Bolívar is quoted more than any other figure in Latin American history and read less. Six countries have official versions of him, and each needs him to have wanted something slightly different; the result is a body of writing treated as a quarry for epigraphs rather than as an argument.
It is, in fact, a consistent argument, developed over eighteen years, and it is not a liberal one. Taken in order — Cartagena in 1812, Jamaica in 1815, Angostura in 1819, Bolivia in 1826, the last letters in 1830 — four propositions recur: that the Spanish colonial inheritance left Americans unfit for the self-government they were entitled to; that federalism is a luxury of settled nations and a fatal indulgence in new ones; that a republic therefore needs an executive strong enough to be, in his own word, permanent; and that the alternative to that strength is not liberty but disintegration.
The Cartagena Manifesto, 1812
He wrote it at twenty-nine, a refugee, three months after the first Venezuelan republic collapsed and he had surrendered the fortress of Puerto Cabello through his own inattention. It is an autopsy, and it is merciless about his own side.
The first republic fell, he argues, because it adopted a federal system — copied from the North Americans, "as if we were Greeks or Romans" — which divided authority at the moment authority was most needed. It relied on volunteer militias rather than a disciplined standing army, on the theory that free men would fight better than professionals; the militias dissolved. It spent its energy on constitutional theory, on lawyers' debates about the rights of provinces, while the Spanish organised. And it treated its enemies with a clemency that was read as weakness.
The Caracas earthquake of the 26th of March 1812, which destroyed the republican cities and spared several royalist ones and which the clergy interpreted for their congregations accordingly, he treats as evidence of a state too feeble to control the interpretation of events within its own territory.
Every subsequent position he took is present here in outline. The document is the founding text of Latin American centralism, and it was written by a man who had just lost a country.
The Jamaica Letter, 1815
Written in exile in Kingston in September 1815, after the second Venezuelan republic had also collapsed and Morillo's army had landed, and addressed to an English gentleman whose identity has never been established with certainty.
It is his most impressive piece of prose and his most realistic assessment. He surveys the whole of Spanish America, region by region, and predicts with considerable accuracy what each will become: that Mexico will probably try a monarchy; that the isthmus might become the emporium of the world; that Buenos Aires will produce a military government; that Chile, isolated and homogeneous, has the best prospects of stable freedom.
On unity he is explicit and he is negative. A single American state from Mexico to Cape Horn is, he writes, a grand idea and an impossible one: the distances, the climates, the opposed interests and the dissimilar characters forbid it. What he proposes instead is that the separate states should eventually form a confederation — and he suggests the isthmus of Panama as the place for its congress, eleven years before he convened one there.
And on what Americans are, he gives the formulation the volume keeps returning to: that they are not Indians and not Europeans but a middle species between the legitimate owners of the country and the Spanish usurpers, disputing possession with the natives while resisting the invaders — a people, in short, whose title to their own country is complicated, and who have been kept by three centuries of colonial government in a condition of permanent political infancy.
Angostura, 1819
The address to the congress at Angostura on the 15th of February 1819 is the centre of his constitutional thought, delivered to a body of some twenty-six delegates in a river town, on behalf of a republic that held perhaps a third of the territory it claimed.
He begins by resigning — a formality he repeated throughout his career and meant on none of the occasions anyone can identify — and then tells the delegates not to copy the United States. The North American constitution, he says, is admirable and suits the North Americans; it is a miracle that it works even there; to apply federalism to a people formed by Spanish absolutism, without the habits of self-government the English colonies had, is to guarantee collapse. He had, by then, watched it happen twice.
His positive proposals are two, and the congress rejected both. The first is a hereditary senate, on the model of the British Lords, its first members drawn from the officers of the independence war and their sons after them: a body independent of elections and of the executive, whose function is to be the ballast of the republic. The second is a fourth branch of government, a "moral power" — a censorial body supervising education, public morals and civic virtue, with the power to publish the names of citizens who fell short. The delegates thought it a Roman fantasy and an instrument of tyranny, and appended it to the constitution as a note rather than adopting it.
What they did accept was a strong presidency, a centralised administration, and the proclamation, in December, of the Republic of Colombia.
The Bolivian constitution, 1826
He thought it his masterpiece. He wrote it for the new republic named after him, sent it to Sucre with a covering address, and spent the following two years trying to have it adopted in Peru and then in Colombia.
Its central provision is a president for life, irremovable, politically unaccountable, with the right to nominate his own successor — an office he described as the sun of the system, fixed and giving life to everything without partiality. He argued that it combined the stability of monarchy with the legitimacy of a republic and avoided the two evils he feared most: the elective presidency, which turns every succession into a civil war, and the hereditary crown, which he rejected absolutely and repeatedly. There is a legislature of three chambers — tribunes, senators and censors, the last holding office for life — and a franchise restricted to citizens who could read and write, in a country where nine in ten could not.
The contemporary reaction was immediate and hostile, and it was not confined to his enemies. To the liberals of Bogotá and Lima the life presidency was a crown in everything but name, and the fact that its author was the obvious candidate for it in three countries simultaneously did not help. The proposal to bind Colombia, Peru and Bolivia into an Andean federation under such a constitution, with himself at its head, is what turned Santander from a rival into an opponent and gave the Venezuelan federalists a national argument.
Bolivia kept it for about two years. Nowhere else adopted it at all.
The dictatorship, and the end
The Ocaña convention of 1828 deadlocked between his supporters and Santander's, and his supporters walked out to deny it a quorum. On the 27th of August he assumed dictatorial powers by decree, suspending the constitution he had sworn to defend and abolishing the vice-presidency his rival held. On the night of the 25th of September conspirators came to kill him and he escaped through a window.
Whatever the merits of the constitutional argument, the effect of the decree was to place the republic's legitimacy on one man's authority at the moment that authority was weakest. Between the dictatorship and his resignation eighteen months later, he governed a country in which his opponents had been shown that the constitution offered them no remedy — which left them the remedies that do not require one.
The last letters are correspondingly bleak. To Flores, on the 9th of November 1830: that America is ungovernable for us; that those who serve a revolution plough the sea; that the only thing to do in America is emigrate; that these countries will fall into the hands of the unbridled multitude and then pass to petty tyrants of every colour and race. He was writing six weeks before his death, stripped of office, barred from his own country on pain of death, having just learned of Sucre's murder.
It is not a fair summary of what he achieved, and it is a reasonably accurate forecast of the next century. The question the documents leave is whether the authoritarian turn was a betrayal of the republican project or its logical conclusion — whether a man who genuinely believed his people unready for self-government could have ended anywhere else. Two hundred years of Latin American constitutional history have been, in part, an extended argument with this body of writing, and the argument is not settled.
End of Chapter VIII