BOLIVAR, SIMON (1783–1830)

Simon Bolivar was a South American soldier and statesman whose revolutionary struggles against Spain resulted in the independence of the countries now known as Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Bolivia. Bolivar was born at Caracas, Venezuela, on 24 July 1783, and died at Santa Marta, Columbia, in 1830. Born to a noble land-owning family, Bolivar was sent to study in Madrid, and during a trip to Paris met an old tutor, Simon Rodriguez, who encouraged him to study Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau and other thinkers, amongst whom the latter two were to prove most influential on his thought. In 1805, at Rome, he dedicated himself to securing the independence from Spain of her South American colonies. He helped to gain Venezuela’s independence in 1811, while opposing the decentralized, federal constitution that it adopted. Moving to Nueva Granada in 1812, he pitted his 800 men against 15,000 Royalists, and on victory was styled ‘The Liberator’. Reaching Caracas in August 1813,

he proceeded to further victories until being defeated at La Puerta in June 1814, which resulted in the Spanish reconquest of Venezuela. In exile in Jamaica in 1815, he wrote the most important political statement of his career, the ‘Letter from Jamaica’, which proposed the establishment of constitutional republics throughout Spanish America modelled on the British system, with a hereditary upper house, an elected lower house and a president elected for life. The latter feature derived in part from his own election as dictator after his initial successes in Venezuela, but has been frequently criticized. Though he wished to abolish slavery and secure civil liberty, Bolivar’s republicanism was strongly oligarchical, with property qualifications limiting the electorate and a strong executive ensuring the centralization of power. Socially he anticipated that the deaths of so many white soldiers during the revolution might bring about the rule of a mixed-race elite or ‘Pardocracy’.

Returning to Venezuela in 1817, Bolivar commenced a lengthy campaign that resulted in a major defeat for the Spanish forces in August 1819, another in June 1821, and in several battles in 1823–4. Bolivar became President of Gran Columbia, the unified states of Ecuador, Venezuela and Columbia. Fearing that political fragmentation would follow victory, Bolivar proposed a permanent confederation of the newly sovereign states, with an assembly of plenipotentiaries that would act as mediator and conciliator in resolving disputes between the states. A constitutional convention in February 1825 established the first political organization of the new republic, but by 1828 centrifugal forces had seriously weakened the union, and Bolivar resigned the leadership of Nueva Granada after 14 years. He spent most of 1829 suppressing a Peruvian incursion into Columbia, and died on 30 December 1830. In his latter years he made various efforts to unify other Latin and South American republics by treaty. At a congress held at Panama in 1826, for instance, a common army and navy, and the resolution of disputes by arbitration, were planned for Mexico, Columbia, Peru and Central America. Bolivar’s reputation remains dogged by accusations of authoritarianism, though he remains indisputably the most important theoretician of the South American independence movement, and of a system of unified government for the region.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 80

ichemx

BOLIVAR, SIMON (1783–1830)