Simón Bolívar was born in 1783 in Caracas, the capital city of the Captaincy-General of Venezuela (roughly corresponding to the present-day country of the same name), which was one of three territorial sub-units of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada, the others being New Granada (present-day Colombia and Panama) and Quito (present-day Ecuador). The Bolívars were wealthy and prominent members of the city’s Creole—European-descended and American-born—upper class. Upon his parents’ death, Bolívar inherited significant agricultural and mining assets as well as a large number of slaves. After an excellent private education and two European tours, Bolívar devoted himself to the cause of Spanish American independence. Throughout the crisis provoked by Napoleon I’s 1808 intervention in Spain, Bolívar led a radical faction advocating within Caracas for the end of imperial rule. In 1811, Venezuela became the first Spanish American nation to formally declare independence. During the prolonged and brutal war that ensued, despite some devastating setbacks, Bolívar gained unrivaled influence over the patriots’ military, political, and diplomatic efforts throughout Andean South America. In 1816, Bolívar exchanged a promise to abolish slavery for material and logistical support from the president of the Southern Republic of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion. Bolívar landed a small force at Puerto Cabello, built a base in the Venezuelan plains, and then led a spectacular assault on Spanish forces across the Andean highlands, taking the Viceregal capital at Santa Fe de Bogotá in 1819. Convinced that only an expansive state could guard its independence against Spanish reconquest, Bolívar designed a constitution for what historians now refer to as “Gran Colombia,” a federal union encompassing the entire former Viceroyalty of New Granada. He then pressed his attack southward, liberating the sometimes-reluctant populations of the Andean highland regions of Quito, Peru, and Upper Peru, which was renamed Bolivia in Bolívar’s honor. Even as Bolívar designed new constitutions and began planning a larger Federation of the Andes, regional leaders within Gran Colombia’s constituent states began agitating for greater autonomy. Bolívar employed increasingly dictatorial means in his efforts to suppress his domestic opponents, while at the same time issuing invitations to the governments of the other independent states of Spanish America—and, after some urging from his vice president, to the United States of America—to send representatives to a diplomatic congress in Panama, where he hoped they might forge a still-broader alliance against both internal and external threats to American independence. The Panama Congress met in 1826, and the delegates negotiated some important bilateral treaties, but the Congress did not fulfill Bolívar’s aspiration to create a permanent forum for arbitrating disputes and coordinating the foreign policies of the new American republics. Domestic politics in Gran Colombia spun out of control in this period as well, as first Venezuela and then Ecuador seceded from the union. Bolívar spent the final months of his life disillusioned and incapacitated by tuberculosis. He died in 1830 at the age of 47.
Identity, Enlightenment and Political Dissent in Late Colonial Spanish America
