Politics
1783 to 1830, Caracas, Venezuela to Santa Marta, Colombia
Independence made inevitable, a continent dreamed into union, slavery struck down by decree, and the hard question of what freedom a newly freed people can actually sustain.
Start learning Simón →Bolívar’s 1815 letter from exile - his diagnosis of why Spanish America’s independence was already inevitable, his portrait of a people caught between two worlds, and his grand vision of continental union, s…
Bolívar’s political theory in the 1819 Address at Angostura - why he thought pure democracy and federalism would wreck the new republics, his case for a strong executive, a hereditary senate, and a fourth ‘m…
Bolívar’s decrees freeing the enslaved, his debt to Haiti’s president Pétion, and his vision of a single mixed-race ‘American’ people - together with the hard gap between the ideal of equality he…
Bolívar’s great project of continental union - the federation of Gran Colombia and the 1826 Panama Congress meant to bind the new republics into a league of American states - and the rivalries, distances, and jeal…
Bolívar’s final disillusion - the 1830 verdict that America was ungovernable and that to serve a revolution was to plough the sea - and the deepest paradox of his career: the liberator who assumed a dictatorship,…
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