El Libertador

BOLIVAR--Emit Ludwig--Alliance ($3.50).

Few books are better suited than this one (written at the request of the Venezuelan Government) to help North Americans to understand Latin Americans. Simon Bolivar freed almost a third of South America in the name of democracy. He was driven out as a dictator when he tried to give orderly government to the region he had freed. His was the pioneer vision of Latin-American unity and hemispheric solidarity. (He was never able to achieve either.) Both his stupendous successes and his stupendous failures shed light on much that Americans find strange in the problems of Latin-American democracy.

The book is important in another respect. One bar to understanding Latin America has been the failure of the U.S. imagination before the sheer physical bulk and vastness of the southern continent. The mind recoils from the cold massiveness of the Cordilleras, bogs down in tropical swamps half as big as the U.S., is lost on Rivers of Doubt 3,000 miles long. What has been needed is a sympathetic human figure on a scale and of a piece with the continent, and embodying something of its volcanic fierceness. Such a figure is Simon Bolivar.

Liberation. He was born of a wealthy family in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1783. As a young traveler in Rome, where he refused to kiss the Pope's slipper, he had his first vision of a free South America. Rising one day from the base of a column, he cried: "On my life and honor, I swear not to rest until I have liberated America from her tyrants!"

An earthquake made him a political leader. It came during the first Venezuelan revolt, and destroyed a quarter of the citizens of Caracas and their property in a few moments. In the main plaza, Bolivar found a priest, shouting: "Sodom and Gomorrha! To your knees! . . . God's arm has fallen on your heads in punishment!" Bolivar pushed the monk away, drew his sword and shouted: "Nature has joined forces with tyranny! She is trying to stand in our way. Forward! We will force her to obey us!"

Not long afterwards he was banished from Venezuela, for the first of four times. From his exile in New Granada (now Colombia) he determined to reliberate his native land. Around Christmas of 1812 he led some 200 "half-caste Negroes and Indios" down the Magdalena River. Their first success gave them guns and made them a legend. Soon there were 500 of them, with 1,400 rifles and four guns. As they approached, 3,000 Spaniards fled. By August Bolivar was in Caracas.

His first act was to call a congress. He took no political title for himself except that of Liberator, El Libertador, given him by the people. Again the revolutionists began to squabble. Again the Spaniards came back. Again Bolivar was an exile, this time in British Jamaica.

Exile, as usual, gave him time to think. In his address To an Inhabitant of Jamaica Bolivar described his great vision of Pan-American unity. "A grandiose idea, to form a single nation of the New World!" he wrote. "With the same race, the same language, the same religion, and the same customs, a government should be able to unite the separate states. And yet it is impossible, for their situations, interests, and characters are too diverse. How splendid it would be if the Isthmus of Panama could be to us what the Isthmus of Corinth was to the Greeks! May heaven grant that we hold a great congress there one day to negotiate war and peace with the other three continents also. ..."

With the help of Haiti, he again invaded Venezuela, was driven out, again fled to Haiti, again invaded Venezuela. He had 700 men. One night while they were skulking in a swamp his officers heard him mumble: "We shall soon have liberated Venezuela. Then we shall pass on--people by people, state by state. Our arms shall liberate first New Granada, then Quito, then Peru. We shall climb up to Potosi and plant the flag of freedom on the sum mit of the silver mountain." "In God's name," said an officer, "the Liberator has gone mad." But eight years later he had done all that.

His return march across the Andes--this time to liberate New Granada-- has been called "the most magnificent episode in the history of war." It was the rainy season. The men could not keep their powder dry. Their rifles rusted. All the cavalry horses died or were lost. The men were almost naked. After marching 75 days with no time to rest, the 3,000 exhausted men routed 5,000 Spaniards.

Wrote Bolivar to his troops: "When you set out on this incomparable campaign, there were not two hundred of you. Today, when there are thousands, all America will be the scene of your deeds. Yet that scene is still too small. North and south of this center of the world you will create a haven of liberty. ..." Says Author Ludwig: "Bolivar the poet began to dream in continents."

Manuela. As he rode into Quito, a woman tossed a laurel wreath on his head. Her name was Manuela Saenz. "Born on the equator and married at seventeen, she . . . was ... a rider and fencer, a student, too, of Tacitus and Plutarch, and must have seemed to Bolivar the very embodiment of his dreams. . . . She was the first woman he knew to match him as a rider, to accompany him on his campaigns, astride her horse in wide trousers and a red dolman, to fear no danger and shoot like a rifleman." To live with Bolivar, Manuela left her husband, an English doctor, who seven years later was still begging her to come back.

"Why do you cause me so much pain?" she wrote the importunate man. "Now that the General has been my lover for seven years, and I know that I have his heart, I prefer to be the wife of nobody. . . . What you call honor leaves me cold. You think it does me little honor that he is not my husband. There is no room in my life for such prejudices. . . . Leave me alone, my dear Englishman. ... In heaven we shall marry again, never on earth. . . ."

Says Ludwig: "A letter in such a tone can only be written by a woman of the Amazon type, who combines womanly pliancy with masculine pride, intelligence and irony with constancy in feeling, and lives it all at the headlong pace of a horsewoman."

The headlong horsewoman followed Bolivar into Peru, spent two years with him while he was liberating that country and Bolivia. More than once she saved his life, for more & more jealous political and military rivals plotted against him. One night, while Bolivar was sleeping, Manuela heard steps, barking dogs, "the thud of a body in the street," shouts of "Death to the tyrant!" She persuaded the Liberator to jump out the window. When the assassins broke in, she met them with a drawn sword, sent them in the wrong direction. Said Bolivar: "Today you have become the Libertadora of the Libertador."

But beyond such political squabbles he never lost sight of the big outlines of hemisphere policy. "America," he wrote from Peru, "can be saved by four things, a big army, a navy, agreement with England, agreement with the United States. The union of our states, the Congress on the Isthmus is the fifth. . . ."

He invited all the governments of North and South America to a hemispheric congress. His program included: 1) no war between hemisphere states; 2) the Monroe Doctrine for all America against Europe; 3) democratic organization within the states; 4) sanctions against nations violating the agreement; 5) a common army and navy; 6) friendship with England and the U.S.

"Prophecy." Bolivar was ahead of his time. His Pan-American Congress was not a success. The personal attacks on him increased. As dictator of Colombia, he was charged with planning to make himself king. The politicians and the rebellious generals began to undermine him. In 1830, the year he died, Bolivar appeared before the Congress at Bogota and renounced his power as president and generalissimo.

Bolivar started for the coast and exile. His letters became Timon-like. "I am resolved," he wrote before starting, "to die an exile in want and sorrow." He was ill and traveled slowly. He began to head his letters "from a deathbed, that is, a place of prophecy." He prophesied that if Latin Americans could not unite, they would "relapse into little tyrannies of all colors and races" until "devoured by all crimes and destroyed by chaos, we shall be reconquered by Europe." He did not think his warnings would do much good. "There have been three great fools in history," he said a few days before his death, "Jesus, Don Quixote, and I."

Bolivar's great contemporary and rival, San Martin, the Liberator of Argentina and Chile, was also in exile, also embittered, but expressed himself more philosophically. "You don't seem to know," he remarked to a friend who blamed him for leaving politics to tend his garden, "that two-thirds of the inhabitants of this earth are idiots, the rest criminals."

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