Simón Bolívar

Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco (24 July 1783 – 17 December 1830) was a Venezuelan military officer and statesman who led what are currently the countries of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela to independence from the Spanish Empire. He is known colloquially as El Libertador, or the Liberator of America.

Bolívar was born in Caracas in the Captaincy General of Venezuela into a wealthy family of American-born Spaniards (criollo) but lost both parents as a child. He was educated abroad and lived in Spain, as was common for men of upper-class families in his day. While living in Madrid from 1800 to 1802, he was introduced to Enlightenment philosophy and married María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alaysa, who died in Venezuela from yellow fever in 1803. From 1803 to 1805, Bolívar embarked on a Grand Tour that ended in Rome, where he swore to end Spanish rule in the Americas. In 1807, Bolívar returned to Venezuela and promoted Venezuelan independence to other wealthy creoles. When Napoleon's Peninsular War weakened Spanish authority, Bolívar became a zealous combatant and politician in the Spanish American wars of independence.

Bolívar began his military career in 1810 as a militia officer in the Venezuelan War of Independence, fighting Royalist forces for the first and second Venezuelan republics and the United Provinces of New Granada. After Spanish forces subdued New Granada in 1815, Bolívar was forced into exile on Jamaica. In Haiti, Bolívar met and befriended Haitian revolutionary leader Alexandre Pétion. After promising to abolish slavery in Spanish America, Bolívar received military support from Pétion and returned to Venezuela. He established a third republic in 1817, and crossed the Andes to liberate New Granada in 1819. Bolívar and his allies defeated the Spanish in New Granada in 1819, Venezuela and Panama in 1821, Ecuador in 1822, Peru in 1824, and Bolivia in 1825. Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, and Panama were merged into the Republic of Colombia (Gran Colombia), with Bolívar as president there and in Peru and Bolivia.

In his final years, Bolívar became increasingly disillusioned with the South American republics, and distanced from them because of his centralist ideology. He was successively removed from his offices until he resigned the presidency of Colombia and died of tuberculosis in 1830. His legacy is diverse and far-reaching within Latin America and beyond. He is regarded as a hero and national and cultural icon throughout Latin America. The nations of Bolivia and Venezuela (as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela) are named after him, and he has been memorialized all over the world in the form of public art or street names and in popular culture.

Early life and family

Simón Bolívar was born on 24 July 1783 in Caracas, capital of the Captaincy General of Venezuela, the fourth and youngest child of Juan Vicente Bolívar y Ponte and María de la Concepción Palacios y Blanco. He was baptized as Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios on 30 July. The first of Bolívar's family to have emigrated to the Americas was a similarly named minor Spanish governmental official named Simón de Bolívar, who had been a notary in the Spanish Basque region, and who had later arrived in Venezuela in the 1580s. The earlier Simón de Bolívar's descendants had served in the colonial bureaucracy and had married into various wealthy Caracas families over the years. By the time Simón Bolívar was born, the Bolívar family was one of the wealthiest and most prestigious criollo (creole) families in the Spanish Americas.

Simón Bolívar's childhood was described by British historian John Lynch as "at once privileged and deprived." Juan Vicente died of tuberculosis on 19 January 1786, leaving María de la Concepción Palacios and her father, Feliciano Palacios y Sojo, as legal guardians over the Bolívar children's inheritances. Those children – María Antonia (born 1777), Juana (born 1779), Juan Vicente (born 1781), and Simón – were raised separately from each other and their mother, and, following colonial custom, by African house slaves; Simón was raised by a slave named Hipólita whom he viewed as both a motherly and fatherly figure. On 6 July 1792, María de la Concepción also died of tuberculosis. Believing that his family would inherit the Bolívars' wealth, Feliciano Palacios arranged marriages for María Antonia and Juana and, before dying on 5 December 1793, assigned custody of Juan Vicente and Simón to his sons, Juan Félix Palacios and Carlos Palacios y Blanco, respectively. Bolívar came to loathe Carlos Palacios, who had no interest in the boy other than his inheritance.

Education and first journey to Europe: 1793–1802

As a child, Bolívar was notoriously unruly and neglected his studies. Before his mother died, he spent two years under the tutelage of the Venezuelan lawyer Miguel José Sanz at the direction of the Real Audiencia of Caracas, the Spanish court of appeals in Caracas. In 1793, Carlos enrolled Bolívar at a rudimentary primary school run by Venezuelan educator Simón Rodríguez. In June 1795, Bolívar fled his uncle's custody for the house of his sister María Antonia and her husband. The couple sought formal recognition of his change of residence, but the Real Audiencia decided the matter in favor of Palacios, who sent Simón to live with Rodríguez.

After two months there, the Real Audiencia directed that he be returned to the Palacios family home. Bolívar promised the Real Audiencia that he would focus on his education and was subsequently taught full-time by Rodríguez and the Venezuelan intellectuals Andrés Bello and Francisco de Andújar. In 1797, Rodríguez's connection to the pro-independence Gual and España conspiracy forced him to go into exile, and Bolívar was enrolled in an honorary militia force. When he was commissioned as an officer after a year, his uncles Carlos and Esteban Palacios y Blanco decided to send Bolívar to join the latter in Madrid. There, Esteban was friends with Queen Maria Luisa's favorite, Manuel Mallo.

On 19 January 1799, Bolívar boarded the Spanish warship San Ildefonso at the port of La Guaira, bound for Cádiz. He arrived in Santoña, on the northern coast of Spain, in May 1799. A little over a week later, he arrived in Madrid and joined Esteban, who found Bolívar to be "very ignorant." Esteban asked Gerónimo Enrique de Uztáriz y Tovar, a Caracas native and government official, to educate Bolívar. Bolívar moved into Uztáriz's residence in February 1800 and was educated in the Classics, literature, and social studies.

At the same time, Mallo fell out of the Queen's favor and Manuel Godoy, her previous favorite, returned to power. As members of Mallo's faction at court, Esteban was arrested on pretense, and Bolívar was banished from court following a public incident at the Puerta de Toledo over the wearing of diamonds without royal permission. Bolívar also at this time met María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alaysa, the daughter of another wealthy Caracas creole. They were engaged in August 1800, but were separated when the del Toros left Madrid for their summer home in Bilbao. After Uztáriz left Madrid for a government assignment in Teruel in 1801, Bolívar himself left for Bilbao and remained there when the del Toros returned to the capital in August 1801. Early in 1802, Bolívar traveled to Paris while he awaited permission to return to Madrid, which was granted in April.

Return to Venezuela and second journey to Europe: 1802–1805

Bolívar and del Toro, aged 18 and 21 respectively, were married in Madrid on 26 May 1802. The couple boarded the San Ildefonso in La Coruña on 15 June and sailed for La Guaira, where they arrived on 12 July. They settled in Caracas, where del Toro fell ill and died of yellow fever on 22 January 1803. Bolívar was devastated by del Toro's death and later told Louis Peru de Lacroix, one of his generals and biographers, that he swore to never remarry. By July 1803, Bolívar had decided to leave Venezuela for Europe. He entrusted his estates to an agent and his brother and in October boarded a ship bound for Cádiz.

Bolívar arrived in Spain in December 1803, then traveled to Madrid to console his father-in-law. In March 1804, Madrid ordered all non-residents in the city to leave to alleviate a bread shortage brought about by Spain's resumed hostilities with Britain. Over April, Bolívar and Fernando Rodríguez del Toro, a childhood friend and relative of his wife, made their way to Paris and arrived in time for Napoleon to be proclaimed Emperor of the French on 18 May 1804. They rented an apartment on the Rue Vivienne and met with other South Americans such as Carlos de Montúfar, Vicente Rocafuerte, and Simón Rodríguez, who joined Bolívar and del Toro in their apartment. While in Paris, Bolívar began a dalliance with the Countess Dervieu du Villars, at whose salon he likely met the naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, who had traveled through much of Spanish America from 1799 to 1804. Bolívar allegedly discussed Spanish American independence with them.