Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

The Colombian caudillo did not ignore the perils of the undertaking; the Spanish troops were good fighters; they had been victorious, and were not without resources in the Sierra; and the Peruvian and Colombian allies were inferior to them in experience and cohesion. "This matter of the war in Peru demands an enormous effort and inexhaustible resources," he wrote to Sucre. Impelled by his genius, he accepted the offer of the Peruvians, for he did not forget that "the loss of Peru would necessarily involve that of the whole of the south of Colombia." The Congress of Lima invested him with "the supreme military authority throughout the territory of the Republic." Two great battles, Junin and Ayacucho (1824), assured the independence of America. At Junin Bolivar led a cavalry charge which decided the day, which was followed by a hand-to-hand fight, not a single musket-shot being heard above the ring and clash of the sabres. Sucre was the hero of Ayacucho: it was he who devised the admirable plan of battle. The patriots were 6,000, the Spaniards 9,000. The Spanish artillery was superior to that of the allies. The enemy opened fire, descending the hillsides; the two lines of battle drew together. Night brought a truce; the officers of the two armies chatted in friendly groups before the coming conflict. On the morning of the 9th of December a charge of cavalry under General Cordova scattered the Spanish battalions: whereupon the royalist reserve came into action. The left wing of the allies wavered, but was reinforced, and the victory was complete. The Spanish army capitulated, its generals surrendered, and Peru was abandoned by its ancient rulers. Bolivar praised the heroism of Sucre, "the father of Ayacucho, the saviour of the sons of the sun," and Lima lauded the Liberator to the skies, proclaimed him the father and saviour of Peru, and elected him permanent President. After these victories the capture of Potosi by the troops of Sucre and the reduction of the fortress of Callao, where the penates of Spain were guarded, terminated Bolivar's magnificent career. His last years were melancholy, like a tropical twilight. Paez and Santander revolted against him; he was given the supreme power and deprived of it; he was offered a crown, and was the victim of conspiracy. The Liberator died, abandoned, a tragic figure, at Santa Marta, on the deserted Colombian coast, like Napoleon at St. Helena, at the age of forty-seven, on the 17th of December, 1830.

Statesman and general, Bolivar was even greater in the assembly than on the field of battle. Equal to Sucre and San Martin as tactician, as politician he was the greatest of all the caudillos. He was the thinker of the Revolution; he drafted statutes, analysed the social condition of the democracies he liberated, and foretold the future with the precision of a seer. The enemy of ideologists, like the great First Consul, an idealist and a romantic, a lover of syntheses in the region of ideas and of politics, he never forgot the rude environment of his deeds. His Latin dreams were tempered by a Saxon realism. A disciple of Rousseau, he wished "the will of the people to be the only power existing on the face of the earth"; but in the face of an anarchical democracy he sought uneasily for a moral power. In 1823 he thought that the sovereignty of the people was not illimitable: "justice is its basis, and perfect utility sets a term to it." A republican—"since Napoleon has been a monarch," he said, he who so admired Napoleon, "his glory seems to me a gleam from Hell"—he wished, despite the servile admiration of his friends, to be neither a Napoleon nor an Iturbide. He disdained all imperial pomp; he wished to be merely the soldier of the Independence. He made a profound analysis of the failings of a future monarchy in the old Spanish colonies. At the Conference of Guayaquil (1822) San Martin represented the monarchical tendency, Bolivar the republican principle. Their opposition was irreconcilable, said Mitre, the Argentine historian, for one was working for the Argentine hegemony and the other for the Colombian: the first respected the individuality of the separate peoples and would only accept intervention in exceptional cases; the second wished to unite the various peoples according to a "plan of absorption and monocracy."[[2]] This antagonism called for a superior point of agreement, a synthesis, for the Colombian doctrine brought with it as a reaction the premature formation of unstable democracies, and the Argentine theory favoured indifference, egoism, and the isolation of nations united by race, tradition, and history.

The genius, aristocratic pride, and ambition of Bolivar impelled him towards autocracy. He exercised a dictatorship and believed in the benefits of a permanent presidency. "In republics," he stated, "the executive power should be of the strongest, for all conspire against it; while in monarchies the legislative power should be supreme, for all conspire in favour of the monarch. Hence the necessity of giving a republican magistrate more authority than a constitutional prince." He did not forget the dangers of an autocratic presidency; but he feared anarchy, "the ferocious hydra of discordant anarchy," which grew like a noxious vegetation, stifling his triumphant work. He regarded with amazement the contradictions of American life: disorder leads to dictatorship, and the latter is the enemy of democracy. "The permanence of power in a single individual," writes the Liberator, "has often marked the end of democratic governments." Yet "indefinite liberty, absolute democracy, are snares in which all republican hopes come to grief." Liberty without licence, authority without tyranny: such was the ideal of Bolivar. In vain did he struggle single-handed amid ambitious generals and a disordered people; before he died he understood the vanity of his efforts. "Those who have served the cause of the Revolution," he cried, "have ploughed the sand.... If it were possible that a portion of the world should return to its primitive chaos, such would be the last phase of America." He denounced the moral poverty of these new republics with the severity of a Hebrew prophet. "There is no faith in America, neither in men nor in nations. Their treaties are waste paper; their constitutions are paper and ink; their elections are battles; liberty is anarchy, and life a torment."

This pessimism, the credo of his maturity, was born of his implacable analysis of American failings. Bolivar understood the original traits and the vices of the new continent. "We are," he said, "a small human family; we possess a world of our own, surrounded by vast oceans; new in almost every art and science, although, in a certain sense, old in the usages of civil society. The present state of America recalls the fall of the Roman Empire, when each part formed a distinct political system, in conformity with its interests, its situation, or its corporations." "We shall not see, nor the generation following us," he wrote in 1822, "the triumph of the America we are founding: I regard America as in the chrysalis. There will be a metamorphosis in the physical life of its inhabitants; there will finally be a new caste, of all the races, which will result in the homogeneity of the people."

While scholars were constructing Utopias, imitating, in their provisional statutes, the federal constitution of the United States, and legislating for an ideal democracy, Bolivar was studying the social conditions of America. "We are not Europeans," he wrote, "nor Indians either; but a kind of half-way species between the aborigines and the Spaniards; American by birth, European by right, we find ourselves forced to dispute our titles of possession with the natives, and to maintain ourselves in the country which saw our birth in spite of the opposition of invaders: so that our case is all the more extraordinary and complicated." "Let us be careful not to forget that our race is neither European nor North American; but rather a composite of America and Africa, than an emanation from Europe, since Spain herself ceased to be European by virtue of her African [Arab] blood, her institutions, and her character."

The Liberator proposed political institutions suited to a continent which in its territory and race and history was original. He was in favour of a tutelary authority: "The American States need the care of paternal governments which will heal the wounds and sores of despotism and war." He loathed federalism and the division of power: "Let us abandon the federal forms of government: they are not suited to us. Such a form of society is a regularised anarchy, or rather a law which implicitly prescribes the necessity of dissociating and ruining the State in all its members.... Let us abandon the Triumvirate of the Executive Power, by concentrating it in the person of a President, and conferring on him a sufficient authority to enable him to maintain himself and contend against the inconveniences inherent in our recent situation." He taught valuable lessons in public wisdom: "To form a stable Government we must have the basis of a national spirit which has for its object a uniform inclination towards two capital points: to moderate the general will and limit the public authority. The blood of our fellow-citizens presents many diversities: let us mix it in order to unify it; our constitution has divided its powers: let us confound them in order to unite them.... We ought to induce immigration of the peoples of North America and Europe, in order that they may settle here and bring us their arts and sciences. These advantages, an independent government, free schools, and intermarriage with Europeans and Anglo-Americans, will totally change the character of the country, and will render it well-informed and prosperous.... We lack mechanics and agriculturists, and it is these that the country has need of to ensure advancement and progress." In Bolivar's writings are to be found the best programmes of political and social reform for America; he was the first sociologist of these romantic democracies.

Carabobo and Junin were his great military triumphs; the letter from Jamaica (1815), the constitutional project of Angostura (1819), the statute of Bolivia (1825), and the Congress of Panama (1826) were his most admirable political creations. To unite the American nations in a permanent assembly; to oppose Anglo-Saxon power by Latin force, the necessary factor of Continental equilibrium; to labour in favour of unity and synthesis: such was the aim of the abortive Assembly of Panama. The letter from Jamaica was a prophecy which the docile reality was to accomplish during the century. "From the nature of the different regions of the country, from the wealth, population, and character of the Mexicans," said the Liberator, "I imagine that they will attempt in the beginning to establish a representative Republic in which the Executive will have very wide attributes and will be concentred in a single person, who, if he governs with wisdom and justice, will attain almost naturally to irremovable authority." "If the preponderant party is military or aristocratic, it will be in favour of a monarchy, which will probably be limited and constitutional in the first place, but will very soon become absolute." The presidency of Porfirio Diaz, the empire of Iturbide and Maximilian, supported by the monarchist party, and even the dictatorship of Juarez, and the powers which the Mexican constitutions have conferred on the head of the State, all confirmed the predictions of Bolivar. "The States of the Isthmus of Panama as far as Guatemala will form a federation." This federation existed until 1842, and to-day the Central American republics are slowly returning to it. Panama was for the Liberator the emporium of the world. "Its canals will shorten the distances of the world, will strengthen the ordinary ties between Europe, America, and Asia, and will bring to this happy region the tribute of the four quarters of the globe. There alone, perhaps, the capital of the world might be set, as Constantine pretended to make of Byzantium the capital of the ancient world."

"New Granada will unite itself to Venezuela in order to form a Central Republic, whose capital will be Maracaibo, or a new city, which, under the name of Las Casas (in honour of that hero of philanthropy), will spring up on the confines of the two countries, on the superb harbour of Bahia-Honda." Bolivar kept Venezuela and New Granada united until 1830; then new leaders, such as General Mosquera, wished to establish the federation which even to-day is still the object of the politicians of Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. "At Buenos-Ayres there will be a central government, in which the military power will be supreme as a consequence of intestine divisions and external war." This is a prophecy of Argentine history up to the advent of Rosas, the struggles of the caudillos, and the anarchy of 1820. "This constitution will necessarily degenerate into an oligarchy or a monocracy." And a plutocratic group did actually rule in Buenos-Ayres, and over all rose the monocracy of Rosas. "Chili is called by the nature of her situation, by the simple customs of her virtuous inhabitants, and the example of her neighbours, the proud Republicans of Araucania, to enjoy the benefits of the just and mild laws of a republic. If any republic lasts long in America I incline to think it will be the Chilian.... Chili will not alter her laws, manners, or practices; she will maintain the uniformity of her political and religious opinions." The long stability of the Araucanian nation, the homogeneity of its population, the lasting nature of its political charter, the conservative character of its institutions, the slow and steady development of Chili until the war of the Pacific and the revolution of 1891, fully realised the prophecies of Bolivar. "Peru includes two elements inimical to all just and liberal government—gold and slavery. The first corrupts everything; the second is corrupt in itself. The soul of a serf rarely succeeds in taking liberty sanely. It rushes furiously into tumult, or lives humiliated in chains. Although these rules are applicable to all America, I believe they apply with most reason to Lima. There the rich will not tolerate the democracy, and the slaves and the liberated slaves will not tolerate the aristocracy; the first will prefer the tyranny of a single person, in order to avoid popular persecutions and to establish a rule that will at least be pacific." The evolution of Peru proved the profound truth of this statement. The oligarchy accepted military dictators, who upheld property and preserved peace. As early as 1815, when America was still a Spanish domain, Bolivar, watching the spectacle of social forces in conflict, announced not merely the immediate struggles, but the secular development of ten nations. He was a great prophet. To-day, a century later, the continent is fulfilling his predictions as though they were a fate strangely laid upon it.