into the little shack, found Córdova sprawled on the floor dying, and dispatched him handily with
two thrusts of the sword.

The short-lived rebellion clarified things. Brash, independent-minded warriors like Córdova, who had once been the life’s blood of the revolution, had become the blight of Bolívar’s republic. Scarred by two decades of war, they seemed singularly unprepared for peace—battlegrounds had become their ultimate courts of justice. And so it had come to this. A beloved general was dead and, as far as the world could see, Colombia was devouring its heroes,
just as Saturn had swallowed his children: one by one, even as they emerged, threatening to overthrow their father. For Bolívar, it was a hard truth to suffer. His patriots were cannibalizing their ranks, dying at one another’s hands. The country’s politicians were radicalized against one another.
In the end, he would be blamed for all of it. O’Leary’s corrective against Córdova had saved the union, but it had poisoned the nation’s soul.
The torment of that reality weighed on Bolívar until it crystallized in the form of a stark conclusion: Colombia was no longer worth the sacrifice.
Bolívar wrote
to his minister of interior, recommending that the republic be divided into three separate states: Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. He added that after the constitutional congress in January of 1830 he would depart for foreign shores.

Few balked. In Bogotá, the gears of politics were whirring freely now; there seemed to be less and less patience for Bolívar. In Caracas, the rage against him was flagrant, led by his old friend Páez.
Graffiti filled the walls, accusing the Liberator of being a hypocrite, a tyrant, a traitor to his countrymen. The lie that he would mount a throne—a phantom concocted by his enemies and embraced bizarrely by his followers—had brought passions to a white-hot fever. As
Páez declared that he would go to war against Bolívar if he had to, city councils began to bar Bolívar from ever stepping foot in Venezuela again.

Everything happened quickly after that. The American diplomat William Henry Harrison was booted unceremoniously from Colombia for his scandalous attempts to meddle with internal affairs. The French delegation left in a huff, as did its English counterpart.
When the Liberator entered the capital for the last time on January 15, 1830, hardly a voice was raised in welcome. The streets were hung in festive bunting and
four thousand soldiers lined the way, but the people were eerily silent, as if something calamitous was afoot. There were rounds of cannon, choruses of music, and yet the air rang with anything but merriment. When Bolívar finally came into view, he was tiny, skeletal—
a wasted specter with lackluster eyes whose voice was barely audible.
It was apparent to everyone that the Liberator was not long for this earth. His grief was palpable. Lost in thought, reduced by fatigue, he made one last ride to the presidential palace.

CHAPTER
18