354. Liberator of Latin America: Simón Bolívar vs The Spanish Empire (Part 1)

11:16William:The ultimate eater hero. No wonder you got so excited by this.

11:19Anita:Well, I mean, you know.

11:20William:But he's also a good dancer, you say, and he liked his cooking.

11:24Anita:He liked his cooking, yes. I mean, this fabulous biography gives you so many of these lovely insights. He liked good cuisine. He could, though, even though he liked good cuisine and fine food, he could endure days, weeks of punishing hunger and these back-breaking trips on his horse. He had stamina in the saddle that was legendary, hence Iron Ass.

11:46William:It's a very good nickname. You like it? I like it very much.

11:49Anita:Good, good. But also, he was fluent in French. You could quote Rousseau just from his head in French. And he could quote Julius Caesar in Latin. So this is your man for all seasons.

12:02William:He's your kind of man, Anita. Definitely your kind of man.

12:05Anita:I mean, describe the picture because I included a picture of him, Willie, and you're good at all of that.

12:10William:Well, the picture just looks like your average early 19th century military hero on a horse, to be honest.

12:16Anita:No, don't be daft. There's the mustachioed picture that I sent you. So, you know, you've got this sort of thatch of curly, dark hair, these penetrating black eyes, you know, very strong chin. And I just look him up, man. I'm not making this up. He's a good looking dude. He's a good looking dude.

12:37William:You make him sound like he's in the Eurovision Song Contest or something.

12:41Anita:Okay, but for all of that, for all of that, you know, good looks, a charisma, the voice that seduce hundreds of women. He did have a weakness, Willie, and you might appreciate it. Thank you for that. He loved flattery, maybe a little bit too much. He really enjoyed it.

13:02William:And there are many accounts, I think, of his master's ego. And this was what brings him down. He has this.

13:09Anita:But let's not do the Daraun poor thing. We're not going to say how he dies. Okay, the death story. What can I hang on to? But you're right.

13:14William:And this is very much of the period. I mean, someone like Napoleon being a similar example.

13:20Anita:Sort of monstrous pride, isn't it? It's sort of egotism that goes insane.

13:24William:And that leads these liberators to become tyrants with a sort of strange inevitability.

13:29Anita:Shall we start with what is in common with some of the huge figures that we've talked about in the past? And there are always common tropes about this. I keep going back to Stalin. He hated his father or was an orphan or had a miserable childhood. And you have that kind of tragedy in the Bolivar story. So, he's born Simon José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios. And he's born on July the 24th in 1783 in Caracas. The moment that he's born, Willie, is a moment of revolution because just months earlier, Britain had signed this treaty effectively ending the American Revolution. And across the Atlantic, you've got the man that you've named a few times as formerly a young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, building his reputation.

14:14William:The other stumpy hero of our age.

14:17Anita:Bolivar though, unlike Napoleon, was born into wealth. The Bolivar family was one of the richest, most respected families in Venezuela.

14:24William:And this also complicates his story, doesn't it? Because he's from that class who are the middlemen between the things that are being extracted from Venezuela, in that case, gold and silver rather than the petroleum of today. And that he's very much not of the people. He's from the Creole landowning class.

14:45Anita:Yeah. And I should say Creoles. When you say Creoles, people will think mixed race, but that isn't the Creole that we mean here. It's a disputed thing and it's a real hot topic of debate, as it is with Alexander Hamilton.

14:57William:Alexander Hamilton probably was mixed race. I had a long chat with Ron Chernow, Hamilton's biographer, and he does think that Hamilton was mixed race. He also uses the same card indexes as me, where old card index people.

15:10Anita:Okay, well, this is vital information. Dinosaur technology.

15:13William:Thank you.

15:14Anita:Good to know. Excellent. But Creole in the context of this time often means, and this is the argument that is had and it is contested as it is with Hamilton. I know Ron Chernow says it is likely, but the Creoles were people who were pure Spanish, but born in the Americas. So they often had the label of Creoles because their parents were Spanish, but they were born not in Spain. And so those people often had that label of Creole attached to them.

15:46William:And his family were rich on cacao plantations?

15:50Anita:Yes. I mean, you mentioned sort of silver, but it's cacao from what we now know as Venezuela.

15:56William:And that's for making chocolate or what?

15:58Anita:Yeah, absolutely. And what's also different, I mean, you have copper and you have cacao. And the reason that it's important that this place that he was born is a little different from the rest of the Americas at this time that Spain has an interest in, is that because of that backbreaking work that's needed to harvest cacao, There are hundreds of enslaved Africans working here. So there is a much more sort of mixed population here in Venezuela than, let's say, even in Peru, for example.

16:30William:And this obviously gives him a complex profile as a liberator, if he's a slave owner. Even if he liberates his own slaves, he's from that class. He's very much from this. Yeah.

16:41Anita:Well, so jumping ahead a little bit, because at the moment, we're in his childhood, where he is a brat. I mean, he's just a rich brat, okay? So, his family's net worth, in this sort of Maria Rana book, which I love so much, she estimates it would be worth about $40 million today. But, but, but, money can't buy you happiness, William, and it doesn't for him.

17:04William:It's a rough childhood, isn't it? Yeah.

17:06Anita:His father, Don Juan Vicente, dies, and he's only two and a half years old at the time. That's why he's called Don Juan. Don Juan Vicente.

17:12William:Your Fabio character has a father called Don Juan. It's perfect.

17:15Anita:His mother, Donna Maria de la Concepcion, she struggles on, she's raising four children, but she is really struggling because she has TB, which is not uncommon at this time. And by the time Simone is only nine years old, she dies too. And it was an awful death. Consumption was a horrific death. So he would have seen his mother bleeding and frothing from the mouth for for days before she died.

17:41William:I remember watching as a child a biopic of Moliere and he dies of consumption and sort of dripping blood all over the keyboards of a piano. I remember it marked me for life. It was the most hideous thing I'd ever seen. I didn't know about it.

17:56Anita:It is a horrible, prolonged way to die. No, you're absolutely right. Yeah. So the orphaned boy, no mother, no father, and traumatized because he's seen the way his mother has died, He's sent off to live with his grandfather. But that doesn't last for long because then his grandfather dies. So, you know, Simon is just faced with loss after loss after loss before he's really even 10 years old. And most of his aunts and uncles and a sister, they die as well around him because, you know, life was precious and fragile back then. He's wealthy, but he has nothing else.

18:32William:So at a time when he's lost successive parents and grandparents, he has, like Alexander the Great, an extraordinary teacher. And in this case, it's Simon Rodriguez. He's a radical thinker, very much in touch with enlightenment ideals. And he introduces the young Bolivar to the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Locke, political thinkers whose ideas about natural rights and social contracts and the end of monarchy very much shape Bolivar's revolutionary vision.

19:03Anita:But I mean, Rodriguez might have opened the door to his curiosity. But you know, Bolivar was by all accounts an autodidact who pursued learning for himself, you know, picked up a book. Like so many of the extraordinary people we cover who sort of rise to the top of these huge empires, they're lonely, sad children who pick up books and write poetry for themselves. And this is very much the Bolivar mould too. So, he loved the classics. Again, this is something that comes up again and again with the characters that we talk about here on Empire. He loved the politics of ancient Rome and ancient Greece.

19:36Anita:And as William just said, Enlightenment France, he gobbled that up. So, at 14, you've got this rather intelligent, lonely, who is rich, but he's looking for a cause.

19:49William:That's the surprise of this, is that you don't normally expect liberators to come from that very coddled, rich background that he comes from.

19:57Anita:By his late teens, like many wealthy brats of his age, he does this grand tour of Europe. I mean, you can tell people, I mean, we sort of grow up with this idea of the grand tour. But Willie, for those who don't know what the grand tour is, I mean, just describe what it actually entails.

20:12William:Well, it's a thing that I thought was very specific to British aristocrats of going around after you've studied the classics, all your teens, you go and see Rome and go and visit Naples. And you have these pictures of all these British 18th century figures being painted in front of the Colosseum, or if they're Scottish, wearing a kilt.

20:33Anita:At the Parthenon. Yes. Doing a Cayley at the Parthenon.

20:37William:Doing a cale at the bathroom, exactly that. I hadn't realized this was something that also happened in Latin America, that if you were a rich Latin American kid, you'd do the same.

20:44Anita:Yeah, rich Europeans did the same thing. And the Creole class, who identified largely as being Spanish, because, you know, they had all the wealth and they were exporting it to Spain primarily, they felt more Spanish. So they, of course, would follow that same trajectory. And then you have it sort of in 1802.

21:02William:Oh, this is the bit you like. You get very excited by this bit.

21:04Anita:Well, sad bits, right? So he's only 19. So he's a baby, but he feels like a man. And in Spain, he meets a woman that changes the trajectory of his life. Maria Teresa Rodriguez del Toro y Alasia. And she's an aristocratic Spanish woman. She says it. I mean, she's always depicted as this rare beauty, like, you know, really just spectacularly beautiful.

21:28William:So she looks a bit like Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West. She's this sort of classic, latid, lovely.

21:33Anita:Well, OK, so they fall in love. And these two beautiful people in love the whole of the rest of their lives ahead of them. They return to Venezuela. He says to me, my love, to her, he says to her, my love, let us go to Venezuela. Let me show you my cacao plant. Anytime you want. Anyway, so they begin their life together on the Bolivar estate and the future looks bright. Join us after the break where it all starts to go very, very wrong.

22:07William:You tell yourself no one wants your college-era band tees. But on Depop, people are searching for exactly what you've got. You once paid a small fortune for them at merch stands. Now, a teenager who calls them vintage will offer that same small fortune back. Sell them easily on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. Who knew your questionable music taste would be a money-making machine? Your style can make you cash. Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste.

23:03William:Send your Mother's Day gifts at the UPS store and we'll get your gratitude there on time.

23:12William:Welcome back. So eight months after their wedding, Maria Teresa contracts a fever. This is a story of epic tragedy. You need to take it on.

23:21Anita:Well, she does. She contracts a fever. And within days, William, she's dead as well. I mean, just imagine this for Paul Bolivar, who's had more than his fair share of loss and death. and he's devastated by this death. And by all accounts, he goes into a deep, deep depression and he makes this young man's vow never to remarry for the rest of his life. He will never find a love like this. I mean, he does find love, but he doesn't marry again. So, that promise he certainly does keep. And people think, or many historians certainly, of Bolívar to pronounce it properly. And do forgive us for pronunciation if we mangle it.

24:02Anita:But a lot of historians think this is a key turning point in his life because having been marked by so much tragedy very early on and then losing the love of his life, he kind of gives up on the idea that this kind of life of domesticity is something that he can ever have, that he's ever, ever going to have. So, he starts looking around for something else. I mean, I've heard some professors of Latin American history. There's one at Liverpool University who has this amazing, interesting, we like a counterfactual in this programme. What would have happened if he'd remained married and lived happily ever after?

24:38Anita:If his wife hadn't died, if she hadn't got that fever? And he posits that,

24:42William:you know, maybe - He would have carried on the cacao, exactly.

24:45Anita:He would have just carried on. He would have been a Creole, landowning aristocrat, exploiting the slaves working on his land.

24:51William:With his estancia.

24:52Anita:Yeah, but he doesn't because that future just dies with Maria Teresa. So in this sort of distraught state, he leaves Venezuela. He leaves his estate. He leaves anything that reminds him of Maria Teresa and returns to Europe.

25:07William:Where he's reunited with his wonderful tutor, Simon Rodriguez.

25:11Anita:That's right. And that has a huge impact because, again, he has something else to think about. And he dives into the radical teachings that Rodrigues is laying in front of him. And you can say sort of at this point, truly, his political education begins in earnest.

25:30William:And this is now 1804. And this is the moment that Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself emperor of France. And like many young men of his generation, Bolivar is both dazzled and appalled. He admires Napoleon's military genius and his leadership and his ability to inspire men, but he's troubled by this portrayal of Republican ideals. And when he's invited to attend the coronation in Notre Dame with the Spanish ambassador, Bolívar refuses. He sucks in his room and doesn't want to witness his transformation of the revolutionary general into an emperor, into a tyrant, into everything that he has rejected.

26:12Anita:So, I mean, this will be a theme in Bolivar's life because he wants to be like Napoleon, but he doesn't want to be like Napoleon at all costs. It's what makes a great leader. Do you have to do what it takes regardless of the human cost because you believe in a better future for your people? So, there is this push-pull when he's not going to Napoleon's ceremony, when he makes decisions and will haunt him for the rest of his life, this idea that he wants liberty, he wants civility. But in the end, he will end up being a man who imposes tyranny and terror. But more on that to come. Willie, take us back to that moment, the oath that you read out to us.

26:56William:So he's gone down from Paris and the coronation to Rome, and we're a year later, it's 1805. and he's still in mourning, but he's now steeped in Enlightenment philosophy. He's got his wonderful tutor, Simon Rodriguez, with him, and he stands on Monte Sacro and he makes this famous vow. What's the circumstances of this, Anita?

27:17Anita:Apart from heavily laden with the Roman history that he would have been well aware of, Spain's at war with Britain again, having recently suffered the devastating defeat at Trafalgar. The Spanish court, which Bolivar has been swimming around in Madrid, is riven. He's seen this now firsthand with incompetence and corruption. He cannot believe these are the guys who are in charge. He can feel that there's a political vacuum building up, that Spain's grip on its vast empire is weakening because the idiots are in charge.

27:50William:I've got a question. How prominent are the sort of Creole landowners from Latin America when they get to Spain? Are they looked down on as provincials from abroad? Or are they given honour? And if they're rich enough, can they pass off as sort of part of the whole sort of Spanish world?

28:06Anita:They are looked on exactly the same way as plantation owners from Britain when they come back, which is we love the money, but we'll laugh at them behind their backs.

28:18William:And regard them as rich brutes or not?

28:20Anita:I mean, sort of just slightly, you know, to be tolerated for the money. I mean, that is a trope.

28:27William:One of the things that always surprises me is how much British plantation owners are looked down on for their brutality. You often have the accusation that it's somehow sort of retrospective 21st century liberalism to laugh at slave owners. But if you look at the writings of the time, people are very horrified by these people. And when they come back to England, they are regarded as brutes.

28:49Anita:Well, not always. I mean, sometimes if you look at some of the literature of the day, and we've covered some of it on this podcast, you know, these are sort of ruffians in silks is what they're looked upon. You know, they don't know the courtly manners, they just ape the courtly manners because they're too far away and it's not the same where they are.

29:06William:But Bolivar's education, presumably, was an unusual thing and having Simon Rodriguez with him always.

29:12Anita:But it also, as we said, you know, sort of more a self-didact. So, more going into, you know, the kind of conversations that you don't have at polite dinner parties in Spain. Why would you be having these kind of, you know, enlightenment? Enlightenment? What are you talking about? You know, this kind of thing, he doesn't fit. He does this certainly, and he would have felt that he doesn't fit.

29:31William:From his class, it's unusual.

29:33Anita:Yeah. Unusual, I guess, maybe. I don't know particularly whether there were others like Kim, who picked up Rousseau and memorised it by heart. But he did not quite fit, that's for sure. But more importantly, he gets this realisation that the Spaniards don't deserve to rule. Who are these people? And he's kind of slightly appalled from them.

30:00William:At this point, perhaps we should paint a portrait of Latin America and the Spanish empire at this moment, 1800. Columbus has arrived, what, 1492. So for more than three centuries, Spain has held this absolutely massive empire, stretching all the way from Argentina through the whole of Latin America, through Central America, Mexico, into parts of what became the United States. Because at this point, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and Texas are all part of this empire too. Tell me how it's all organized, Anita. Presumably it's not one sort of enormous colony. There are different viceroyalties, yeah?

30:45Anita:No, because it would be a nightmare. It's viceroyalties, exactly. So a viceroyty is an administrative division. In India, you had one viceroy. But here in South America, over this enormous landmass, you have different viceroyalties. and they govern in the king's name, just as the Viceroy of India did. So, you have these different places, New Granada, and that comprises modern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. You have the Viceroyalty of Peru. You have the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, which is comprising of what we now know as Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. So, this actually, this is really important because it will lead to great splits, which somebody who wants to liberate these places from Spain's control will be able to exploit.

31:37Anita:The reason you have different viceroyalties is because you can't govern from a centre if you have so much land. If you have these different viceroyalties, and actually very importantly, you're not allowed to talk to each other as vice royalties, you're not allowed to confer, everything must go back to the centre, which Bolivar has already said is run by idiots. You have this almost a competitive environment between them, but also sort of aggressively against each other. And they also have very different concerns. So, you will have New Granada, which comprises Venezuela, which is where Bolivar is from.

32:15Anita:It's the least developed politically, economically of the four vice royalties. And that's because, you know, they're agricultural workers. They're working on cacao, they're working in the fields. They've got slaves. It's also, therefore, much more multicolored.

32:28William:So you've got all these different vice royalties within each area. The Creoles and the Spanish crown are, there is tension growing, isn't there? There is this feeling that the Creoles are excluded from highest office. They want to increase their power, obviously, while the Spanish crown is trying to hold on to control from the peninsula, from Spain.

32:51Anita:I mean, to say there's tension at this point would be, I think, an exaggeration. There is a system that has always existed, which is that the so-called peninsulares, or the people who are from Spain, hold the very highest offices, right? So they are right at the top of the period.

33:05William:They're imported grandees.

33:07Anita:Yeah, exactly. But underneath them, you know, the actual levers of power are being put in the hands of Creoles. You know, the Spanish who are born or brought up in South America.

33:19William:The local elite.

33:20Anita:This is an elite, you know, based on money because you can have a sale of offices at this time. You know, much as we have rotten boroughs, a history of rotten boroughs in this country where if you were very, very rich, you could buy yourself a political seat at the table. You had very rich people who were taking those very powerful civil service jobs for themselves. Now, that is going to be a problem when the Spanish try to change things, because it will occur to these people who are doing the work day by day that, hang on a minute, we're doing the work day by day. Why are we answering to some Spaniard or peninsulari who's telling us what to do?

33:58Anita:That's going to be in the next episode.

34:01William:And this is crucial tension, just to flag that, that this is the world which Bolivar is stepping into. This is the tension between the local aristocracies and the local elites and the crown in Spain, which is trying to keep control and increase its control.

34:17Anita:Yeah. I mean, you know what? He probably doesn't even question it until he goes to Spain and he sees the doofuses who are taking these top positions. It's just the way it has always been. But when he sees them with his own eyes, when he meets them, when he talks to others in Europe about these, for want of a better word, the Chinless Wonders who are actually running the show. Why? Why should they? We know the country. We were born in the country. We're doing all the work. So, why is this happening? In the next episode, that's what we're going to be looking at. Because it is going to be really down to the Peninsulares, the Spanish, who change the rules.

34:59Anita:and that is what he's had this remained I mean people would have grumbled and perhaps it would have limped on but the Spaniards are going to try and close their grip on power and if you want to listen to that next episode right now you don't have to wait go to Empire Club you join our club and you get it all in one go the whole Bolivar series but until the next time we meet it's goodbye from me Anita Arnand

35:21William:and goodbye from me William Durumpel

35:29William:Psst, it's mushrooms with Matty Matheson. Let me tell you the secret of how to look like you know what you're doing. Use mushrooms, toss them on eggs, noodles. Boom, it's delicious. It's not magic. It's mushrooms. Hit up mushroomcouncil.com and get cooking. An employee's email signature might not seem like a big deal until audit season. Outdated legal language. Missing disclaimers. Unapproved edits. If signatures aren't centrally enforced, you cannot control regulatory exposure. And the more your organization grows, the more that exposure scales. Exclaimer is email signature management built for IT.

36:06William:One dashboard. Centralized control. Audit trails. Visit exclaimer.com to start your free trial. It is out of control in the White House right now. Welcome to The Rest is Politics US.

36:19Anita:I'm Katty Kaye.

36:20William:I'm Anthony Scaramucci. Who is the worst politician in Washington right now?

36:25Anita:They don't know how to manage Donald Trump.

36:28William:I talked to the people that organized the abduction. I'm telling you why they did it.

36:32Anita:The White House isn't a bind, Anthony.

36:34William:Here's what I would say to you about FAFA.

36:36Anita:The chaos is the strategy.

36:38William:It should not have happened, and it is a violation of international law.

36:42Anita:Is he losing control of the party?

36:45William:I survived 11 days in Trump's White House. I know the SOB.

36:49Anita:I've been covering politics in Washington for almost 30 years. Twice a week, we break down what's really going on in Trump's White House.

36:57William:The big issue for the United States is going to be we were once seen as a benevolent superpower, and now we're seen as an aggressor.

37:06Anita:You know, he can lie about a lot of things, but he can't lie about what people are feeling about the economy.

37:12William:If you really want to understand what's going on in Trump's mind, just search The Rest is Politics U.S. wherever you get your podcasts.