Bolivar: American Liberator (66 page)

Whether Manuela informed Bolívar of the plan, we do not know; but as a close friend of Urdaneta’s she was surely aware of it. In any case, she had every reason to support the idea. She believed her lover to be a great man and she wanted to perpetuate his vision and ensure his place in history. With all her customary worldliness and gusto, she hosted a glittering party for King Charles X’s official French delegation, which arrived to discuss the monarchical project in early May. Virtually every member of the capital’s diplomatic community swirled through Manuela’s rooms that evening—all, that is, except for the U.S. representative, William Henry Harrison, and a few others who were viscerally opposed to a monarchist state. It isn’t hard to imagine the French delegates’ eagerness as they quaffed champagne in Manuela’s house and toasted the Liberator: Napoleon had always had an eye on the Americas;
now, with a Bourbon king back on the throne and
much of the French navy plying American waters, an irresistible opportunity had presented itself. The charming soiree in the home of Bolívar’s mistress augured well for the empire of Charles X. Within little more than a year, however, all of it would be a pipe dream: Parisians would revolt, hurling stones into the king’s gardens, and Charles X would evacuate the Palais-Royal in the black of night.

But in the mists of Bogotá, Bolívar’s ministers could not imagine such an outcome. A monarchy promised order, permanence, and a foreign link—all the rudiments thought necessary for the survival of the republic. When they finally presented the idea to Bolívar, he waved them off with an exasperated hand. There were
a thousand reasons why it wouldn’t work, he said: What European prince would want to rule in that utter chaos? How would Colombia support the staggering expense of a monarchy? Most important, Colombia’s humbler classes, accustomed by now to freedom, wouldn’t stand for inequalities of empire. Nor was it likely that a monarchy would be tolerated by Colombia’s new generals, who stood to be stripped of all power and command.

No, he had no stomach for kings. Since his days in Madrid—days of Miranda, days of San Martín—
Bolívar had adamantly rejected all argument that favored a monarchical system. He rejected it now. The monarchy question was like a summer swarm of gnats: constant, annoying, yet so insignificant in his mind as to be swatted away.
Some historians claim he ignored it because he had already declared a wish to abandon power; the decision was no longer his. But there were
other reasons for Bolívar’s dismissal: his distance from the capital, the delicate question of Córdova’s disaffection, his inability to see the maneuvering at first hand.
But his wan response, twisted artfully, was used by his enemies to suggest that he had always hankered after a throne.
Indeed, those who prayed for Bolívar’s ruin—including Páez and the supporters of Santander—feigned support for a monarchy at first, knowing that the only means to destroy Bolívar was to make Colombians believe that he, too, wanted it for himself. And didn’t he, after all? Hadn’t his ministers put it forward? Surely Bolívar himself had instigated it—indeed, been angling for it—all along. When the young, impetuous General Córdova
heard about Bogotá’s machinations, his response was immediate and unequivocal. He decided Colombia needed to be rid of Bolívar. For all his past loyalty to the Liberator, he decided to break all ties and dedicate himself to one burning cause.

By August, when Bolívar had reentered Guayaquil and La Mar had receded into the margins of history, Córdova was on the loose in the rich, green valleys of northwest Colombia, his native home.
With little more than three hundred followers, he began a campaign to overthrow Bolívar. He approached Bolívar’s steadfast supporter General Mosquera in the deluded belief that he could
recruit Mosquera to his way of thinking; he tried to persuade the rebel Obando to reclaim his seditious stand.
He wrote to Páez, congratulating him for his separatist spirit and inviting his support. Córdova had been incomparably brave in the past; indeed Bolívar had
honored him with one of the jeweled crowns Peru had given him after the victory at Ayacucho. But Córdova was also rash and egotistical. Thinking he would divvy out the republic piece by piece—Venezuela for Páez, Ecuador for Flores, New Granada for himself—thinking, too, that
an army was all he needed to govern a country, Córdova was the essence of a military mirage that would persist into the twenty-first century. For him, it was enough to rule by brute force, not as a government of the people. It was a foolish, atavistic, colonial frame of mind, and it was bound for failure.

But Bolívar hardly had a chance to respond to the insolence. He was unwell when Córdova had seen him in Pasto six months before, and Córdova had noted the striking deterioration. Bolívar had been sick again upon arrival in Quito: so weak, and so emotionally overcome by the sight of Sucre that
he could hardly speak; he cried like a baby. Bolívar continued the backbreaking schedule, nevertheless: dictating scores of letters at a time, managing the republic, negotiating with Peru, moving restively from one trouble spot to another.
He was determined to broker a sturdy peace. He knew that Peruvians expected him to invade and be the warmonger they made him out to be; he wanted to prove them wrong. Shortly after
his arrival in Guayaquil at the end of July, however, the Liberator fell into an illness far graver than any he had experienced. He was delirious, bird-thin, incapacitated,
spitting
black. He reported that it was a passing incidence of black bile—gastric in nature—but anyone could see that it was a desperate battle for survival, and
all too clearly in his lungs.

We know now that the slightest frailty can admit dormant tuberculosis in its fiercest form; once the sparks of disease ignite, it can rage through a body like consuming wildfire. As soon as Bolívar’s illness began to devour him, even he couldn’t refute that something was deeply wrong. But he didn’t allow himself to rest until peace with Peru had been established.
Forced to spend twelve feverish days in bed, he continued to dictate letters and give orders, even as he floated in and out of delirium.
The equatorial heat was relentless, the humid, pestilential climate ruinous to his delicate condition, and yet he could claim considerable progress: Guayaquil had been retaken easily; the Peruvians had simply slipped away, too distracted by their own reversals to oppose him. In Lima, the government had crumbled in a surgical coup; President
La Mar had been deported to Guatemala at bayonet point, in shackles.
The new chief of state, Antonio de La Fuente, had always been well disposed toward Bolívar—and was willing to talk peace. La Fuente would last only months at Peru’s helm, giving way to the Machiavellian hand of General Agustín Gamarra and his power-hungry, bellicose wife, but for the time being, in the beastly heat of the Guayas River, it seemed as if Bolívar’s peace would last.

All the same, by September, when Bolívar had recovered enough to take in the situation around him, he understood the extent of betrayal that had been mounted against him by the brave and beloved General Córdova. It had been one thing to be attacked by Santander’s lawyers and city “liberals”; it was something else entirely to be despised by a trusted general.
The wound this betrayal inflicted on the Liberator was lasting and deep, and,
although he tried to dismiss it, he rose from his sickbed to a dark night of the spirit. His correspondence in the next months exhibits a level of torment—an almost pathological frustration—that was completely unlike the vigorous, determined Liberator who had marched into Bogotá only a year before. Bolívar wrote to O’Leary:
“My strength is almost entirely gone. You wouldn’t believe the state I’m in. . . . My spirit and body have suffered so much that I have no energy for the slightest task, and I feel powerless to rekindle it.”

A mere five years earlier, after the fateful victory at Ayacucho, he had
called America the hope of the universe, the long desired promised land. Now, the revolution seemed
little more than a chimera; its heritors, madmen. As far as Bolívar was concerned, all the colonies had been duped by their illusions, like a flock of foolish children.
“We have tried everything under the sun,” he wrote to Urdaneta, “and nothing has worked. Mexico has fallen. Guatemala is in ruins. There are new troubles in Chile. In Buenos Aires they have killed a president. In Bolivia, three presidents took power in the course of two days, and two of them have been murdered.” His America, like his body, was riddled with maladies.

It was during this time that he learned just how far his star had fallen: in France, the renowned thinker Benjamin Constant
denounced Bolívar as an outright despot. In England, George Flinter, a British officer in Venezuela, published a blistering letter to King George IV, warning against issuing support for Simón Bolívar,
“who has murdered thousands in cold blood and swindled the British nation out of millions.” In New York, Luis Ducoudray, the French mercenary who had served Bolívar in Angostura, released a lacerating memoir, prompting a British reviewer to conclude that Bolívar was
less a lion of liberty than a snake. In Washington, William Henry Harrison’s condemnations were being heard by Congress and
disseminated by the press.
In Chile, the outcast Riva Agüero—who
still called himself president of Peru—was claiming that the Liberator was a despicable Negro and that his long-dead wife, María Teresa del Toro, had been the illegitimate daughter of a cook.

“I’m being accused of an inferno of abominations,” Bolívar confessed. At the end of his tether,
he wrote to General O’Leary insisting that someone else be president and that O’Leary should promote that idea in Bogotá. At best, Bolívar told his old aide, a liberator might be a gadfly to goad the machinery of government—not run it. He was too weary to go on as head of state.

Was he being
calculating, as some historians have claimed? Spaniards, Argentines, Peruvians—all with good reasons for their antipathy to Bolívar—have argued that he was an unabashed autocrat, a crypto-monarchist whose goals became more and more twisted with each victory.
He refused laurels, those critics say, because he knew they would be offered again. He rejected power only to accept it anew in an hour of crisis, at which point he could apply it with abandon. To some extent, these accusations were true: he had turned down the presidency numerous times, resigned outright, before being persuaded to take it again. He was suspect in this. He had said that he wanted to please, serve, unify. But, since the liberation of Peru, he had come to believe that he could do none of these without wielding absolute control. In order to preserve liberties, in other words, he had assumed a dictatorship,
under which—as he himself had said—all talk of liberty was impossible. Now, in this strange echo chamber of will and intent, his loyalists (as well as his enemies)
wondered whether he was insisting that he wanted to leave precisely because he wanted to stay.

He continued to work. He
drew up a treaty with Peru, although it wasn’t clear that it would last. He oversaw an
ingenious plan to finance Colombia’s crippling deficit with vigorous exports of Venezuelan tobacco. He signed off on
improvements in universities, schools, courts. He
sent military reinforcements to Panama to protect it against the Spanish presence in Cuba.
He congratulated the army on its efforts to put down Córdova’s rebellion. And always—always—he found the strength to dictate a multitude of letters to his officers, relying on the power of the word. But the correspondence in which he was engaged was largely bureaucratic. He no longer had an aide whom he could trust enough to dictate his most private thoughts.
“I have no one to write for me,” he lamented in one of his missives; and he certainly didn’t have the energy to do it himself. Worse, few of his correspondents were informing him about sensitive matters—as Santander had done so masterfully in happier days. He felt out of reach, out of touch.

Hoping for a bit of clarity, Bolívar
published a circular that asked Colombians to state exactly what they wanted from government, but his enemies recalled that Napoleon, too, had ordered a plebiscite just before making himself emperor. Bolívar, they insisted, was no patriot sounding the public will, but a manipulator plotting his coronation. Bolívar threw up his hands.
“There is no such thing as good faith in America,” he concluded. “Treaties are worth little more than the paper they’re printed on; constitutions are pamphlets; elections, an excuse
for war; liberty has dissolved into anarchy; and for me life has become a torment.” Forces against him were too strong now. Years of serial abandonment by officers who had once been loyal—Santander, Páez, Padilla, Obando, Córdova—had had their cumulative effect.
“I hope you haven’t forgotten what I told you,” he wrote O’Leary. He was less coy with Mosquera, who visited him on an emerald isle just south of Guayaquil where he had gone to recuperate.
He wanted to leave, he told his old friend bluntly, travel to Europe, live out his days in peace, taking nothing more from America than his memories. He was determined to step down at last.

IN JULY OF 1829, SANTANDER,
whom Bolívar could neither abide nor safely destroy, was released from Bocachica dungeon and set on a journey that would ultimately take him to Hamburg. His first stop would be Venezuela, where he would be held until he was allowed to board a foreign vessel in Puerto Cabello. It must have been sobering for Bolívar when he heard of it. Santander had been friend and foe; collaborator and saboteur. Bolívar had always known that having a Granadan in the vice presidency was good cement for the republic—the only way Bogotá would accept a Venezuelan in the presidency. Santander was hardworking, ambitious, detail-oriented, and he had served Bolívar loyally for many years.
But the fundamental distrust between Granadans and Venezuelans had been there from the start, and, for all their effort to overcome it, they couldn’t rid themselves of a sick germ of suspicion.

The germ had been planted long before, when they had faced off as young men on the border between New Granada and Venezuela, at the start of the Admirable Campaign. Bolívar, head of the consolidated army, had ordered Santander to continue his march into Venezuela, and Santander had refused, unwilling to fight someone else’s war.
“March at once!” Bolívar had barked at him. “You have no choice in the matter! March! Either you shoot me or, by God, I will certainly shoot you.” Eventually, Santander obeyed him; indeed, as the revolution unfolded, he obeyed the Liberator with utter dedication. Bolívar had every reason to make him his trusted colleague. In time, their correspondence revealed an alliance unparalleled in South American history. Now, after years of mounting bitterness, Santander was being ejected from the fatherland
he had served all his life, and it spoke volumes about the inherent fissures in Greater Colombia. A deep, fratricidal impulse had crept into Spain’s disgruntled children. Nowhere was this more apparent—and more polarizing—than in the relationship of these two men.