The military campaigns of 1819 to 1822 are the operational core of the Bolivarian independence struggle. In four years Bolívar's republican armies crossed the Andes, defeated the principal Spanish field forces in three theatre-decisive engagements (Boyacá 1819, Carabobo 1821, Pichincha 1822), occupied Bogotá, Caracas and Quito, and produced the territorial framework of the new Gran Colombian state — modern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama, plus the territorial claims that would be partially relinquished in the 1820s diplomatic settlements. The military operations are the subject of this chapter; the constitutional foundation at Angostura and Cúcuta is the next.
The Llaneros under Páez
The strategic foundation of the 1819 recovery was the alliance between Bolívar's republican command and the Llanero forces under José Antonio Páez. The Llanos — the tropical grasslands of the Orinoco basin in western Venezuela and eastern Colombia — were a distinctive social-military region: a vast cattle-ranching country sparsely inhabited by mestizo and mulatto herdsmen (the llaneros proper), accustomed to long-distance horseback warfare, lance-and-machete close combat, and the mobile economy of cattle-raising. The royalist forces of Boves had drawn from this population in 1814 with devastating effect. Páez — illiterate, in his mid-twenties at the time of the 1816–17 reorganisation, an instinctively skilled cavalry commander — gradually transferred the Llanero allegiance to the republican side over 1816–1818, in part because the republican command now offered the Llaneros what the royalists had: freedom for enslaved llaneros, land grants to fighting men, and substantial autonomy of operation. The Páez-Bolívar relationship would be the political bond that held the Venezuelan part of Gran Colombia to the Bogotá-centred constitution for the next decade — and the break of that bond in 1830 would be the principal cause of the republic's dissolution.
The crossing of the Andes
Bolívar's strategic plan of 1819 was the most daring of his career. The Spanish field army in New Granada — under the Viceroy Sámano and the field commander José María Barreiro — was substantially superior to the republican force in numbers, equipment and training; it was concentrated in the central Bogotá highlands; it was not seriously threatened from the south or east. Bolívar proposed to march his army of approximately 2,400 men (predominantly Llanero cavalry under Páez and Anzoátegui, with the British Legion's veteran infantry contingent of about 900 under Colonel James Rooke, plus a thin republican infantry core) from the lower Orinoco at Angostura, up the swampy plains of the western Apure river, across the eastern cordillera of the Andes through the pass of Pisba (12,000 feet, in June, in driving rain), and into the New Granadan plateau north of Bogotá. The march was conducted in May and June 1819. Approximately a quarter of the army's effectives — particularly the British Legion contingent, whose tropical-acclimatised infantry suffered severely at altitude — were lost to exposure, disease, and exhaustion. But the army that emerged onto the Bogotá plateau in early July 1819 was tactically positioned where the Spanish command had not expected it.
Boyacá
The Battle of Boyacá on the 7th of August 1819 was fought across a small bridge on the Teatinos river twelve miles north of Tunja, between Bolívar's republican force of approximately 3,000 and Barreiro's Spanish division of 2,800. The action lasted less than two hours; the republican attack on both ends of the Spanish line, particularly the British Legion's frontal infantry attack across the bridge, broke the Spanish formation; Barreiro was captured along with approximately 1,800 men. The casualties on the republican side were 13 killed, 53 wounded. Bolívar entered Bogotá three days later. The capital of the New Granadan viceroyalty was in republican hands, with the Spanish administrative apparatus intact, the royal treasury substantially full, and the political-military path to the rest of the viceroyalty open.
Carabobo and Pichincha
The Boyacá victory opened a two-year campaign of liberation across the rest of the former viceroyalty. The Venezuelan campaign was completed at the Battle of Carabobo on the 24th of June 1821, in which Bolívar's force of approximately 6,500 defeated the Spanish field army of Miguel de La Torre (approximately 5,000) on the plateau twelve miles south of Valencia, Venezuela. The action — fought across approximately three hours — broke the principal Spanish military position in Venezuela; La Torre's army retreated to Puerto Cabello, where it would hold out until October 1823 in a long siege without operational significance. Bolívar entered Caracas on the 29th of June 1821. The Ecuadorian campaign was completed by Bolívar's lieutenant Antonio José de Sucre at the Battle of Pichincha on the 24th of May 1822, in which Sucre's force of 3,000 (republican troops, with substantial Peruvian and Argentine contingents) defeated the Spanish force of 1,900 under Melchor Aymerich on the slopes of the Pichincha volcano overlooking Quito. Quito was occupied on the 25th of May. The territory of the former Viceroyalty of New Granada was, by the summer of 1822, almost entirely in republican hands.
The constitutional framework for governing this territory had been agreed three years earlier, in the Congress of Angostura of February-December 1819 and the Congress of Cúcuta of May-October 1821. Those two assemblies — the constitutional foundation of Gran Colombia — are the subject of the next two chapters.
End of Chapter II