Listen and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript
In the early 19th century, the Spanish Empire in the Americas began to fracture.
From the chaos emerged a wealthy young aristocrat with little formal military training, enormous ambition, and a vision that extended far beyond his own country’s independence.
He would cross mountains, survive exile, win impossible campaigns, liberate nations, and ultimately struggle against the very political forces his victories unleashed.
Learn more about Simón Bolívar, the Liberator of South America, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
By the early nineteenth century, the Spanish Empire in the Americas was rotting from the inside out. Centuries of Spanish rule, enforced social and racial hierarchies, and exploitative economic policies had weakened Spain’s control over its territories.
By this point, Spain’s colonies in the Americas were ripe for change. As it turned out, an unlikely source set the dominoes in motion: Napoleon Bonaparte.
Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 resulted in the imprisonment of the Spanish King, Ferdinand VII, and the placement of his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the Spanish throne.
Without a legitimate monarch on the Spanish throne, the administrative illusion holding the empire together vanished overnight, prompting unrest in the Spanish Americas. This power vacuum opened the door for local leaders to seize power across the continent, often under the ruse of maintaining Spanish rule.
Out of the ruins of imperial authority emerged a man who became both the sword and the symbol of South American independence: Simón Bolívar.
Bolivar was born into great wealth in modern-day Caracas, Venezuela. Despite his affluence, he lost both his parents to tuberculosis before his 10th birthday. He represented the very elite aristocracy that stood to gain the most from South American independence movements.
Bolívar was a product of the European Enlightenment, tutored in the radical philosophies of Rousseau and Voltaire, yet hardened by the staggering realities of New World warfare.
According to Bolívar, while standing on a hill in Rome in 1805, the 22-year-old pledged on his life that he would never rest until he broke the chains of Spanish rule in his home country.
But swearing an oath in Europe was a world away from fighting a war in the Andes. When Bolívar returned to Venezuela to join the developing revolutionary struggle, he discovered that liberating a continent required more than wit and wisdom; it required military training.
Bolívar needed to master the unique landscape of South America’s wars of independence. Liberated regions often collapsed quickly under royalist counteroffensives and regional rivalries.
Unlike Europe’s military leaders, many of whom fought as Royalists, Bolívar learned while serving in Caracas’s militias. Although he possessed considerable skill with weapons and horsemanship, he possessed no formal military experience; nevertheless, his affluent background secured him a senior rank in the militia.
Bolívar compensated for his lack of experience by reading libraries of classical military science, studying the strategies of Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander the Great. His vast library included works by modern military strategists, which he devoured one after another.
Bolívar’s true “military academy” was the catastrophic collapse of Venezuela’s First and Second Republics between 1812 and 1814. Venezuela was one of the first states to declare independence from Spain, yet its government quickly descended into chaos and fell in one calamity after another.
Royalist forces seized the opportunity to unravel these early republics, even using a devastating 1812 earthquake to portray the disaster as divine retribution against the revolutionary governments.
Unreliable local commanders, failed supply lines, political divisions, and a lack of unity within the patriot ranks contributed to the Royalist victory.
Bolívar was not yet a national figure, but his reputation was growing. After the defeat, Bolívar fled to New Granada, what is today Colombia, where he joined the revolutionary struggle and rebuilt his military career.
Bolívar forged his legendary status during the 1813 military offensive called the “Admirable Campaign.” Using troops from New Granada, he launched a lightning offensive that shattered royalist defenses and recaptured Caracas. As he rode through the streets, his supporters showered him with chants of “El Liberator”.
However, Bolívar couldn’t hold the city and lost the Second Republic to Royalist commander José Tomás Boves and his alliance with the Llaneros. The Llaneros were fierce horsemen of mixed Spanish, indigenous, and African descent who played a pivotal role in South America’s wars of independence.
After the fall of the Second Republic, Bolívar was exiled to Kingston, Jamaica. There, he wrote works on South American independence and refocused his military strategy.
In his famous Jamaica Letter, Bolívar articulated the urgent need for revolution in the Americas, writing: The role of the inhabitants of the American hemisphere has for centuries been purely passive. Politically, they were nonexistent. We are still in a position lower than slavery, and therefore it is more difficult for us to rise to the enjoyment of freedom.
Bolívar’s time in Jamaica was busy; he spent much of it unsuccessfully lobbying the British for support against Spain and the Royalists. He also realized he could not fight conventional European wars against well-funded adversaries on South American soil.
Instead of relying on linear formations, he weaponized the continent’s geography, waging a campaign across terrain his historical heroes could never have imagined. He was not commanding armies on Europe’s battlefields; he was fighting in the jungles of the Amazon basin and towering peaks of the Andes.
After failing to secure resources in Jamaica, Bolívar sailed to Haiti, where President Alexandre Pétion gave him vital military and financial support. Bolívar promised Pétion that he would abolish slavery in South America, as he noted: “It is madness that a revolution for liberty should try to maintain slavery.”
After returning from his Jamaican exile, Bolívar retreated deep into the jungles of the Orinoco River Basin in 1817, turning the wilderness into a natural fortress. From the city of Angostura, he turned the hostile jungle into a base camp free from Royalist interference.
In the jungles, he radically restructured his strategy for victory. A crucial development was Bolívar’s alliance with the Llanero leader José Antonio Páez, whose formidable cavalry brought thousands of plainsmen into the patriot coalition; promises of social advancement and land also helped sustain their support.
Bolívar launched his next push toward New Granada during the rainy season, marching his exhausted troops through the waist-deep, flooded Casanare plains. This impassable route caught Spanish commanders completely by surprise.
His final assault was based on climbing more than 14,000 feet (4260 m) up the Andes. By crossing the freezing Páramo de Pisba during the 1819 rainy season, Bolívar achieved strategic surprise and bypassed the routes the Royalists expected him to use.
Bolívar proved that victory came from using and exploiting the region’s geography. As Bolívar’s troops stacked victories, they made important social and political proclamations designed to build coalitions among the diverse factions of supporters.
In addition to abolishing slavery, he pursued aggressive land reforms to reduce the economic hardship of the lower classes under the Spanish Casta system.
Following the victory at the Battle of Carabobo in 1821, Bolívar had liberated Venezuela and solidified control over the northern rim of South America.
But securing the north was only half the battle. To truly shatter Spanish power, Bolívar had to look south, bringing him onto a collision course with South America’s other great liberator: Argentine General José de San Martín.
San Martín, also part of South America’s founding history, had independently liberated Argentina and Chile before marching north to capture Lima, Peru.
In July 1822, they met behind closed doors in Guayaquil, Ecuador. While their private talks remain a mystery, their goals clashed: San Martín wanted European-style monarchies, while Bolívar demanded a centralized republic.
Recognizing that Bolívar’s ambition wouldn’t allow for compromise, San Martín made the astonishing decision to resign his command and walk away into European exile.
With San Martín gone, Bolívar stood alone at the peak of South American power, ready to finish the final campaigns in Peru, unaware that total military control would only hasten the political collapse of his grand design.
With the decisive victory at the Battle of Ayacucho in December 1824 in Peru, the Bolivar’s forces effectively ended Spanish colonial rule in South America.
For Bolivar, the true challenge lay ahead.
His goal for South America was to unite the former Spanish colonies into a vast continental federation, beginning with Gran Colombia, to create a superpower capable of standing up to great European powers.
Gran Colombia, which consisted of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama, was short-lived, lasting only from 1819 to 1831. In Bolívar’s grand plan, Gran Colombia was the first block in his vision of a unified federation of former Spanish colonial holdings.
However, Bolívar fundamentally underestimated the region’s political and geographic realities. To hold together such a vast, fractured space, he was forced to impose a highly centralized power structure that directly contradicted the decentralizing, liberal ideals driving the original revolutions.
Circumstances, like the 1828 assassination attempt on his life, forced his descent into autocracy.
Furthermore, while he had used South America’s brutal geography to win wars, he failed to account for how those same physical barriers rendered permanent centralized governance impossible in peacetime.
Economic fundamentals also worked against Bolívar’s dream. The region was utterly exhausted by decades of war, and the difficulties of economic recovery for former Spanish colonies proved insurmountable under a incapable administration.
Gran Colombia perished shortly after Bolívar died in 1830 from tuberculosis. Bolívar never achieved the dream of a unified state in South America. In fact, on his deathbed, he was bitter and angry about his failures, offering a famous lamentation: America is ungovernable for us. He who serves a revolution plows the sea.
After Gran Colombia’s collapse, much of Central and South America drifted away from stable constitutional rule, falling instead under the sway of caudillos, local military strongmen who ruled through force and personal loyalty.
Bolívar’s legacy in the Americas is complex and still debated. Some celebrate him as the visionary liberator who broke Spanish colonial rule, while others see him as a precursor to the authoritarian strongmen who later dominated the region’s politics.
To many in South America, Bolivar is viewed through the same lens as George Washington in the United States. In fact, both men have benefited from efforts to create foundational mythologies about national heroes.
In this context, myth doesn’t mean falsehood or fiction; rather, it implies a dramatization and simplification of events designed for long-term understanding.
Bolívar is enshrined in national mythos of many South American countries as the ultimate romantic hero of Latin American independence, often elevated to a near-mythic status as the Libertador.
For more than a century, leaders have erected statues and plazas bearing his name as a calculated effort to legitimize their own rule by tethering it to his legacy.
Simón Bolívar helped destroy Spanish rule across much of northern and western South America, but winning independence proved easier than building lasting political unity.
His armies helped create new nations, yet his dream of a powerful federation collapsed amid regional rivalries, economic exhaustion, and political conflict.
By the end of his life, the man celebrated as the Liberator had become deeply disillusioned with the revolution he helped lead. Even so, few individuals shaped the political map of the Americas more profoundly, and Bolívar remains one of the most influential figures in Latin American history.