The creole revolutionary
Born in 1783 to one of Caracas’s richest families and orphaned young, Bolívar was educated on Enlightenment texts by tutors including the radical Simón Rodríguez, toured Napoleonic Europe, and — by his own famous account — swore on Rome’s Monte Sacro in 1805 to free his homeland. Napoleon’s 1808 seizure of Spain gave creole elites their opening; Venezuela declared the First Republic in 1811, and lost it, beginning a decade in which Bolívar’s cause was destroyed and resurrected repeatedly — punctuated by his Decreto de Guerra a Muerte (“war to the death,” 1813), exile, and the Jamaica Letter (1815) sketching a free continent.
The pivotal alliance was with Haiti: President Alexandre Pétion twice re-equipped Bolívar’s shattered expeditions in 1816, asking as price the abolition of slavery in the lands he freed — a pledge Bolívar honoured in proclamation and pressed, incompletely, in practice.
The campaigns
His masterpiece came in 1819: leading an army through the flooded Orinoco plains in the rainy season and over the freezing Páramo de Pisba pass — a route considered impossible, at terrible cost in men — to fall on the Spanish from an undefended direction at Boyacá, liberating Bogotá. Carabobo (1821) freed Venezuela; Bomboná and his lieutenant Sucre’s Pichincha (1822) freed Ecuador; after the Guayaquil conference eased out his rival liberator San Martín, Junín and Sucre’s decisive Ayacucho (1824) ended Spanish power in Peru — and in 1825 Upper Peru constituted itself as a republic named Bolivia, for which Bolívar drafted a constitution featuring a president for life.
Ploughing the sea
Political union defeated him as Spain had not. Gran Colombia — his united republic of Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador — strained apart on regional rivalries; his answer, an 1828 dictatorship, drew an assassination attempt he survived by leaping from a window (his companion Manuela Sáenz delaying the killers). Sick, spent, and renounced, he resigned in 1830 — the year his heir-apparent Sucre was murdered — and set out for European exile, writing the epitaph of his politics: “America is ungovernable… he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.” He died of tuberculosis at Santa Marta on 17 December 1830, aged 47, in a borrowed shirt.
The republics he freed have argued over him ever since — six countries’ founding hero, name of two currencies and one nation, claimed by every faction from liberators to strongmen: the continent’s common ancestor, and its common argument.