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.