Simón Bolívar

The opportunity to act on his Roman vow came in 1808, when Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula, deposed the Spanish Bourbon monarchy, and placed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne. The resulting vacuum of legitimate authority fractured the Spanish Empire. In Caracas, as across Spanish America, criollo elites refused to recognize the French usurper. On 19 April 1810, the local elite deposed the Spanish Captain-General and formed the Supreme Junta of Caracas. Bolívar, who had returned to Venezuela in 1807, threw himself into the unfolding crisis, beginning his military career as a militia officer. The early years of the struggle, however, were defined by disaster, fragmentation, and brutal civil war. The First and Second Venezuelan Republics collapsed in quick succession under the onslaught of ferocious royalist forces. By 1815, with Spanish authority temporarily restored and New Granada subdued, Bolívar was forced into a bleak exile on the island of Jamaica.

It was during these darkest years of defeat that Bolívar’s strategic vision matured. He realized that the war could not be won by the criollo elite alone; it required a broader social base and international allies. From Jamaica, he traveled to Haiti, where he befriended the revolutionary leader Alexandre Pétion. In exchange for Haitian military assistance, arms, and financial backing, Bolívar promised Pétion that he would abolish slavery in the territories he liberated. Armed with Haitian resources and a newly inclusive message of continental solidarity, Bolívar returned to Venezuela in 1817 to establish a third republic. Rather than attacking the heavily fortified coastal cities, he shifted his campaign to the vast, wild interior plains of the Orinoco river basin, forging alliances with the tough local llanero horsemen and coordinating with local guerrilla leaders.

What followed was one of the most audacious military campaigns in human history. In the summer of 1819, Bolívar led a ragged army of Venezuelan soldiers, British and Irish mercenaries, and plainsmen across the flooded plains of the Apure and up into the freezing, treacherous passes of the Andes Mountains. Many of his men and horses died of exposure, but the army achieved total tactical surprise. Descending into the fertile valleys of New Granada, Bolívar routed the Spanish forces at the Battle of Boyacá in August 1819, entering Bogotá in triumph. This victory broke the spine of Spanish power in northern South America. Over the next six years, Bolívar and his brilliant generals, most notably Antonio José de Sucre, executed a grand pincers movement across the continent. They liberated Venezuela and Panama in 1821, swept south to secure Ecuador in 1822, and marched into the high strongholds of Peru, securing its independence at the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824. By 1825, the final royalist holdouts in Upper Peru were defeated, and the region was renamed Bolivia in honor of the man now universally acclaimed as El Libertador.

Yet, the very magnitude of Bolívar’s military success sowed the seeds of his political undoing. His grand dream was not merely the independence of individual provinces, but the creation of a vast, unified, and powerful state capable of defying European re-colonization and resisting the growing power of the United States. To this end, he merged New Granada, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama into the massive Republic of Colombia, known historically as Gran Colombia, and served as its president while simultaneously holding dictatorial executive powers in Peru and Bolivia. But the immense geography of the Andes, the lack of infrastructure, and deep-seated regional rivalries militated against unity. The regional elites of Caracas, Bogotá, and Quito, having thrown off the yoke of Madrid, had no desire to submit to the centralized rule of a president-for-life in Bogotá.

In his final years, Bolívar watched his grand political creation disintegrate. His insistence on a strong, highly centralized executive branch and his distrust of federalism alienated former allies, who increasingly viewed him as a budding dictator. As regional revolts flared and his health failed, he was systematically stripped of his offices and influence. Disillusioned, exhausted, and dying of the same tuberculosis that had claimed his parents, Bolívar resigned the presidency of Colombia in 1830. He prepared to leave for exile in Europe, but died on 17 December 1830, near the Colombian port of Santa Marta, at the age of forty-seven. He died virtually penniless and politically isolated, famously lamenting in his final months that "all who have served the revolution have plowed the sea."

Though his physical political creations fractured into the modern nations of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama, the phantom of Bolívar’s grand vision remained. He did not merely liberate a territory; he forged a shared historical consciousness across half a continent. His legacy became a secular religion in South America, claimed by generations of politicians, revolutionaries, and nation-builders of every ideological stripe. By breaking the oldest colonial empire of the modern world, Bolívar ensured that the destiny of the Americas would be determined not in Madrid, but in the cities and plains of the New World.