Hello and welcome to Revolutions.
In August 1813, Simón Bolívar had done the impossible. Less than one year earlier, he had been a miserable exile in Curaçao without any rational hope of a happy ending to his life. But instead of giving up, he instead imagined himself marching triumphantly back into Venezuela at the head of a patriotic army, clearing out the Spaniards and the royalists on his way to the glorious liberation of Caracas.
And then he had done it. In less than a year, he had done it. He had gone from stone-broke exile to conquering hero. Naturally, his status in Caracas skyrocketed from what it had been the last time that he was there. Remember, he had always been kept at arm’s length by the cooler and wiser heads of the city. He had served in neither the Caracas Junta nor the first Venezuelan Congress. And the only way he got that ambassadorship to Britain was by paying for the trip.
When he joined the army of the First Republic, he was commissioned as a mere Colonel and purposefully kept away from the center of the action by Miranda. But now he was the general, the Liberator, and no one could keep him at arm’s length anymore because wherever Bolívar was, that was now the center of the action. And he had gone from tolerated radical to de facto dictator of Venezuela.
Now, if you’ll remember from my reading of the Decree of War to the Death, though, a lot of people took Bolívar at his word when he said, “we are sent to destroy the Spaniards, to protect Americans, and to reestablish the republican governments that form the Federation of Venezuela. The states protected by our arms are once again ruled by their former constitutions and leaders.” So it’s not at all surprising that a lot of people in Venezuela expected the Liberator to reinstate the first Venezuelan constitution in all of its federalist glory. But there was no chance that Bolívar was going to do that. When the reinstated republican governor of the province of Barinas requested the restoration of the constitution, Bolívar said, “No, Venezuela is now ruled from Caracas. The lack of political unity is what got us into this mess, and I am not going to make that same mistake again.”
And Bolívar was not just talking about a unified Venezuela here because no sooner had he arrived in Caracas that he was talking up his vision for joining with New Granada to form a single unified superstate. And this was going to be a long, hard sales pitch that Bolívar would make for the rest of his life, and that nobody would ever really buy. But he would keep making that pitch until the day they finally ran him out of Bogotá for good in 1830.
But though Bolívar could dictate terms to the governor of Barinas and the other provinces of western Venezuela, after all, he had liberated them all and commanded the armies of the west, he could not just dictate terms to the provinces of eastern Venezuela. Those provinces were garrisoned by the armies of Santiago Mariño, and so in the east, it was Mariño’s word that was law, not Bolívar’s. Mariño made it clear that he expected his territories to be independent states within a federalist system. And though Bolívar rejected the idea, there was nothing he could really do to force his centralist vision on Mariño. It’s not like Bolívar could march east and take Mariño down, nor did he really want to. It would have been massively counterproductive. So as the Second Republic got off the ground in the late summer of 1813, the west would be run by Bolivar and the east by Mariño.
Now, if you were going to draw a map of Venezuela in the summer of 1813, things would have looked very favorable for the Second Venezuelan Republic. There was a division between Bolívar and Mariño, yes. But their common enemy, the royalists, had been pushed back to a few isolated enclaves, mostly along the coast, and then in the deep southeast along the Orinoco River. Domingo de Monteverde had shut himself up in Puerto Cabello and refused all offers to come to terms. Further west, the city of Coro continued to be a well-defended base of royalist operations. And it was currently under the command of a Spanish field marshal named Juan Manuel Cajigal, who had taken over for the guy who was supposed to have become Captain General after the fall of the First Republic, a guy named Fernando Miyares.
Now, I mentioned Miyares very briefly two episodes back, but then we just stopped talking about him because it turns out the guy had no backbone. When Monteverde essentially struck out on his own to go conquer Caracas, Miyares made a few feeble attempts to exert authority and then said, “Oh, well, it’s fine,” and he sailed back to Puerto Rico, never to return. Monteverde never did have any official sanction for his campaign or the year he’s now spent as de facto dictator of Venezuela. He had just done it all and dared anybody to tell him not to, though in the end, it turned out not to be Spanish authorities who told him not to, but rather Simón Bolívar.
Now, with things looking pretty good on paper, the now 30-year-old Bolívar established himself in Caracas as a self-proclaimed emergency dictator. He would eventually get around to calling for a representative government to be formed, but for the moment, he was in no great hurry. And in the absence of a functioning constitution or government, Bolívar just ruled.
But though he had a pretty good idea of how to avoid the mistakes of the First Republic, Bolivar was quickly confronted with a dilemma that would allow him to make all new mistakes. So the men and women of the leading families of Caracas came by almost daily to make sure that Bolívar was not planning to turn the world upside down, that the rebellious slaves would all be returned to work, that the uppity pardos would be put back in their place. They wanted him to divert military resources to slave-hunting patrols so that they could all get their haciendas back up and running.
Now, as I said, Bolívar was not and never was a true believer in big white supremacy. But at this point, it seemed more important to him to consolidate support amongst the elite criollo than the lower-class pardos. And this would be a major mistake because the majority of the Venezuelan population, as we’ve said, was not white. And Bolívar did not yet recognize that until the criollos got over themselves, that the republican project was doomed to failure. And his failure to recognize this fact, to mostly go along with what his old friends and neighbors wanted, was the new mistake that would doom the Second Republic.
So that brings us to the men who would prove to be the decisive factor, not just in this early stage of the wars of Venezuelan independence, but at every stage of the wars of Venezuelan independence. Had the conflict remained one that pitted Bolívar and Mariño’s republican forces against the few remaining royalist forces led by Monteverde and Cajigal, I have little doubt that the Second Republic would have survived quite a bit longer than it did. But it did not. And that is because down in the wide-open grasslands that covered most of southern Venezuela, the cowboys of the Llanos were coalescing into gangs that would then merge to become larger bands, that would then merge to become whole armies. And from here on out, whichever side the llaneros are on, that side is going to win.
So I briefly mentioned the Llanos when rolling through the topography of New Granada back in Episode 5.2, and I’ll actually just go ahead and quote myself here to remind you. I said, “The region between the coast and the Orinoco, for example, was just huge stretches of worthless grassland dubbed the Llanos, run through with riverbeds that are flooded out between May and October and bone dry from November to April. The whole swath of territory is filled with roughly one gillion bugs, but no precious metal.”
And then when talking about the economics of Venezuela, I said, “Out in those worthless Venezuelan grasslands, cattle and horses introduced during the early days now roamed in wild herds, and a population of mostly mixed-race cowboys had moved in to make a go of it in hides and meat.” And those cowboys are going to be really super duper majorly important, so don’t forget about them.
Well, I hope you didn’t forget about them because here we are. The cowboys of the Llanos, called the llaneros, roamed the vast plains that stretched to the Brazilian border by the tens of thousands. Many of them had come to this location as vagabonds and hard cases and free spirits who had gone off to escape the rigid social structures of the civilized urban areas. And the Llanos was where the racial caste system was barely acknowledged as practically all llaneros were some version of non-white. They were black or Indian, mestizo, pardo, sambo. Now the owners of the big ranches were, of course, criollo, but these guys were almost uniformly absentee owners, leaving the management of the lands and herds to black, pardo, and mestizo managers. And if anything, out in the Llanos, pure whites were looked down on as soft and weak because the llaneros were a hardy breed who took pride in their ability to endure any hardship. They rode from sun up to sundown. They rode when it was a million degrees and everything was dust and dehydration. They rode when it did nothing but rain for months on end and the entire landscape was flooded out. They endured the bugs. They slept on the ground. The grasslands were not completely lawless, but it was a far more Darwinian existence than in the cities. The weak could not hack it. Only the strong survived. And these cowboys, the llaneros, would prove to be the men who held the fate of Venezuela in their hands.
Now, during the early days of the First and Second Republic, I think it’s fair to say that the llaneros didn’t have much in the way of political consciousness, and most did not ride off into battle in defense of some well-thought-out political agenda. They were not like proto-Zapatistas, the peasant soldiers of the Mexican Revolution, who fought specifically for concrete political and economic reforms. Mostly, it was the promise of plunder and riches and adventure that earned the fluid allegiance of the llaneros. But though it’s fair to say that they did not have revolutionary consciousness, they were still a revolutionary force. I mean, once you have huge armies of mixed-race cavalry riding around who hated the criollos and wanted to humiliate them, kill them, and then take their stuff, I mean, even if it was just greed driving them, all that killing and plundering would have the effect of turning the world upside down.
The first man to recognize the military and political might of the llaneros was, ironically enough, a peninsular, a particularly ruthless peninsular named José Tomás Boves. Boves had been born in northern Spain in 1782, so he’s just about 30 years old at this point and just nine months older than Bolívar. As a teenager, Boves became a pilot, serving on merchant ships that traded between Spain and the Americas. But at some point, and it’s not clear to me when, he got busted in Venezuela for smuggling, and the authorities tossed him into prison. He secured his release only by agreeing to go into exile out into the Llanos. And so he moved down to the small interior city of Calabozo. There he reinvented himself as a merchant and cattle rancher. A charismatic and imposing man with a famously huge head, Boves soon became a leading fixture of Calabozo.
Now, he had tried to join the army of the First Republic, but his request for a command had been rejected by the stuck-up criollos of Caracas. And shortly thereafter, under murky circumstances, he was arrested for treason and tossed in jail, and he was actually slated to be executed. But in May of 1812, Monteverde’s army had swept through and freed him. Boves then joined Monteverde’s army and was rewarded for his service in January 1813 when he was appointed administrator of Calabozo.
But, of course, January 1813 is right when Bolívar was wrapping up the Magdalena campaign and Santiago Mariño was reinvading eastern Venezuela with his 45 true believers. Soon the tide would turn against Monteverde’s royalist regime. But Bolívar’s admirable campaign did not come through Calabozo, nor did Mariño’s forces yet penetrate that far west. So all on his own, Boves began to form a legion of llaneros to fight the forces of the Second Republic.
But Boves and his guys were royalists in name only. Boves kind of hated everybody equally at this point, and his recruitment pitch was about plunder and riches, not God and the King. But Boves himself now bore a special hatred for the aristocratic, racist, soft criollos that ran the Republic. And so when representatives from the Republic came around to begin the process of integrating all Venezuela under the rule of Caracas, Boves made it very clear that they were most unwelcome in Calabozo, and that if that little dandy Bolívar wants a war to the death, he’s going to get it.
So by mid-September 1813, the Second Republic faced a war on two fronts: against the true royalist forces led by Monteverde and Cajigal, operating out of Puerto Cabello and Coro, respectively, and then Boves and his llaneros marauders, gathering around Calabozo, and already riding around on plundering expeditions. They sacked haciendas and estates and any town they came across. So after about an eight-week respite following the conclusion of the admirable campaign, Simón Bolívar went back to war.
In mid-September, Monteverde was reinforced with 1,200 peninsular soldiers sent from Cádiz. And almost as soon as these troops landed, Monteverde staged a breakout from Puerto Cabello. He wanted to go capture Valencia, which lay just about 30 miles due south. Monteverde led 2,000 men out of Puerto Cabello at the end of September, but as they approached Valencia, a 3,000-man Republican army met them at Barbuda on September 30 and decisively blocked Monteverde’s advance. As the royalist forces fell back, the republicans pursued, and a couple of days later, on October 3, they fought a second battle at Las Trincheras, where Monteverde himself was severely wounded. The royalists then fell back all the way to Puerto Cabello in complete defeat.
This debacle convinced the Colonel, who had led the 1,200 reinforcements over from Spain, that the wounded Monteverde was no longer fit for command. So the Colonel took control of Puerto Cabello, and in short order, Monteverde would be getting on a boat to Puerto Rico and from that point be leaving our story entirely. He would remain in Puerto Rico until 1816 and then return permanently to Spain, where he would live until he died in 1832. His year as self-proclaimed dictator of Venezuela would never come back to haunt him because, as we’ll discuss next week, events in Spain were far too tumultuous for anybody to care about Monteverde. And if anything, his vigorous defense of Spanish rule in the Americas earned him accolades, not admonishments.
So it was all sunshine and roses for the republicans on that front of the war. And this would be followed by good news on the other front. To deal with the marauding llaneros, Bolívar sent 2,500 men up to Calabozo under the command of a particularly ruthless character named Vicente Campo Elías. Like his opponent, Boves, Campo Elías was a peninsular. He had been a businessman in the city of Mérida when the revolutionary wave started crashing on Venezuelan shores. And despite being a full-blooded Spaniard, Campo Elías eagerly joined the patriot cause. He was prominent in the independent junta movement and suffered greatly when the First Republic fell as he was targeted for harassment by Monteverde’s agents.
When Bolívar came through Mérida at the outset of the admirable campaign, Campo Elías joined up and took the lead in recruiting others to join Bolívar’s army. And Campo Elías would be one of the staunchest defenders of the war to the death because he was quite famously a Spaniard of the self-loathing variety, and he said that when he was finished killing every Spaniard in Venezuela, he was going to turn his sword on himself.
On October 14, 1813, Campo Elías met Boves’s legion of llaneros outside Calabozo and routed them so decisively that as Boves fled the field, he took with him only 17 men. Campo Elías then took hundreds of prisoners and proceeded to execute every last one of them. And then, as he brought republican rule to Calabozo and the surrounding region, he was ruthless with anyone suspected of royalism. So atrocities committed by each side in these campaigns would soon justify the atrocities committed by the other side until the cycle of atrocities was spinning out of control.
The success of his subordinates against the royalists then induced Bolívar to go out and take personal command of the situation. And what he wanted to do was push west towards the city of Barquisimeto, which, if you draw a line west from republican-held Valencia and south from royalist-controlled Coro, that’s where Barquisimeto is. Bolívar wanted to ensure that all roads back to New Granada were secure, but Field Marshal Cajigal sent out an expedition from Coro to block this attempt. In mid-November, Bolívar was dealt his first defeat. The royalists were fairly well whipped during the battle, but in the attack, Bolívar’s infantry got confused and started to retreat, leaving the royalists free to attack the panicked republicans and drive them off with fairly heavy casualties. Bolívar was so pissed about all this that when the survivors reconvened, he screamed at them and said, “From here on out, you will be called the Nameless Brigade for the shame that you have brought to the patriot cause.”
But that was really the only low point for the whole rest of the year.
Bolívar’s uncle, José Félix Ribas, the hero of the admirable campaign, soundly beat another attempted breakout from Puerto Cabello at the end of November, as both sides maneuvered around each other preparing for the biggest confrontation of the wars to date. That force from Puerto Cabello was supposed to be linking up with units coming down from Coro and an independent Llanero band coming out of the grasslands. But Ribas prevented this linkage, and after sending the royalists back to Puerto Cabello, he turned around to come reinforce Bolívar. The two sides finally squared off near the city of Araure on December 5, and I’ve seen estimates that put the numbers as high as 6,000 per side. But as far as I can tell, it was more like the low estimates of 2,000 infantry and about 1,000 cavalry apiece.
Bolívar and the republicans won the Battle of Araure handily, with major contributions from the Nameless Brigade, who regained their honor and were then redubbed the Victors of Araure by their grateful General.
The Battle of Araure would prove to be the high point of the Second Republic if indeed it could be called a high point at all. Because, much like Miranda before him, Bolívar was not happy that this had descended into a civil war where Americans were fighting Americans. I mean, one of the whole points of the decree of war to the death was to prevent this kind of intra-American fighting. But when Bolívar and his generals looked across the lines, they saw native foreign Venezuelans fighting them to the death. The Second Republic, and at this point, we’re still talking about the personal military dictatorship of Simón Bolívar, had failed to convince the vast majority of the population that it was worth their allegiance.
Aware that his six months of authoritarian rule was probably eroding as much support for the Republic as it was building, Bolívar convened a public assembly at a church in Caracas on January 2, 1814, ostensibly to step down from office. He stood before the assembled crowd and said, “I am not your sovereign and was never meant to be. The time has come for you to elect a representative government.” He also said that though he was flattered by the title Liberator, the people of Venezuela should not forget that he was just one man and that the committed officers and common soldiers were the true liberators of Venezuela.
And this is something Bolívar is really good at. He was egotistical, sure, but he was not the guy who took all the credit and pretended like nobody else existed. For the whole run of his campaigns, Bolívar is always going to make sure that the men who did the work and the individual officers who had rendered some signal service were duly recognized. I mean, there is a reason he developed such a loyal following. And even here, as he is saying, “I want to resign as supreme commander,” and the people wrote, “No, you must stay.” Bolívar said, “There are more illustrious citizens than I. General Mariño, Liberator of the east, now there is a leader worthy of directing your destinies.” But the people wouldn’t hear of it, and despite his best efforts, they would not let Bolívar resign. Now, the likeliest explanation for this whole song and dance, of course, was that Bolívar wanted to shore up his dictatorship in a way that made it look like he was trying to give up his dictatorship. And the suggestion of Mariño was a calculated gambit to put on record the people’s rejection of Mariño.
With his rule effectively re-ratified, Bolívar returned to the war with renewed vigor, but he soon discovered that he was fighting a war against an enemy he could not defeat: demographics. He may be the darling of Caracas, but it seemed like everywhere else, friends of the Republic were few and far between. Practically the entire mixed-race population of Venezuela was openly siding with the royalists, the Decree of War to the Death or not. And out in the Llanos, the temporarily beaten José Tomás Boves had gone right back to recruiting, now more zealous than ever. On November 1, 1813, he had put out a general call to the cowboys to join him in a vast anti-white army of plunder. “Let’s kill those who hate us and take their stuff.” By January 1813, Boves had joined with another generous warlord named Tomás Morales, and their combined forces now numbered some 7,000. As they thundered around killing and plundering, they soon earned the name that would define them for all of history: the Legions of Hell.
Now, of those 7,000, only about 150 could be counted as white. So this really was shaping up now to be a full-blown race war. And there were just more non-whites in Venezuela than there were whites. The deep well of Llaneros, hankering for plunder and a chance to vent some wrath on the haughty criollos, would prove to be nearly inexhaustible. And at their peak, the Legions of Hell would number some 20,000. Meanwhile, Bolívar was now having major trouble recruiting to fill his own ranks. For every man the enemy lost, they could replace, no problem, sometimes with two or three more. For every man Bolívar lost, Bolívar lost to man.
And this was to say nothing of the problem of armaments. Bolívar had run the Magdalena campaign and the Admirable campaign basically with guns stolen from royalists along the way. Venezuela had no native arms factories. Everything had to now be purchased. So Bolívar begged and pleaded with the British to sell him guns. But they were still allied with the Spanish regency against Napoleon and refused to endanger that relationship. The United States, meanwhile, was continuing to stay as neutral as possible, and they would not officially sanction gun sales either. So Bolívar had to rely on infrequent black-market purchases.
Meanwhile, the royalists had no such problems. The forces down along the coast always had a lifeline of arms back through Spanish channels. And the llaneros of the interior – they didn’t even fight with guns. The signature weapon of the Legions of Hell was the sharpened lance. The men would hold these lances straight while hanging their whole bodies off to one side of the horse so you couldn’t get a good shot at them, and then they’d smash into you at full speed. The unprotected republican infantry trying to reload their early 19th-century guns would suffer atrocious casualties under these charges.
So the war got going again in earnest in February 1814, and by then Bolívar was already well aware of his demographics problem and was begging Santiago Mariño to send him some reinforcements. But Mariño would drag his feet coming to Bolívar’s aid. He kept saying, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll send some guys.” But then he just didn’t. And Mariño almost waited too long.
In early February, Boves and the Legions of Hell rode north and were planning to push their way into Caracas itself. But in order to pass from the grasslands into the valleys that would take them down to Caracas, they had to get through a sharp spine of low mountains. And the best place to do that was at a pass called La Puerta, which translates in this case as “the gate” or “the door.” Bolívar ordered good old Campo Elías to hold La Puerta, and Campo Elías got there just ahead of the Legions of Hell. But he only had 1,500 men with him and did not stand much of a chance. On February 3, 1814, the Legions crashed the gate, and after an intense fight, Campo Elías was forced to retreat, leaving 1,000 men dead in the field.
With La Puerta cleared, Boves divided his men into three columns, which turned out to be not such a great idea because though the republicans couldn’t muster forces to take all of the legions at once, they could now pick off each column one by one. One of the three columns headed down to the town of La Victoria, where José Félix Ribas conscripted locals to fight for the Republic, including about 100 kids as young as twelve years old from a local school. And though they fought bravely, Ribas would have been overrun at La Victoria had not Campo Elías and the remnants of his army arrived just in the nick of time.
With La Victoria saved, Bolívar then ordered Ribas to go defend the city of Ocumare. But when Ribas got there, he found that the Legions of Hell under General Morales had already passed through. Ocumare was a body-strewn ghost town.
But Ribas did make a fortuitous discovery. General Morales had dropped a satchel full of letters, one of which made it clear that royalist prisoners in Caracas were planning a mass uprising. Ribas forwarded this intelligence to Bolívar, prompting Bolívar to make a very serious decision. He sent word to the man he had left in charge of Caracas. He said, “Without delay and without exception, you will put to the sword every Spaniard in the dungeon or hospital.” Between dungeon and hospital, that was about 1,000 men. And from February 14 to February 16, 1814, these thousand men were systematically corralled out onto a plain near the city and beheaded one by one. This was the black mark on Bolívar’s record I was talking about when we discussed Bolívar’s shame and having lost Puerto Cabello, how he did not want to make the mistake of letting prisoners get the drop on him again. And so he ordered this mass indiscriminate execution. War to the death.
While Ribas had stymied the advance of one column of the Legions of Hell, Simón Bolívar was grappling with the rest and, against his instincts, was now forced into a defensive crouch. And as he was ordering the murder of all those prisoners, he was himself busy setting up what looked an awful lot like a last stand at one of his own estates in San Mateo. After leaving Ocumare, Ribas and Campo Elías joined Bolívar at the newly fortified estate at San Mateo. And when Boves launched a full frontal attack, on February 28, the republicans were able to successfully beat him off.
The whole month of March then turned into the siege of San Mateo, with Boves and the Legions of Hell unable to crack their way in. But Bolívar and the republicans running out of time, ammunition, and supplies. And then they got hit with the demoralizing news on March 17 when Campo Elías was killed in a skirmish.
Boves then launched two more major attacks on March 20 and March 25 to try to break the siege. And on March 25th, he was nearly victorious. His guys fought their way into the main house of the estate where all the patriot powder was housed. But rather than allow the house to fall to the enemy, the republican captain in charge lit the powder, blowing up the house and everyone inside, including himself in the process. This sudden explosion turned the tide back to the republicans, and the Legions of Hell were once again driven off.
But Bolívar’s forces were now in desperate straits here. I mean, it was just a matter of time before they got beat. But that is when Santiago Mariño and 4,300 men finally, finally arrived from the east to help. With Mariño’s fresh army on the way, Boves withdrew rather than get caught between two enemy forces.
The arrival of Mariño staved off defeat and temporarily halted the advance of the Legions of Hell on Caracas. But this was all only temporary. Boves retired back to Calabozo to recruit more men. And then both sides spent most of April regrouping.
Field Marshal Cajigal finally left Coro in mid-April, headed for Valencia. His plan was to link up with Boves to form a single united front. But it was becoming very clear that Boves was not super interested in taking orders from anyone. So in mid-May, the republicans, now combined under the shared leadership of Bolívar and Mariño, went out looking for Cajigal and found him at Carabobo, where the royalists were stalling, hoping that Boves would come and back them up. But Boves never came. And on May 28, Bolívar and Mariño won a smashing victory against the royalists in the pouring rain. Cajigal was forced to flee on foot with only a few of his staff to a safe spot way out on the Orinoco River.
But though this was a great victory, do not confuse this Battle of Carabobo with the more famous Battle of Carabobo that will come around in 1821 and which would actually finally pave the way for Venezuelan independence.
But despite the great victory at Carabobo, the republican forces were still weak, and the Legions of Hell were coming back stronger than ever. As I said, for the republicans, every bullet fired and man lost was one less bullet and one less man. Boves, meanwhile, seemed to be drawing from an inexhaustible supply of both. And then, in June, Bolívar made a fatal error. With Boves looking like he was going to make another push through La Puerta, Mariño put himself in a strong defensive position guarding the gate. But Bolívar, remember, is not a man who likes to be on the defensive. So he arrived on the scene with reinforcements and was keen to go after the enemy.
On June 15, 1814, the second Battle of La Puerta began, with the republicans holding a defensive line for quite a while. But then Bolívar surveyed the enemy and said, “Look, there’s not that many of them. I think we can go take them.” Except Boves was keeping, like, half his army out of sight. So when the republicans came out onto the plains, they were set upon and pretty well crushed. The second Battle of La Puerta was catastrophic. The republican forces were shattered, and Bolívar and Mariño had to run all the way back to Caracas.
Boves, meanwhile, was now able to move unimpeded. He first secured the long-targeted city of Valencia by promising the residents leniency if they let him in. And unfortunately, they believed him. The night he entered, he threw a ball and demanded that the women of the city dance for him or he’d kill their husbands, their brothers, and their sons. And so the women danced, and when they were done, Boves killed everyone anyway.
Meanwhile, down in Caracas, total panic had set in. The Legions of Hell were coming, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. Even Bolívar could see the futility of resistance. Mariño said that they would all find refuge east in the city of Barcelona. And so Bolívar ordered every piece of gold and silver in the city stripped and loaded into 24 trunks. Then, on July 7, 1814, he and the 1,200 soldiers he still had left said, “We are going to Barcelona, and anyone who wants to come with us, let’s go.”
Now, it’s hard to tell what the population of Caracas was at this point, especially with the Caracas earthquake having already devastated the population. But the vast majority of the inhabitants of Caracas followed Bolívar. Only about 4,000 elected to stay behind. For the next 23 days, a column of refugees from Caracas marched towards Barcelona, and that march turned into a running nightmare of dehydration, starvation, exposure, and disease. Many people just dropped dead along the way. As a grim Simón Bolívar could only watch helplessly from his horse and then just keep riding.
Boves entered Caracas on July 16 and he was greeted by those who stayed behind, who fell into roughly four groups: religious types like priests and nuns, peninsulares assured of safety because they were royalists, blacks and pardos who knew Boves would treat them well, and finally, suicidal patriots who decided to die in their homes rather than run. But the capture of Caracas marked Boves’ break with the royalist cause. He had always been in it for himself and his own men. So Cajigal tried to issue orders, and Boves just blew him off. And it soon became clear that if you were white and still in Caracas, you were dead. It didn’t matter who you were. Blacks and pardos were spared. Then they were promoted and put in charge of the city while whites were located, robbed, and killed. So while there was no formal list of political principles for which the Legions of Hell fought, they were indeed a revolutionary army.
Thanks to the inexhaustible supply of new recruits for the Legions of Hell, when Boves captured Caracas, a whole separate llaneros army under General Morales was able to ride east and track down the fleeing republicans. And by then, the republicans realized how desperate their situation really was.
When they finally arrived in Barcelona in early August, they found the city in panic. Residents jammed the shoreline, tossing their belongings onto every boat they could find. This was not a place of safe refuge. This was an evacuation zone. Now, most of the bedraggled Caracas refugees stopped walking in Barcelona. But a few of the more intrepid and stronger followed Mariño and the 24 trunks of treasure further east to the city of Cumaná.
Bolívar himself, meanwhile, rode out south with what few forces he had left, joining them with some of Mariño’s existing garrisons near the small town of Aragua, where they hoped to halt the charge of Morales’ branch of the Legions of Hell. Numbers are always tricky in these wars, and I’ve seen Bolívar’s forces reported as low as 2,500 and as high as 6,000. But Morales’ army is always numbered at 8,000 strong. The Legions came roaring into the valley on August 17, and the next day battle was joined. Bolívar’s forces were crushed, sustaining casualties well over 50% and forcing Bolívar and a few other senior officers to flee at high speed for Cumaná. After all the killing at the Battle of Aragua, Morales moved on to the town of Aragua, sacked it, and allegedly left 3,000 dead civilians in his wake.
The Second Republic was now all but finished. But there was still one more little tragic, kind of pathetic act to play out before the end. When Bolívar reached Cumaná, he learned that Mariño had loaded the all-important 24 trunks of treasure onto some ships run by an Italian captain. But now the Italian captain had taken the trunks hostage. Mariño himself had gone aboard one of the ships to demand their return, but he never came back. So then Bolívar went aboard, but while he was arguing that everyone and everything should be released, the Italian captain ordered his ships to sail. And here great bitter confusion set in amongst the republicans.
Now, Bolívar’s version of the story is that he and Mariño finally got the Italian captain to agree to release most of the treasure as long as he could keep some of it. This business finally settled, the ship headed for the offshore island of Margarita, which was still held by a republican garrison led by Manuel Piar. But by then, Piar had heard that Mariño and Bolívar had loaded up all the treasure on some ships and sailed away, and not unreasonably thought that they were trying to skip town. I mean, this is kind of exactly what Miranda had done. So when the ships approached Margarita, Piar opened fire, forcing them to turn around and head back to Cumaná.
But when the ships returned to Cumaná, Bolívar and Mariño discovered that everyone there also thought that they had been skipping town. José Félix Ribas was furious at his nephew for apparently abandoning him and the republican cause. So he arrested both Commanders in Chief. Mariño, he threw in jail, and Bolívar, he stripped of command, and then Ribas communicated with Piar to keep up the republican war effort under new leadership. Their respective chiefs deposed Piar would now run the east, while Ribas ran the west. If they won the war, that was.
So, on September 8, 1814, Ribas put both Bolívar and Mariño on a boat and said, “Get the hell out of here. You guys are done.” So once again, Simón Bolívar was headed off into exile, having failed to defend the Second Republic, just as he had failed to defend the First Republic. But as miserable as he may have felt, Bolívar could once again count himself extremely lucky. Because just hours after the ship sailed, Manuel Piar arrived in Cumaná with a company of riflemen, planning to execute both Bolívar and Mariño for treason.
So the rapid-fire changes of fortune in the wars of Spanish American independence had once again left Bolívar in exile and Venezuela in the hands of royalists. Utterly undeterrable, though, next week Bolívar will pick himself up off the mat once again. He will sail for Cartagena, where once before he had risen like a phoenix from the ashes. And where he hoped to repeat the trick.
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