In Part I of this series we looked at the ideological and material basis for Simon Bolivar’s revolutionary project, as well as his family and background. We now proceed to the effects of that project, constituting the beginning of the continent’s indebtedness and geopolitical subordination, something Bolivar himself was able to discern, and which he came to regret.
Selling the Future to Lose the Past
In practical terms, the Carta de Jamaica led to Bolivar enlisting a large number of British mercenaries for his cause, along with Haitian soldiers. The alliance with Britain, however, would sour.
In May of 1823, while awaiting the reception of financial aid and arms from his ally, he wrote the following to his friend and Grand Marshall of Ayacucho (who would also serve as President of Peru and Bolivia) Antonio José de Sucre:
England is the first interested party in guaranteeing the success of this transaction, since she wishes to form a league with all the free peoples of America and Europe against the Holy Alliance, putting herself at the head of these peoples and directing the world. It is not desirable for England that a European nation like Spain should possess a territory like Peru in America. England prefers that such be independent, weak, and with a fragile government. That is why, under whatever pretext, England will support the independence of Peru. [My translation].
Bolivar is under no illusions, understanding that British aid is geared towards establishing that country as a hegemon.
The above letter is cited in an essay entitled “Debt and Free Trade as Instrument of Subordination Since its Independence” by the spokesman for the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CAD), Éric Toussaint, who goes on to write:
From the beginning of his struggle for independence, Simón Bolívar … embarked on a policy of both internal indebtedness—which evidently ended up benefiting the local ruling classes—and external indebtedness to England and its bankers. In order to borrow abroad, he used part of the nation’s wealth as collateral, and had to sign free trade agreements with Britain. Most of the money granted in loans never reached Latin America, as bankers retained enormous commissions, applied abusive interest rates and sold the securities well below their nominal value. Some of those in charge of the Latin American missions, mandated by independence leaders, also extracted large commissions…Of what was left, an important part was used to purchase arms and military equipment from British merchants at prohibitive prices…A small part of the loans was even embezzled by members of the new authorities. [My translation]
(Much of this is explored by the Spanish communist scholar Santiago Armesilla, on whose research I am drawing.)
Toussaint goes on to provide relevant quotes from Bolivar himself to highlight his awareness of the poisoned gambit, as, for example, in a June 1823 letter to Vice-President Francisco de Paula Santander:
In the end, we will achieve everything, but our national debt will oppress us. … The public debt is a chaos of horrors, calamities, and crimes. We have … Colombia, a victim whose entrails these vultures shred: they have devoured the future sweat of the people of Colombia; they have destroyed our moral credit, while we have received only the most meager aid. Whatever we do with this debt, our actions commit us to a terrible end. If we recognize it [if we pay it], we cease to exist, if not … we bring opprobrium on this nation.
It seems Bolivar tried to take both these paths. On the one hand, we have a series of desperate attempts to pay it off: In 1825, he proposed paying the debt by ceding Peruvian mines; in 1827 he tried to develop the cultivation of quality tobacco in order to sell it to Great Britain; in 1830 he proposed the sale of fallow public lands to creditors. On the other hand, we have a letter in which a strikingly remorseful Bolivar proposes making South America’s dire financial straits known to the people, that they might find a way to rebel against the arrangement procured for them by their leaders (himself included):
The masters of the mines, the owners of Andean silver and gold, are borrowing millions to underpay their small army and their miserable administration. Let all this be told to the people, and let it testify powerfully against our abuses and our ineptitude. That way, we may avoid having it be said that the government protects the abominable system that ruins the people. I say: let the “Government Gazette” decry our abuses.
We sometimes hear that the Spanish empire (despite engaging in thorough fiscal redistribution and cultivating wealth in American cities that exceeded that of its European ones) somehow bears the blame for Latin America’s ongoing economic agony. This is unsustainable. It is to Bolivar’s confessedly reckless policy of garnering material support for his wars by thoroughly indebting his embryonic state (and, therefore, its balkanizing successors) that we may trace the beginning of Latin American poverty and economic subordination to foreign interests. It is symbolic that this subordination began, in a sense, with the Carta de Jamaica, an island that had been Spanish and became British.
Hispanic Confederacy: Bolivarianismo’s Final Form
Although neither his defenders nor his detractors would concur, Bolivar’s thought can be understood as reaching its maturity in a neo-imperial project (akin to what I’ve called a post-empire) whose nature is not, finally, anti-Spanish.
It is enough to refer to an oft-ignored episode: in 1820, Bolivar attempted to modify the course of the terrible momentum he had set in motion. He sent the diplomat, Francisco Antonio Zea Díaz, to London, charged with meeting Spain’s ambassador to the UK, the Duke of Frías. Zea presented the Duke with Bolivar’s secret plan, entitled the ‘Plan for Reconciliation and Project for Hispanic Confederacy’ (Plan de Reconciliación y Proyecto de Confederación Hispánica). This came to naught, but it is of extreme importance for understanding Bolivar’s ideological evolution.
We may suggest that it was the failure of his attempt to sublimate the loss of pre-modern class privileges under the banner of modern ‘progress’ and statehood (a sublimation I would describe as liberalism’s ‘false consciousness’), that ultimately forced Bolivar to reconsider his position and articulate what would have been a better synthesis of modern and pre-modern, of state and empire (namely his “Project for Hispanic Confederacy”). Alas, this ‘better synthesis’ also failed, and Bolivar went on to organize the 1826 Panama Congress. Its aim was to unify the newly independent vice regencies of America, but to no avail. Internecine conflict would not abate, and the continent’s balkanization proceeded unencumbered. He would try again just before his death organizing the so-called Admirable Congress, which, however, came to the same abortive end.
In his final letter dated December 1830, the very month of his death, Bolivar still yearns for unity: “Colombians!” he writes, addressing the inhabitants of Gran Colombia. “My last vows are for the happiness of the homeland. If my death contributes to the cessation of factionalism and the consolidation of our Union, I go peacefully to my sepulcher.”
Such was his hope. A month prior, however, he had despaired of the independent, fragmented states he was leaving behind. Directing himself to the Ecuadorian Head of State, General Juan José Flores, he wrote:
You know that for twenty years I held the reins of power. Well, from these years I have gleaned but a few sure conclusions. To wit:
- America is ungovernable for us.
- He who serves a revolution plows at sea.
- The only thing to be done with America is to emigrate from her.
- This country [Gran Colombia] will invariably fall into the hands of the teeming multitude, and from them, into those of tyrants belonging to every race and color.
- Devoured by our crimes and extinguished by ferocity, Europeans will no longer deign so much as to conquer us.
- If it were possible for any part of the world to return to a state of primitive chaos, this would happen in America.
Letters and flurries aside, in his Final Testament, Bolivar simply declares himself a Catholic, confesses the Creed, and asks that his remains be stored in Caracas, his country’s capital. This can be read both as a repudiation of previous, more secularizing ideas, and (together with his December 1830 letter) a sign of his consistent patriotic love for Gran Colombia.
Yet this does not contradict Bolivar’s last letter, together with the secret mission on which he sent Zea. Indeed, the latter is consistent with what the revolutionary leader’s butler, Jóse Palacios, reports to have been one of his employer’s final statements on his life’s work: “I abhor having initiated a war against the Spaniards.”
Conclusion
Modern defenders of the imperial legacy, even of a political Hispanidad, should not view Bolivar as anathema. Unlike those who celebrate the revolution he came to abhor, they may look at the fullness of Bolivar’s arc and endorse its final conclusion. Understanding Bolivar as a repentant revolutionary, we may see his life as a cautionary microcosm for the subsequent centuries of Latin American history, passing from revolutionary fervor to regret, finding that the wholesale rejection of the imperial legacy leads to division and indebtedness.
In doing so, however, we should resist the desire to baptize his legacy, so to speak, as though, shortcomings aside, its sheer scale, impact, and endurance forces us to transfigure it in our imagination as a force for good. A lucid assessment of his career cannot but admit that Bolivar deliberately led a murderous campaign against loyalists (civilians included), robbing his continent and any future independent nation of vital human resources, as well as saddling the generations in his wake with mammoth debt, all for an enterprise he himself reneged on a decade later.
Even if the emergence of Gran Colombian (and other American states and nations) was a foregone conclusion, the campaigns Bolivar led resulted in his nation’s stillbirth.
Such was his own verdict.
It would seem a healthy iconoclasm is indeed called for when dealing with the cult of Bolivar. That it happens to constitute the cornerstone of contemporary Latin America’s political mythos only makes it more necessary to align with alternative currents in the history of those lands.
It would seem a healthy iconoclasm is indeed called for when dealing with the cult of Bolivar. That it happens to constitute the cornerstone of contemporary Latin America’s political mythos only makes it more necessary to align with alternative currents in the history of those lands.
