Simón Bolívar
Simón Bolívar liberated six countries and died at forty-seven convinced that he had ploughed the sea. Born in Caracas in 1783 into one of the wealthiest creole families in Venezuela, orphaned early, he was educated by tutors including Simón Rodríguez, travelled in Europe, and swore an oath in Rome in 1805 to free his country from Spain. The first Venezuelan republic collapsed in 1812 after an earthquake that the clergy called divine judgement and a royalist counteroffensive. His analysis afterwards, in the Cartagena Manifesto, was that federalism and legalism had destroyed it and that the war needed a single command — a conclusion he applied for the rest of his life and that made him a dictator by consent more than once. He proclaimed war to the death in 1813, and both sides fought it that way. The turning point was 1819. He marched an army from the Orinoco plains across flooded savannah and then over an Andean pass at 4,000 metres in the rainy season, losing men and every horse, and destroyed a royalist army at Boyacá on the other side with the survivors, liberating New Granada in eleven weeks. Carabobo freed Venezuela in 1821, Pichincha Ecuador in 1822, and Ayacucho Peru in 1824. Gran Colombia, his union of Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador and Panama, fell apart within a decade under regional rivalries he could not contain. He resigned in 1830 and died of tuberculosis near Santa Marta on his way to European exile, in a borrowed shirt. His last letters are bleak and worth taking seriously as analysis rather than despair. He wrote that America was ungovernable, that those who served the revolution had ploughed the sea, and that the continent would fall into the hands of petty tyrants — which is a fair description of the following century.
- Lived: 1783 CE – 1830 CE
- Nationality: Venezuelan
- Roles: military_leader, statesman, revolutionary
