The political end of Gran Colombia came in slow stages across the spring and summer of 1830 — slow enough that the republic's dissolution coincided, almost to the week, with Bolívar's terminal illness and death. The two arcs are inseparable: the institutional collapse of the republic and the physical decline of its founder ran in parallel, and the canonical Latin American melancholy that the death-of-Bolívar literature has cultivated for almost two centuries is partly an aesthetic response to the structural coincidence. The political question — whether the republic could survive without Bolívar — was answered by the events of 1830 negatively: it could not, and would not even pretend to try.
The April resignation
The Constitutional Congress that opened in Bogotá in January 1830 was Bolívar's last attempt to produce a constitutional settlement under which the Republic of Colombia might survive. The Congress — known as the Admirable Congress on the basis of the unusually high quality of its delegates — drafted a new constitution that substantially reduced presidential authority, restored the vice-presidency, lengthened presidential terms to eight years, abolished the appointive senate, and provided for substantive federal autonomy of the departments. It was Bolívar's own retreat from the centralist position he had taken between 1826 and 1828, and an explicit acknowledgement that the unitary republic was politically unsustainable in the absence of a personal authority — his own — that he was no longer able to provide.
Bolívar resigned the presidency on the 4th of March 1830, in a letter to the Congress that has been read for almost two hundred years as one of the foundational documents of Latin American political pessimism. The Congress accepted the resignation on the 1st of May. Bolívar's chosen successor was Joaquín Mosquera, a moderate Bolivarian who would govern briefly until the comprehensive collapse of central authority later that year. The Congress dissolved itself on the 10th of May after ratifying the new constitution. The constitution was substantially obsolete by the time it took effect: Venezuela had already, in November 1829, called its own provincial congress at Valencia and would formally secede from Gran Colombia on the 13th of January 1830; Ecuador would follow on the 13th of May 1830 with a provincial congress at Riobamba that proclaimed it the Republic of Ecuador.
The journey to Santa Marta
Bolívar left Bogotá on the 8th of May 1830 for what he intended as the beginning of a voluntary European exile. He travelled by mule across the central cordillera to the Magdalena valley, embarked on a river steamer at Honda for the seven-week descent of the Magdalena, and reached Cartagena on the Caribbean coast in late June. He was, by then, visibly ill: a chronic respiratory condition that had troubled him since the 1820s had worsened across the spring; his weight had fallen below 45 kilograms; the wet heat of the Magdalena lowlands had aggravated his cough. He was forty-six years old.
At Cartagena Bolívar received news that his Venezuelan opponents had had the new Colombian congress vote, in May 1830, to forbid him from returning to Venezuelan territory under penalty of death. The political position to which he had given thirty years of his life was now formally hostile to his person. He attempted, briefly, to organise European exile arrangements; he wrote to British acquaintances in Jamaica about the practical problems of travel and accommodation; he received conflicting medical advice; he was offered residence at a country estate near Santa Marta — the Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino — by its Spanish-Colombian owner Joaquín de Mier. He accepted. He travelled by river-and-coast vessel to Santa Marta in late November, arrived on the 1st of December 1830 desperately ill, and was taken to the Quinta on the 6th of December.
The 17th of December
Bolívar's final illness — diagnosed at the time as tisis (tuberculosis), more probably (on subsequent medical analysis) a combination of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis and arsenic poisoning from chronic exposure to the period's medical preparations — ran for eleven days. He dictated his political testament, the famous Last Proclamation of San Pedro Alejandrino, on the 10th of December: "Colombians! You have been witness to my efforts to establish liberty in the country where tyranny once reigned. I have laboured with disinterest, abandoning my fortune and even my tranquillity... If my death serves to consolidate the union and put an end to the parties, I will go to my grave in peace." He received the last sacraments from Father Sebastián de Estrada on the 10th. He died at one o'clock in the afternoon of the 17th of December 1830. He was forty-seven years and four months old.
The Republic of Colombia, of which he had been the foundational figure, no longer functionally existed. Venezuela had seceded; Ecuador had seceded; the rump New Granadan territory under Mosquera's nominal government would, within months, reorganise itself as the Republic of New Granada under a new constitution and a new federalist political order. The successor states that emerged from the dissolution — Venezuela, Ecuador, New Granada (later renamed Colombia in 1858) — are the subject of the next, final chapter.
End of Chapter VII