Simón Bolívar
Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco[c] (24 July 1783 – 17 December 1830) was a Venezuelan military and political leader who led what are currently the countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Bolivia to independence from the Spanish Empire. He is known colloquially as El Libertador, or the Liberator of America.
"Bolívar" redirects here. For other uses, see Bolívar (disambiguation) and Simón Bolívar (disambiguation).
Simón Bolívar
Office established
24 July 1783
Caracas, Captaincy General of Venezuela, Spanish Empire
17 December 1830 (aged 47)
Santa Marta, Gran Colombia (now Colombia)
- Spanish (until 1810)
- Venezuelan (1813–1819)
- Colombian (from 1819)
Simón Bolívar was born in Caracas in the Captaincy General of Venezuela into a wealthy family of American-born Spaniards (criollo) but lost both parents as a child. Bolívar was educated abroad and lived in Spain, as was common for men of upper-class families in his day. While living in Madrid from 1800 to 1802, he was introduced to Enlightenment philosophy and married María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alaysa, who died in Venezuela from yellow fever in 1803. From 1803 to 1805, Bolívar embarked on a Grand Tour that ended in Rome, where he swore to end the Spanish rule in the Americas. In 1807, Bolívar returned to Venezuela and promoted Venezuelan independence to other wealthy creoles. When the Spanish authority in the Americas weakened due to Napoleon's Peninsular War, Bolívar became a zealous combatant and politician in the Spanish-American wars of independence.
Bolívar began his military career in 1810 as a militia officer in the Venezuelan War of Independence, fighting Royalist forces for the first and second Venezuelan republics and the United Provinces of New Granada. After Spanish forces subdued New Granada in 1815, Bolívar was forced into exile on Jamaica. In Haiti, Bolívar met and befriended Haitian revolutionary leader Alexandre Pétion. After promising to abolish slavery in Spanish America, Bolívar received military support from Pétion and returned to Venezuela. He established a third republic in 1817 and then crossed the Andes to liberate New Granada in 1819. Bolívar and his allies defeated the Spanish in New Granada in 1819, Venezuela and Panama in 1821, Ecuador in 1822, Peru in 1824, and Bolivia in 1825. Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, and Panama were merged into the Republic of Colombia (Gran Colombia), with Bolívar as president there and in Peru and Bolivia.
In his final years, Bolívar became increasingly disillusioned with the South American republics, and distanced from them because of his centralist ideology. He was successively removed from his offices until he resigned the presidency of Colombia and died of tuberculosis in 1830. His legacy is diverse and far-reaching within Latin America and beyond. He is regarded as a hero and national and cultural icon throughout Latin America; the nations of Bolivia and Venezuela (as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela) are named after him, and he has been memorialized all over the world in the form of public art or street names and in popular culture.
Personal beliefs[edit]
Bolívar's personal beliefs were liberal and republican, and formed by Classical and Enlightenment philosophy;[391] among his favorite authors were Hobbes, Spinoza, the Baron d'Holbach, Hume, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.[21] The tutelage of Simón Rodríguez, a student of Rousseau, has been traditionally seen as foundational for Bolívar's beliefs.[32][392] Also important to Bolívar's intellectual development were his stays in Paris from 1804 to 1806 and in London in 1810.[393][394] Bolívar was an anglophile, and sought British aid in securing Latin American independence.[395][396] The extent of Bolívar's religiosity is debated; while Bolívar resented the social capital of the Catholic Church and its Royalist leanings during the wars of independence, he sought to co-opt its social capital for the benefit of the republics he established rather than dismember the Church.[397][398]
Throughout his political career, Bolívar concerned himself with the construction of liberal democracy in Latin America and the region's place in the Atlantic world.[399] By the 1820s, his goal was to create a federation of Latin American republics in Spanish America, each governed by a strong executive and a constitution modeled on the British constitution.[400] Inspired by Montesquieu, Bolívar believed that a government should conform to the needs and character of its region and inhabitants;[401] in the Cartagena Manifesto, Bolívar stated that federalism as practiced in the United States was the "perfect" government but was unworkable in Spanish America because, he believed, Spanish imperialism had left Spanish Americans unprepared for federalism.[402][403] Bolívar sought to prepare Colombia for a more liberal democracy via free, public education.[404] Over the 1820s, Bolívar became increasingly disillusioned and authoritarian until, in 1830, he declared to Flores, "all who have served the Revolution have plowed the sea."[405]