Simón Bolívar: The Liberator of South America

Simón Bolívar is the towering figure of Latin American independence — the general, statesman, and visionary who led the liberation of six nations from Spanish colonial rule, who dreamed of a unified continent that could stand as a counterweight to the empires of the world, and who spent his adult life in the saddle, crossing the Andes, fighting at the head of armies, negotiating with the intransigent, and outmaneuvering the impossible. He is called El Libertador — the Liberator — and the title is not hyperbole. Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Panama all owe their independence in substantial measure to his campaigns. He is, by any measure, one of the most consequential military and political figures of the nineteenth century.

He was born Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios on July 24, 1783, in Caracas, in what was then the Captaincy General of Venezuela, part of the Spanish colonial empire. He was born into one of the wealthiest and most distinguished creole families in Venezuela — families of Spanish descent who had been born in the Americas and who occupied the upper tier of colonial society but were excluded from the highest offices of government, which were reserved for peninsulares, Spaniards born in Spain. This structural exclusion of the creole elite from political power commensurate with their social and economic standing was one of the essential conditions that made independence possible: it ensured that the wealthiest and most capable sector of colonial society had an interest in overturning the imperial order.

His childhood was marked by loss. His father died when he was two; his mother when he was nine. He was raised by an uncle and then, more formatively, by a young tutor named Simón Rodríguez — a man of radical ideas, deeply influenced by Rousseau and the French Enlightenment — who opened the boy's mind to the philosophical foundations of the revolutionary age. He was sent to Spain to complete his education at seventeen, and it was in Spain and in the Europe of the Napoleonic era that the intellectual and political formation that would make him a revolutionary was completed.

He married María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alayza in 1802, but she died of yellow fever within a year of their marriage. He said afterward that her death had altered the course of his life: that if she had lived, he might have been a happy private citizen rather than the liberator of a continent. Whether this is true is impossible to say, but it captures something about the quality of personal loss that shaped his particular intensity — the sense that he had nothing left to lose in the ordinary sense, that his life could be given wholly to the great cause.

The Intellectual Formation of a Revolutionary

The Europe that Bolívar encountered as a young man in the first decade of the nineteenth century was a continent in the grip of the convulsions that Napoleon had unleashed. The French Revolution had destroyed the old order and proclaimed the universality of liberty, equality, and the rights of man; Napoleon had channeled those energies into military conquest and had imposed new constitutional orders across Europe that, even when they reflected his own imperialism, carried the seeds of liberal politics that could not be contained once planted.

Bolívar was present in Paris in 1804 when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, and by his own account the spectacle of this self-coronation — of a revolutionary hero claiming monarchical power — both fascinated and repelled him. He had come to Europe as an admirer of Napoleon; he left it with a more complicated relationship to the idea of military leadership, understanding both its power and its susceptibility to corruption. The lesson he took from Napoleon was not the model of imperial monarchy but the model of the campaign: the rapid, audacious, personally led military operation that could reshape the political landscape before the enemy had time to organize a response.