Simon Bolivar
The Venezuelan general who freed six South American nations from Spain, then despaired as his dream of a united continent shattered.
By the time he died in 1830, broke and coughing blood in a borrowed house on the Caribbean coast, Simon Bolivar had liberated an area the size of Western Europe and lost faith that any of it could be governed. Born in 1783 into one of the richest Creole families in Caracas, orphaned young, and steeped in the ideas of the European Enlightenment during his schooling abroad, he returned to a Spanish America simmering with resentment against three centuries of rule from Madrid. On a hill outside Rome in 1805 he had reportedly sworn an oath not to rest until he had broken those chains. He became El Libertador, the Liberator, the single most important figure in the independence of South America.
The campaigns
Bolivar did not win by caution. His signature move was the improbable march. In 1819, rather than fight the Spanish where they expected him, he led his army out of the Venezuelan plains, up through freezing Andean passes that killed men and horses, and fell on the royalists from behind at the Battle of Boyaca, liberating New Granada (today's Colombia) in a single stroke. Victory at Carabobo in 1821 secured Venezuela; his lieutenant Antonio Jose de Sucre took Ecuador at Pichincha in 1822. Bolivar then carried the war south into the Spanish heartland of Peru, where the campaigns of Junin and Ayacucho in 1824 broke Spanish power on the continent for good. A grateful new republic carved out of Upper Peru named itself Bolivia in his honor, one of only a handful of countries on earth named for a single person. In roughly fifteen years he had helped free the territory of six modern nations across some of the harshest terrain on the planet.
The dream that failed
Bolivar wanted more than independence; he wanted union. His model was partly the United States: a league of Spanish-American republics strong enough to deter reconquest and to matter in the world. He forged Gran Colombia, a single state joining Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama, and dreamed of a wider confederation. It fell apart in his own lifetime. Regional strongmen, the caudillos, pulled the new nations into rival, feuding states, and Gran Colombia dissolved in 1830 as Venezuela and Ecuador broke away. Embittered, he wrote to a general that year that 'those who serve a revolution plow the sea,' and set down his bleak conclusions: America was ungovernable, revolution was futile, the continent would fall to petty tyrants. He died months later, aged 47.
Afterlife
His reputation outlived his despair. To admirers he is the George Washington of the south, though unlike Washington he never managed the peaceful handoff of power that anchors a republic. Nearly everyone since has claimed him: liberal constitutionalists, military nationalists, and, most prominently, Hugo Chavez, who renamed the country the 'Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela' and built a socialist movement around his name, the movement whose collapse Venezuela is still working through today. The man who plowed the sea became, fittingly, the most fought-over symbol in Latin American politics.
That is the paradox stamped on a hundred plazas from Caracas to La Paz: a liberator revered by the very nations whose separation broke his heart.