The Invention of Nature

He was a man full of contradictions, as happy in a hammock slung on the branches amid a thick forest as on a packed dance floor. He would impatiently draft the nation’s first constitution in a canoe paddling along the Orinoco but would also delay military action for his own gain to wait for a lover. He said that dancing was the ‘poetry of motion’, but could also coldly order the execution of hundreds of prisoners. He could be charming when in a good mood but ‘ferocious’ when irritated, with his moods shifting so fast that ‘the change was incredible’, as one of his generals said.

Bolívar was a man of action but also believed that the written word had the power to change the world. On later campaigns he would always travel with a printing press, carrying it up and down the Andes and across the vast plains of the Llanos. His mind was sharp and fast, he often dictated numerous letters at the same time to several secretaries and was known for making snap decisions. There were men, he said, who needed solitude to think but ‘I deliberated, reflected, and mulled best when I was at the centre of the revelry – among the pleasures and clamour of a ball.’

Simón Bolívar (Illustration Credit 12.2)

From the Río Magdalena, Bolívar and his men marched through the mountains towards Venezuela, fighting and defeating royalist troops. By spring 1813, six months after he had landed in Cartagena, Bolívar had freed New Granada but Venezuela was still in Spanish hands. In May 1813 his army descended from the mountains into the high valley where the Venezuelan city of Mérida was situated. When the Spanish heard that Bolívar was approaching, they left Mérida in a panic. Bolívar and his troops arrived with their clothes worn, hungry and ill with fever but to a hero’s welcome. The citizens of Mérida declared Bolívar ‘El Libertador’ and 600 new recruits signed up to his army.

Three weeks later, on 15 June 1813, Bolívar issued a brutal decree that proclaimed a ‘War to the Death’. It condemned all Spaniards in the colonies to death unless they agreed to fight alongside Bolívar’s army. It was ruthless but effective. As Spaniards were executed, royalists defected and joined the republicans – and as Bolívar’s army moved eastwards towards Caracas, their numbers increased. By the time they arrived in the capital on 6 August, the Spanish had fled the city. Bolívar took Caracas without a fight. ‘Your liberators have arrived,’ he told the inhabitants, ‘from the banks of the swollen Magdalena to the flowering valleys of Aragua.’ He talked of the vast plateaux they had crossed and the huge mountains they had climbed – aligning their victories with the rugged wilderness of South American nature.

As Bolívar’s soldiers marched through Venezuela along the War to the Death’s bloody trail, killing almost every Spaniard they found, another army rose: the so-called ‘Legions of Hell’. Made up of rough plainsmen from the Llanos, along with mestizos and slaves, the Legions of Hell were under the command of fierce and sadistic José Tomás Boves, a Spaniard who had lived in the Llanos as a cattle dealer and whose army would eventually kill 80,000 republicans. Boves’s men were fighting against Bolívar’s privileged class of creoles who they claimed were to be feared more than Spanish rule. Bolívar’s revolution descended into a merciless civil war. One Spanish official described Venezuela as a region of death: ‘Towns that had thousands of inhabitants are now reduced to a few hundred or even a few dozens,’ villages were burned, and unburied corpses were decomposing in the streets and fields.

Humboldt had predicted that the South American struggle for independence would be bloody because colonial society was deeply riven. For three centuries the Europeans had done everything to cement the ‘hatred of one caste for another’, Humboldt told Jefferson. Creoles, mestizos, slaves and indigenous people were not a united people but divided and mistrustful of each other. It was a warning that came to haunt Bolívar.

Meanwhile in Europe, Spain had finally been released from Napoleon’s military grip and was able to concentrate on its unruly colonies. Having taken back his throne, the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, now equipped a huge armada of some sixty ships and dispatched more than 14,000 soldiers to South America – the largest fleet Spain had ever sent to the New World. When the Spanish arrived in Venezuela in April 1815, Bolívar’s army – weakened by the fighting against Boves – didn’t stand a chance. In May, the royalists took Caracas and the revolution seemed to be over for good.