LEFTIST LATIN AMERICA: El Libertador -- Simon Bolivar

His name was Simón José Antonio de la Santisima Trinidae Bolivar Palacios y Blanco and his life may be, at the same time, one of the most triumphant and tragic in the history of mankind.

More commonly known as Simon Bolivar, or El Libertador, or the George Washington of South America, in the 19th Century he liberated Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela from the Spanish. Born into wealth (his family owned Venezuelan copper mines) in 1783, he married in 1802, but his wife died a year later. He studied in Spain and then worked for Napoleon before returning to the continent of his birth to use his family’s money to wage wars of independence.

And what’s more, he’s the legend who first dreamed of a South America united as a single country.

It could be said that leaders have since ruled in his shadow. A statue of the General naked, racing on his horse, fills Bolivar Plaza in Colombia. In his simple office full of books, Che Guevara kept a small bronze statue of El Libertador, a testament to unflinching will, a warrior.

Bolivar drove the Spanish out of Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador and then united them as a single nation: Gran Colombia. Bolivar became president. When he finally made his way south to Peru, the country voted him in as dictator and then created the country of Bolivia in his name.

Barely fifty years after the American Revolution, Bolivar idealized the federal system that governed the United States. He envisioned the same kind of centralized government for South America. He believed in the liberal principles of the Enlightenment. It’s said that the General carried with him Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

Yet as quickly and as gloriously as Bolivar liberated a continent, so soon did his empire begin to crumble. A sad irony, uprisings began in Venezuela, the land of his birth. Regional leaders weren’t keen to power concentrated in a centralized, federal government. Resistance mounted. Assassination attempts became commonplace. Bolivar the Liberator tragically became Bolivar the failure.

Yet his image lives on, commonplace throughout Latin America as the original liberator, the icon of visionary leaders who believed in the beauty and potential of the continent, even one day united as one.

(Photo from flickr.)

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