But like Washington, Bolívar was a man of the Enlightenment. Reason and
republicanism drove him forward. Arana tells us that he tended his white
horse first thing in the morning, read Montesquieu and Voltaire before
breakfast and issued edicts after the meal. He knew how to wield
political and military power in a single gesture, as Washington used to
do, but he also knew how to weather the ghastliest of conditions, one
Valley Forge after another, in versions that were tropical, Andean,
wildly remote and beyond anything that Washington had to endure. Only in
the mid-1820s, after 14 years of war, did he manage to achieve
international recognition for various new independent republics of South
America; and even then, post-victory, warfare never seemed to stop.
Arana judges that carnage and destruction in the course of South
America’s struggles for independence added up to a calamity so great as
to be demographic: in some regions population dropped 50 percent.
Bolívar coped with impossibly complicated racial and ethnic
circumstances. The man himself was fabulously wealthy, the owner of
slaves and estates, capable of raising his own armies for a while,
though his struggles ultimately impoverished him. And yet, because a
strain of non-European blood was thought to run through his otherwise
European veins, even he, the Caracas aristocrat, was obliged to fend off
the skin-tone prejudices of the age. “Sambo,” he was called in Peru,
not by his admirers. Indian warriors with bows and arrows made up a
portion of his armies, and Indian women a large portion of his camp
followers. Slaves and the descendants of slaves from Africa played a
central role in the war, sometimes fighting on the Spanish royalist
side, ultimately on Bolívar’s republican side; and the spirit of
conspiracy being what it was, he executed the finest of his black
republican generals.
Unfortunate executions apart, Bolívar’s positions on slavery and race
were in every respect superior to Washington’s. At a moment when the
anti-Spanish struggle seemed hopeless, the president of Haiti, Alexandre
Pétion, came to Bolívar’s aid (as no president of the United States
ever managed to do, which is pitiful to see), and Bolívar responded in
1816 by ordering the abolition of slavery, not merely for strategic
reasons. Arana quotes a speech from 1819: “Our people are nothing like
Europeans or North Americans; indeed we are more a mixture of Africa and
America than we are children of Europe.” He continued, “It is
impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong.” And
more: “We all differ visibly in the color of our skin” — which is the
kind of straightforward acknowledgment that no leading figure in the
United States would have uttered in those benighted days, or for many
generations to come, even if, in the United States, epidermal
monochronicity has never been the norm.
On the other hand, Bolívar figured that South America’s racial mishmash
ruled out any experiments in libertarian or democratic self-rule. “We
will require an infinitely firm hand,” he said, “and an infinitely fine
tact to manage all the racial divisions in this heterogeneous society,
where even the slightest alteration can throw off, divide or undo its
delicate balance.” He ended up in command of the countries that are
nowadays known as Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia (whose
name derives from his own) and Peru, all of which he hoped to unite,
together with still more regions, into a grand Latin American
federation. And the constitutional system that he proposed made
provision for a presidency-for-life, like a Supreme Court appointment in
the United States, except with a further, faintly monarchist clause
allowing the president to appoint a vice president who would be his
successor.
Among Bolívar’s fellow freedom-fighters and republicans, not everyone
looked with admiring eyes on this dictatorial tendency. In 1828, a group
of his associates, who styled themselves “liberals,” hatched a
tyrannicidal assassination plot. The plot was foiled by Bolívar’s
mistress, a married lady named Manuela Sáenz, who, Arana tells us, was
notorious for her libertine panache — her probable lesbian affair with
one of her slaves, her delight in costuming not only herself but her
female slaves in masculine clothes and her tolerance for Bolívar’s many
affairs. But Sáenz’s most salient trait, historically speaking, was an
ability to think quickly. She heard the assassins breaking into the
house. She instructed Bolívar to leap out the window to safety, which he
did, wearing her shoes. And with the conspirators about to burst into
the room, she greeted them at the door for the purpose of giving Bolívar
extra time to make his escape — “a strikingly beautiful woman, sword in
hand,” according to the description of one of the plotters, whom Arana
wisely quotes.
The conspirators were not alone in regarding Bolívar as a tyrant in the
making. In the United States, his greatest admirers — Henry Clay chief
among them — lost faith in the man after a while. The Marquis de
Lafayette, who was the world’s greatest expert on the question of George
Washington comparisons, sent Bolívar a letter objecting to the idea of a
president-for-life. Arana rejects the notion that in our own day, Hugo
Chávez, the late president of Venezuela, was justified in assuming
Bolívar’s mantle — though in dismissing Chávez’s presumption, she
appears mostly to have in mind Bolívar’s liberal ideals, and not his
anti-liberal penchants. She does concede that in the centuries after
Bolívar one Latin American dictator after another has taken inspiration
from his example.
Her purpose in “Bolívar,” however, is not to come up with weighty
observations about Latin America’s political tradition. Mainly she
chronicles Bolívar’s military and political exploits, which makes for a
mighty river, coursing through more than 600 pages, of too many names
and battles. But she brings an agreeable affection to this task. She is a
writer with Peruvian origins, the author of “American Chica,” and her
background appears to have endowed her with a pleasing and romantic
nostalgia for the southern continent. Horse hooves drum like a heartbeat
on a sun-dappled forest floor and a black cape flutters from Bolívar’s
shoulders on the very first page, and by the middle of the book,
“snow-capped peaks glisten against azure skies.” All of which may be
corny but, like a Technicolor swashbuckler, is dreamily entertaining.
Paul Berman, the author of “The Flight of the Intellectuals” and a
senior editor of The New Republic, is teaching this year at Princeton.
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