Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Simón Bolívar was sick. Plagued by an almost certain case of tuberculosis, he traversed the hard road from Ecuador to Colombia in the fall of 1829, slowly and painfully. Where old Iron Ass had once ridden from dawn till dusk, he now struggled with even a few hours of continuous riding before he had to stop and rest. He was pale. He was thin. He coughed blood and bile. He was a weak skeleton, held erect by little more than a starched white shirt. But the sickness was not just in Bolívar’s lungs. It was everywhere. It had spread to his heart. It had spread to his soul. His fellow South Americans were the virus that infected him. He was sick of the backstabbing, the treachery, the villainy, the selfish, short-sighted, parochial obsessions. And without question, sick of the endless complaints and criticisms and accusations. These he found everywhere, whispered behind his back, trumpeted in the press. It was read between the lines in friendly correspondences and embarrassingly obvious when he was heckled from a crowd. It had spread beyond the shores of South America, where in the United States and France and Great Britain, the name Bolívar no longer meant dashing revolutionary hero, but petty and hypocritical tyrant of a backward kingdom. Bolívar was sick of everyone. And everyone was sick of Bolívar.

As Bolívar’s body and soul slowly died, so too did Gran Colombia. He had first tried to sell his fellow Venezuelans on union with New Granada in the triumphant days at the end of the Admirable Campaign in the summer of 1813. They had been skeptical, but Bolívar kept pushing. After all, had it not been thanks to the New Granadans that the Venezuelans had just been liberated? And then, after the fall of the Second Republic, he had gone back to New Granada and made the same pitch in reverse, but found the New Granadans just as skeptical.

But in his mad way, after years of failures, exiles, and defeats, Bolívar still managed to induce the Congress of Angostura to unilaterally declare Gran Colombia a thing in early 1819. And then he rode off to prove that, for him, union was not just words. He led an army of Venezuelans up into the mountains to liberate New Granada. Now, after the Battle of Boyacá, surely everyone would recognize the necessity of working together. But they did not. Even after Granadans turned around and fought to liberate Venezuela at Carabobo, they did not. But everyone did recognize the necessity of Bolívar. And so, they let the Liberator have his way. And the unnatural union that no one wanted was born of little more than his willful insistence. Then, with the help of his protégé, Sucre, Bolívar had used Granadans and Venezuelans both to liberate Ecuador and make the Gran Colombia of his dreams a reality.

But in reality, it never existed anywhere but in Bolívar’s dreams. What he celebrated, everyone else tolerated. What he thought sublime, they found inferior. It was only a matter of time before the sand Bolívar had built his Republic on shifted under his feet. And as he struggled to reach Bogotá at the end of 1829, the last grains of sand slipped out of the hourglass.

On that road to Bogota, Bolívar was dealt a further emotional blow when General Córdova, the hero of Boyacá and the man who had just suppressed an anti-Bolivarian rebellion himself, went into rebellion. A native of Colombia, Córdova believed that Bolívar’s obvious sickness and Santander’s recent expulsion from the country left a power vacuum that he could step into. So in the fall of 1829, he had dispatched letters to Páez in Venezuela and General Flores in Ecuador, and he said, “Join me. We will rid ourselves of Bolívar and each get a country of our own.” But neither Páez nor Flores felt the need to join Córdova’s rebellion. Páez was comfortable with the speed and trajectory of Venezuelan independence, so there was no need to throw in with Córdova. And Flores likewise declined the invitation. So the revolt fizzled and wound up only drawing a few hundred adherents. Córdova himself was cornered and killed on October 17, 1829.

Much to Bolívar’s increasing depression, the gods continued to curse his personal enemies to hellfire. But increasingly, those enemies were men who had once been his friends, trusty allies, and longtime supporters. Their deaths brought him no comfort, only sadness.

Aware that the union of Gran Colombia had always been more figment than reality, and with yet another Constitutional Convention convening in a few months, Bolívar decided to issue a circular letter asking the citizens of Colombia — all of Gran Colombia — what they wanted to see in the new government. What did they want? What did they need? What would it take to get them to believe? It was, I think, an honest question. But Bolívar’s reputation was now so diminished that the letter was compared to the bogus plebiscite Napoleon had circulated just prior to his imperial ascension. Distrust of Bolívar was so high that even an offer to engage with his people was mocked as a prelude to yet another disingenuous power grab.

So as Bolívar’s skeletal frame slouched still further, he said,

“There is no such thing as good faith in America. Treaties are worth little more than the paper they are printed on. Constitutions are pamphlets, elections an excuse for war. Liberty has dissolved into anarchy, and for me, life has become a torment.”

But when they were done mocking Bolívar’s circular letter, the Liberator’s enemies in Venezuela took the opportunity to tell him what they really wanted. Under the auspices of José Antonio Páez, these men gathered in Caracas in late November 1829 and demanded total separation from Colombia. They wanted Páez to be their president, and they wanted no part of Simón Bolívar. These points, they said, were non-negotiable. This meeting was convened in the very room where Bolívar had once been declared Liberator after the Admirable Campaign, and many of the same men who had stood by him then — Arismendi, Mariño, even Bermúdez — now saw that Venezuela’s future no longer lay on the same path as her most famous son. Bolívar had gone from being a nearby father to a distant tyrant. Páez even said that he would fight a war with Bolívar if the Liberator did anything to stand in the way of the Venezuelans withdrawing from the union. Thus, even the happy omen of the tangled swords just a few years before turned out to have been invented from the same wishful pixie dust that had driven so much of Bolívar’s career.

With no more wishes left, Bolívar entered Bogotá on January 2 to an understandably subdued reception. Now, he did have a few comforts left, though. Manuela Sáenz welcomed him with her tender care. And even better, Sucre had been convinced to serve as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and would himself soon be arriving in Bogotá, giving Bolívar hope that he may yet make the handsome young General his heir. In fact, when the Convention convened on January 20, it would be Sucre who stood in for Bolívar. Accepting a gracious welcome from the Convention, the liberator proved too weak to stay in the hall for long, and he had Sucre read a sharp speech which stated unequivocally his intention now to resign the dictatorship.

As soon as the Convention was done and a new government formed, they would all get their wish and be rid of Simon Bolivar. The delegates rustled a bit, but as when San Martin had announced his intention to leave Lima, the delegates in Bogota had no plans to talk Bolivar out of his decision. They gave him the honor of Presidency of the Convention, but appearing to demonstrate a real determination to leave, he passed the office on to an uncontroversial Bogota liberal. He would himself take no part in the convention. They knew what he wanted, and if it was not what they wanted, then so be it.

Retiring to his estate outside of town, Bolívar got ready to remove himself from the country. While such an exile could be honorably self imposed rather than dishonorably mandated, but he was now faced with an uncomfortable and embarrassing reality. He was broke. As we’ve seen, Bolivar made a virtue of being a revolutionary popper. He refused all salaries, and anytime he was offered additional money, land, gifts, treasure, he either declined or accepted and then immediately redistributed it amongst his men. So though he had been born the Prince of Caracas and had inherited one of the largest fortunes in Venezuela, all of it was gone. And most had been confiscated and sold back during the original struggle against the Spanish, with Bolívar just never coming back around to reassert his old claims. All he had left in his decimated portfolio was a Venezuelan mine that was in a bad state of disrepair. At least passingly aware over the past few years that A) his public career really might be drawing to a close, and B) he did not have any ready cash, Bolívar instructed his sister in Caracas to sell the mine, but the process had been going on for years now.

His financial troubles were further exacerbated by the fact that nobody found it plausible that the Liberator really was broke. I mean, everyone assumed that, of course he had been squirreling away money this whole time. He was the Liberator, after all. Everybody showered him with everything, he had been given silver and jewels and crowns, land, palaces. But he had kept none of it. And since he never planned to wind up an exile, he had never made a backup plan for himself. There was no secret Swiss bank account. Only a few in his inner circle knew that his austere Republican act had never been just an act. When Bolivar said that he only owned the clothes on his back and a few books, he was telling the truth.

So when he got back to the estate outside of Bogota that he occupied but did not own, he dug up some silverware and sold it, getting just enough to hopefully arrange passage on a ship to Europe. After that, who knew how he would support himself? And his hopes were now pinned on the proceeds from selling the mine. But his now ex-friends in Venezuela had other ideas about that. The Venezuelans canceled the pending sale of the mine to a London buyer, refusing to grant permission for the mine to be sold to a foreigner. The canceled sale left Bolívar with no financial future whatsoever. And then, adding insult to injury, or perhaps just injury to injury, they stripped Bolívar of his citizenship and ordered him to never step foot on Venezuelan soil ever again. For the fifth and final time, Simón Bolívar was an exile from his home country, the country he had sworn to liberate or die trying and then did.

As the constitutional convention in Bogotá proceeded well out of Bolívar’s hands, it predictably went in the opposite direction from every place he had ever tried to lead them. Bolívar was practically the last man alive still representing that republican centralist quadrant of the Spanish American revolutionaries. The rest of them were all staunch federalists.

Bolivar’s allies had tried to at least secure union by suggesting three essentially autonomous states: Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. But it was clear that even this was too much. The Venezuelan position was already that any further discussions with Bogotá would be of a diplomatic nature, not a constitutional one. Meanwhile, over in Ecuador, general Juan Jose Flores was positioning for a declaration of independence of his own. The Ecuadorians had no interest in being ruled from Bogotá anymore.

So, the Colombian constitution that was now being finalized by April of 1830 would apply only to what had once been the territory of New Granada. And it is, in fact, how it, from among these three states, retained the name Colombia, because it was what was left of Old Grand Columbia after the departure of Venezuela and Ecuador.

The sand giving way all around him, Bolívar himself decided it was now time to leave it all behind. He had technically retained the title President-Dictator during these final months to ensure that there was some legal sovereign while the convention did its work. But with that work nearly complete, he resigned his office on April 27, 1830. It was the last time he would ever hold political or military power.

Bolívar on the way out the door, the framers of the constitution then cleverly ensured that his anointed heir, Sucre, could not and would not be able to succeed him. They made the minimum age for the presidency 40, and Sucre was still only 35 years old. But when somehow the delegates elected another Bolivarian ally to the presidency, the rest of the delegates erupted in anger and forced through a new election that brought a minor Bogotá liberal into office. But when your very first election has to be tossed out because you don’t like the results, it’s hard to believe that you’ve put yourself on sound political footing, and Columbia was not really on sound political footing.

But for the moment, the Colombians cared more about what they were getting rid of than what they were building. And what they were getting rid of was Bolívar. The new constitution was unveiled on May 4th, and within days, unrest in Bogotá peaked with sporadic rioting. As the people of Bogotá made it plain that Bolívar continuing to linger was not acceptable. The convention delegates now seamlessly transitioning into Colombia’s congress did vote the Liberator one incentive to help him move along now, please. A life pension of $15,000 to live on. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

So on May 1830, Bolívar packed up his few remaining belongings and with a small entourage of still loyal servants and aides, he prepared to leave Bogotá for the last time. A group of dignitaries and officials greeted him at the door of his residence to bid him a polite farewell. But he did not get a polite farewell from the people of Bogotá, who took the opportunity to mock him and hurl insults as he departed. When he finally passed through the gates, they followed the lead of their distant cousins in Lima and celebrated their liberation from the Liberator.

But in a bit of a replay of that departure from Lima, Bolívar wasn’t yet convinced that this would really be the last time he would see Bogotá. Or at least that’s what Manuela Sáenz chose to believe. So rather than accompany Bolívar out of the city, she elected to stay behind, believing in this latest of late hours that the Bogotá liberals were far weaker and less popular than they like to believe, and that it would not be long before the Colombians begged the Liberator to return. So she stayed behind to help lay the groundwork for his eventual return. And the thing is, she wasn’t crazy at all. And that’s nearly how it played out. But instead, when she embraced Bolívar and bid him farewell, it was the last time they touched, and the last time that she saw Simón Bolívar alive. 

Sucre, meanwhile, wasn’t even allowed a final goodbye, even if he too, would not have known that it would have been their final goodbye. Sucre had been out of Bogotá when Bolívar made the decision, or had the decision made for him to leave. Sucre raced back to the city, but missed Bolívar and could only send a touching letter to his mentor, patron and friend. He said,

“When I came to your house to accompany you from the city, you had already departed. Perhaps it was just as well, since I was spared the pain of an impossible farewell. Now, with my heart breaking, I don’t know what to say. Words cannot express my feelings for you. You have known me for some time now, so you are well aware that it is not your power, but your friendship that inspires my most tender affections for you. Goodbye, my General. Take as a measure of my fondness these flowing tears.”

Just a few days after Bolívar departed Bogotá, General Flores led the former audienceia of Quito and would-be state of Grand Colombia to declare independence, giving birth to the independent state of Ecuador. Taking a slightly different tack from the Colombians and the Venezuelans, Flores tried to seize on what remained of Bolívar’s prestige and legacy by offering the Liberator asylum but Bolivar politely refused and instead took the Magdalena River down to Cartagena.

The Magdalena is where he had transformed himself from a dismissible young radical to the leader of Spanish American independence. In 1813 he had swept up the river on a mad dash clearing the river of Spaniards and making sure that the world now knew the name Bolívar. But though going up the river represented the soaring promise of his career coming back down the river was another matter and the Magdalena served as both an entry and an exit during a revolving door phase of his career that he had been trapped in.

In 1815, remember, he had been forced to come back down the Magdalena but rather than relive his triumphant in reverse he had arrived at the bottom only to find Cartagena had shut its gates, General Maria’s Armada on the way and given no choice but to exile himself to Jamaica. As the door slowly revolved one final time he would once again be carried away in disgrace. But he would not be carried out to sea this time. Instead of getting on a boat and sailing away, Bolívar would find himself trapped against the rocks pummeled by an unforgiving ocean of sickness and despair until he finally gave up and drowned.

When he got to Cartagena, he had enough money to secure passage on a ship heading to Europe but the first available option was considered too small to accommodate a man in as bad a shape as Bolívar was, but he was told another would be along shortly. So, Bolívar waited and when the second ship arrived it was pulled in against the rocks and had its hole smashed. Then a third ship came, this one manned by an extremely generous British Captain who promised to take Bolívar to Europe in dignity and comfort. But there was a problem. The ship had to make a run to La Guaira and back before he set sail for home and Bolívar was not welcomed in Venezuela, and if he were to accompany the Captain there was a good chance the Liberators enemies back home would take it as a sign that he was trying to come back, and possibly he would wind up like old Miranda, tossed into a prison and left to rot after being accused of betraying his people.

Whether Bolívar thought much about Miranda these days, I have no idea, but I have to think he would have given the Precursor a thought or two as he now shared the fate of the old man who Bolívar had once been so utterly convinced of selfishly betraying the Patriot cause just as he himself now stood so unjustly accused.

While he waited for the ship to return he got a letter on July 1, 830 the contents of which nearly killed him. “We regret to inform you that Antonio José de Sucre has been murdered.” Sucre had left Bogotá to return to his family in Quito and outside Pasto, he had been ambushed by gunmen and assassinated. He was shot twice in the heart and once in the head. “My God,” Bolívar cried, “they have slain Able. If there is justice in heaven, hurl down your vengeance now.”

Already frail, now beyond description, the news of Sucre’s violent death devastated Bolívar. He slipped into a mix of physical exhaustion and spiritual despair, and he was certainly in no condition for a transatlantic voyage.

Back up in Bogotá, Manuela Sáenz led a rearguard action against the incoming government. The new president had been out of Bogotá when he was elected by the Congress and did not arrive in the city until mid June. When he showed up, a triumphal parade passed right beneath Sáenz’s balcony. A gathered crowd began hurling insults up at her, and some suspect that they intentionally started tossing firecrackers in her direction, which led her to retaliate. And she and a few of her faithful servants tossed fireworks of their own right back. Rifles and pistols soon appeared, but a Bolivarian General still in Colombian service rode back, defused the situation, and cleared the street.

But Sáenz’s implacable love of the Liberator and hatred of the Bogotá liberals was soon pushed even further when Pedro Carrujo, one of the innermost conspirators of the assassination plot and who was only alive today because of the generosity of Bolívar, was elevated into a position in the ministry.

So, Sáenz battled with the government relentlessly, so much now that her continued presence in Bogotá was considered nothing less than seditious. They tried to seize Bolívar’s archives, but she beat them off with a stick. Then both the national government and mayor of Bogotá made it plain that they plan to investigate her for treason and toss her in jail. Death threats were now a daily part of her routine. In August, she finally faced the fact that she was in real, actual danger and abruptly decamped the city, riding to the Magdalena River, which she planned to follow down to her lover.

If she had stayed just a few weeks longer, though, she would have been able to witness firsthand the equally abrupt collapse of her enemies. The liberal government that had taken over after the Constitutional Convention was proving itself to be as inept as they were corrupt. Sáenz really did have a knack for keeping her finger on the pulse of the people, and was correct that the Bogotá liberals were not as popular as they liked to think.

A faction emerged that combined the professional military with the power and wealth of the Catholic Church, and it openly pined for the return of Bolívar, who, though exhausting and not without flaws, was at least a man who provided stability. This faction was led by General Urdaneta, who had been the de facto governor of Bogotá after the expulsion of Santander, but before the inauguration of the new government. On September 5, Urdaneta led a coup that deposed the new President and his ministry, and though Urdaneta was eager to move out from Bolívar’s shadow, there was no play he could make that did not require a public call for the Liberator to come back and once again take power.

As soon as she got the news, Sáenz turned around and came back to the city to once again set up the return of Bolívar. A delegation representing Urdaneta made a trip down the river and found Bolívar still stuck in limbo. Trapped in a labyrinth from which he could not escape, the very idea of trying to pick up his dying body and transport it back up the river was absurd. He could barely cross a room these days without exhausting himself. But the physical impediment was perhaps only a final excuse. He said, “I cannot live between rebels and assassins. I refuse to be honored by swine, cannot take comfort in empty victories.” He told the delegation, “No, I will not come back.” More than that, he told Urdaneta to stand down to restore the legitimate government. And to his remaining friends who urged him back into action, he confided: “I am old, sick, tired, disillusioned, besieged, maligned and badly paid, and I ask for nothing more than a good rest and the preservation of my honor. Alas, I don’t think I will find either.”

Suffocating now in the sweltering heat of Cartagena, his friends moved him inland to Barranquilla, but it did little to improve his health or his mood.

It was not just Bogotá that came calling these days while Bolívar hovered outside the graveyard. Though his rivals and enemies in Venezuela had been ascendant in his absence, their final capture of power and punitive exile of Bolívar had done much to undermine support for them in the country. They were as petty and corrupt and inept as the liberals in Bogotá, and across Venezuela, cities and towns agitated for their expulsion and the return of the Liberator. But Bolívar brush these aside too. “You must reconcile yourselves with each other. You must forge a future with each other, but not with me.”

But he knew that this advice was worthless. They would never work together. They never had worked together. They never would work together. To General Flores, who had once been his subordinate but was now President of Ecuador, Bolívar wrote the last great entry of the Bolivarian canon: The Cartagena Manifesto, the Letter from Jamaica, the Angostura Address, all the constitutions that he had written. It had now finally come down to this, quote:

“One, America is ungovernable. Two, he who serves revolution plows the sea. Three, all one can do in America is leave it. Four, the country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color. Five, once we are devoured by all manner of crime and reduced to a frenzy of violence, no one, not even the Europeans, will want to subjugate us. Six, and finally, if mankind could revert to its primitive state it would be here in America in her final hour.”

Bolívar had never been a starry eyed idealist about the prospects for South America. He had always been aware of his country’s flaws, but from birth he had believed those flaws ultimately surmountable. It would be hard it would take both cunning and brute strength, but like the Andes, South America’s problems were surmountable. But he believed this no more. He offered Flores a final bit of personal advice he said:

“Avenge Sucre’s murder then get out while you can.”

For Bolívar, the time to get out while he could now finally seem to be at hand. A Bolivarian General of long standing loyalty was in charge of the defense of the northwest coast of Colombia and when Bolívar wrote him asking for a few supplies, this man dropped everything and took Bolívar under his personal care and protection. He not only procured the requested supplies but found a competent French physician and dispatched him to assess and treat Bolívar. Then he arranged for a ship to transport the Liberator to far more comfortable lodgings in a mansion in the town of Santa Marta, a little port tucked away in a safe harbor on the Colombian coast. There, Bolívar would be able to recuperate once and for all and then finally sail for London. But when Bolívar arrived in Santa Marta in early December 1813 it was clear to everyone that Bolívar had, yes, been brought to the point of his final departure, but his destination would not be London, it would instead be the Elysian Fields.

In Santa Marta, Bolívar was tended by the French doctor and also an American surgeon who happened to be in town. It was pretty clear the Liberator was dying of tuberculosis and that the end was fast approaching. He was too tired to move but too sick to sleep. He did not eat and mostly lived in a feverish half-dream. He was moved a few miles inland to a beautiful sugar plantation and there lay on his deathbed. On December 9, he slipped into a final fever sinkhole and his body was now ready to die, but his will yet persisted. Bolívar’s will had never been of his own making. It was an energy that he did not consciously create but instead had merely harnessed it on behalf of revolution and glory, and even now, here at the end it refused to just let him die. 

He lingered for a day, and then another and then another, and then a week had passed. In a moment of fleeting lucidity he dictated a few final thoughts. He said:

“Colombians, you have witnessed my efforts to launch liberty where tyranny once reigned. I have labored selflessly sacrificing my fortune and my peace of mind. When it became clear that you doubted my motives I resigned my command. My enemies have toyed with your confidence, destroyed what I hold sacred my reputation and my love of liberty. They have made me their victim and hounded me to my grave. I forgive them. As I depart your midst, my love for you impels me to make known my last wishes. I aspire to no other glory than the consolidation of Colombia. If my death can heal and fortify the union, I go to my tomb in peace.”

On December 17, 1830, the labored breathing of Simone Bolivar finally slipped from inaudible whisper to silent calm. The Liberator was dead.

Word of the death of Simón Bolívar spread out from Santa Marta and was greeted by either relief, joy, dread or sorrow, depending on the ears that it hit. Concerned that Bolívar never seemed to leave the country or come back to Bogotá, Manuela Sáenz was on the road to Santa Monica to rejoin him when she was stopped by messengers coming the other way. Now, she had convinced herself that the stories of Bolívar’s deteriorating condition were exaggerated lies promulgated by his enemies. And it took a few staggered moments to face the fact that she had already never seen him again. But in typical defiant fury, she stated boldly that “in life I love Bolívar and in death I worship him.”

But for the moment, few shared her stubborn adoration. So, she became the steward of a positive memory of Bolívar that had now been overwhelmed by the image of a hypocritical tyrant. She managed to live in Colombia for another two years, but the inevitable return of Santander forced her out of the country. She spent time first in Jamaica and then attempted to return home to Quito, but Ecuador refused her attempt to cross the border. So she was forced to instead sail for Peru. Not welcomed in Lima nor with the means to fund a life there, the Liberatress found a final stop in Paita, a small port on the Peruvian coast just south of Guayaquil. There she set up shop as a tobacco merchant, an English translator, and a composer of letters for illiterate sailors. She faded into impoverished obscurity, but had enough to take in an utterly senile Simón Rodríguez when the old man hobbled back into her life in the 1850s, and she took care of Bolívar’s old tutor in his final years.

Manuela Sáenz died of diphtheria in November of 1856, with almost nobody remembering who she was or what she had once been. And it took another century at least for her name to return to the story that she had played so prominent a part of. The authorities in Ecuador that had refused Sáenz’s return was an unstable government shared by the founder of Ecuador, Juan Jose Flores, and a fierce rival whose name I’m not going to trouble you with because we’re about to leave South America behind. The two of them vied for, shared, and split power off and on for the first few decades after independence. And as had been distressingly common both during and after the revolution, power was defined by powder and steel, politics a sport of blood.

Flores was forced into exile, and then he returned and forced his enemies into exile, because that’s where it went everywhere in post independent South America. Flores never could heed Bolívar’s advice to get out while he could. Men never can quite believe that they are not indispensable or bound to finally win in the end.

When word reached Venezuela of the Liberator’s death, there was relief from the conservative criollo who had now ensconced themselves in power under the protection of José Antonio Páez. The rich criollo and the Llaneros warlord refused to even allow the return of Bolívar’s bones, afraid that even the ghost of the Liberator might somehow defeat them. 

Always the key to Venezuela, Páez now strode forward as truly the most prominent of the revolutionary caudillos. The man who had once been an illiterate, penniless servant of a slave, was elected President of Venezuela in 1830 and served in that office soften on for the next 18 years. But even when he was not technically President, Páez was the overwhelming power behind the puppets in Venezuela elected to run the country.

Twelve years after Bolivar’s death, the fears of his ghost began to subside, and Páez decided he could afford to recloak himself in the Bolivarian legacy. In 1842, Páez initiated the process of disinterring Bolívar’s bones and bringing them home for a proper burial.

But though Páez was the predominant power in Venezuela, that did not mean that the other caudillos who had once fought with the Liberator were done aiming at personal power. Santiago Mariño, the man who had once been Bolívar’s equal in the early days of the revolution and then his ever disloyal subordinate, led a revolt against Páez in 1835. The revolt failed, which forced Mariño out of the country, but he returned in 1848 and led another revolt that forced Páez into exile. But then another decade passed, and another revolt allowed Páez to return in 1858, and he served as President again from 1861 to 1863, before you guessed it, being forced into exile again. Like I say, this is how it goes all over.

So rather than spending his last days in the rural Llanos that he knew so well, where men like him sat on skulls and slept on horseback, José Antonio Páez, the Centaur of the Plains, spent the final decade of his life in the exact opposite surroundings. He made a home in exile in New York City, where he was a colorful, if eccentric member of society, and where he died in 1873.

Aside from Páez, the only other man in the story of Grand Colombia who matches his stature is Francisco de Paula Santander. And really it was the three of them, Bolívar, Páez, Santander, who formed the critical trinity of the failed country. Their contentious and occasionally brilliant blend of rivalry and partnership had first founded Grand Colombia and then defined its failure.

Santander had wound up in Europe after being booted after the assassin attempts of 1828. But the death of Bolívar was all the signal he needed to return. He came home to Colombia in 1833 and promptly ensured that the demon woman, Manuela Sáenz, was ejected from his country. Then he sat about restoring himself to his rightful place in Bogotá. A new new new constitutional government elected him president in 1832, and he served until 1837, trying to restore all the laws and institutions that Bolívar had tried to dismantle in his absence.

No longer quite as committed to free trade principles that flooded the country with cheap foreign imports, which destroyed home manufacturing, he tried a more protectionist approach, but with only limited success. Everything in South America always seems to be defined by those words: limited success.

Though Santander would die in 1840 at the age of just 47, after 30 years of revolutionary labor, he did enjoy something that few of his revolutionary brethren enjoyed. He died at home, in his own bed, in his home city.

Now, there’s simply no way to account in any meaningful way for the subsequent 200 years of South American history, but Bolívar’s final depressed vision of the future proved prophetic. “The country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color.” And that seems to about cover it.

Ambitious warlords and treacherous politicians ensured that the nations Bolívar liberated, never really enjoyed stability or unity of purpose. And the same was true across South America as both the remainder of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century, South America was racked by constant strife, foreign wars and civil wars, annexations and counter annexations, revolts, invasions, insurrections, repression, bankruptcy, and then let’s do it all over again.

In a macro way, South America mirrors the course of Haiti, with its government and economy unstable and at the mercy of North American and European merchants, bankers and politicians who saw South America as a resource to be exploited rather than a land of coequal partners in the project of Western civilization. 

And speaking of Haiti, despite Bolívar steadfastly maintaining his promise to Pétion to ensure that the South American Revolution meant freedom for the slaves, slavery was only outlawed after long periods of foot dragging. It was not until the 1840’s, 50’s, and 60’s that slavery was once and for all abolished. And despite the promise of racial equality and the rhetoric of a raceless society that still exists today, no one missed that all the wealth was held by the heirs of the white criollo and all political offices dominated by their sons and then their grandsons, and then their great grandsons. A fact that persisted deep into the 20th century. And it wasn’t really until now that men with Amerindian blood, for example, were first able to crack into the highest rungs of leadership.

There are no races in South America, okay, but the face of power always seems to look the same.

Overall of this history, now hung Bolívar who for about the first decade after his death remained the hated hypocrite of recent living memory. But as the years passed, his earlier exploits were remembered with more clarity and his later conduct now seen in a clearer light. Particularly that in his final years he had enemies who had been eager to paint him with as black a brush as possible.

So within about a generation Simón Bolívar transformed into the Simón Bolívar that is frankly still recognizable today, a somewhat nebulous revolutionary deity. A face, a name, a few battles and a statue. He’s everywhere in South America. He’s all over North America. You can find him everywhere in Europe. More than any other single man, he represents the entire process of South American independence. And without question, he is now mostly remembered as a romantic hero of an adventurous age. The details of the man himself little remembered or even needed. And in this way too, he is like Washington, mythologized to the point of abstraction.

But I hope that as we’ve slogged our way along with him now over the past 27 episodes, across mountains and grasslands and through deserts and freezing cold, in the city and in the country, in victory and in defeat, aiming for glory, getting it, losing it and then winning it again, that we can appreciate him as a man riding through difficult times trying to take the world he had inherited and turn it into a world that he dreamed of.

And even if the project in the end only met with those fateful words: limited success, he had done the one thing he had set out to do, he had liberated his country.

Now, through all of this, Simón Bolívar had been honored to maintain a sporadic correspondence with a hero from the previous generation of revolutionary heroes. Having left his own trials behind for a life of relaxed retirement, the old Marquis de Lafayette was himself honored to write and receive letters from the liberator of South America. The youthful exuberance of Lafayette’s early years never had been crushed, not by the French Revolution, not by an Austrian prison. Lafayette thrilled at the exploits of Bolívar and his fellow South Americans and always encouraged them to think of themselves as the heirs to the project that he himself had helped begin in the United States so many years ago.

This mutual admiration peaked in the mid 1820s after independence had been won and Lafayette gifted Bolívar a pair of pistols alleged to have been owned by Washington himself. But as Bolívar kept writing and as he became more and more autocratic Lafayette, too soured on the Liberator. And among the letters Bolívar received while he was dying in 1830, one came in from Lafayette which curtly chided him for the embrace of a lifetime presidency and urged him to reconcile with Santander, the man who Bolívar believed not without good reason had just tried to kill him.

This rebuke from Lafayette made a cold Bolívar turn yet colder. And they were the last words he ever heard from the Hero of Two Worlds.

But though it’s always fun to wallow in Bolívar’s miseries at the end of his life, that’s not why I told you about that letter. That letter was dated June 1, 1830, when Lafayette was living on a sprawling estate under the obnoxious but not directly threatening rule of King Charles X of France. Less than two months after writing this letter to Bolívar, Lafayette found himself suddenly thrust back into the tumult of revolution. As the pressures that had been building under King Charles finally exploded at the end of July 1830.

Lafayette’s revolutionary career had one final chapter. And when I returned from my break, the whirlwind of edits on The Storm Before The Storm hopefully behind me, I will come back to man the hastily erected barricades in Paris, topple the Bourbons once and for all, and replace them with Orléans branch of the family, completing what many suspected way back in 1789 had been the original design of the French Revolution.

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