The Last Dictatorship: Betrayal or Consummation?

That the final dictatorship of Simón Bolívar in Gran Colombia added little, if anything, to his glory while embittering his days with personal disappointments and political frustration is a proposition that admirers and detractors alike can readily accept, however much they may differ as to the reasons why. Somehow, as Alvaro Valencia Tovar expressed it, those last years were “años que sobraron en la vida del Libertador.”¹ Bolívar’s admirers show a natural tendency to dwell on other aspects of his life and times, so that in the memorable collection of citations that enrich El culto a Bolívar, by Germán Carrera Damas,² it is striking how few make reference to the period in question. Nevertheless, the Bolivarian dictatorship that constituted the last phase of the Gran Colombian experiment in unity as well as the penultimate stage in the life of the union’s creator is something that neither Bolívar’s biographers nor other historians of the early national era can ignore altogether. And the way in which they approach it reveals, incidentally, perhaps more clearly than the treatment of any other aspect of Bolívar’s long and remarkable career, the historiographical and ideological leanings of the authors.

A preliminary detail on which contemporary observers and later historians have sometimes disagreed is the precise chronological dimensions of the dictatorship. When Bolívar resumed the presidency at Bogotá in September 1827—after settling, he thought, the rebellion of José Antonio Páez in Venezuela, which had been his first concern on returning from Lima the year before—his political opponents in New Granada feared that he would at once establish a regime of military repression whose victims they would be. A few went into hiding, and though they soon emerged, there did occur some arbitrary actions by the government or its close supporters that were made much of by Bolívar’s critics.³ They are overshadowed, however, by the mere fact that in the election of November-December 1827, held to choose delegates for a convention whose purpose was to heal by means of constitutional reform the strains that were already tearing the nation apart, Bolívar’s enemies had few apparent obstacles placed in their way. Francisco de Paula Santander, both titular vice-president and key figure of the opposition, led the list of deputies elected from Bogotá; many of his political collaborators were elected elsewhere; and when the Convention finally opened at Ocaña in April 1828, the Bolivarian bloc found itself clearly outnumbered by a combination of frank oppositionists and independents.⁴

As the Convention itself drew near, there were cases of attempted intimidation of antigovernment forces. The classic example was the burning by military men in active service of an issue of the Santanderista organ El Zurriago, and then, when it reappeared the next day as El Incombustible, the sacking of its plant.⁵ On the day after that—March 13, 1828, to be exact—Bolívar declared a state of emergency and assumed extraordinary faculties everywhere save in the one canton of Ocaña.⁶ Though ostensibly justified by threats of a Spanish attack from the Caribbean and domestic instability, and scarcely without precedents in the earlier history of Gran Colombia, the step was seen by Bolívar’s opponents as another threat to themselves, particularly as it coincided with a flood of often abusive memorials addressed to the Convention by local assemblies, military units, and even Indian communities.⁷ All this might also be taken as a starting point of the dictatorship, but in actual fact the barrage of manifestos proved counterproductive. Largely ignoring the Liberator’s message that called for a vigorous strengthening of the national executive, the deputies at Ocaña went to work on a constitutional reform of quasi-federalist features that could only be anathema to him. In desperation, his hard-core supporters deserted the Convention so as to obstruct a quorum; and only when it dissolved with nothing accomplished did Bolívar openly and frankly establish dictatorial rule.⁸

Up to this point, Bolívar’s use of extraordinary faculties had been in agreement with the letter, if not always the spirit, of the Gran Colombian Constitution of 1821, which enabled him to take measures needed for a particular emergency and always on condition that he later account to Congress for his exercise of those powers. It now being assumed that events had abrogated the Constitution, a junta of notables, or cabildo abierto, organized in Bogotá on June 13 by the intendant of Cundinamarca, Colonel Pedro Alcántara Herrán, called on the Liberator to take exclusive control of the republic “con plenitud de facultades … en todos los ramos.” He was offered in effect the suma del poder público, as it came to be known in the Argentina of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Like Rosas, he established one special condition of his own by insisting that the offer of dictatorship receive the endorsement of the nation as a whole. In Bogotá, sheets of paper were set out for citizens to sign either in support of or in opposition to the June 13 acta, and we are told that only four (even fewer than dared vote against Rosas in the Buenos Aires plebiscite of 1835) signed in opposition. They were two students and two minor functionaries.⁹ Over the following weeks, imitations of the Bogotá acta poured in from other towns and cities, with various degrees of spontaneity. Local authorities attempted to whip up popular enthusiasm by such means as carrying Bolívar’s portrait in procession through the streets, which in Caracas was done “en un magnífico carro triunfal tirado por seis ninfas.”¹⁰ And the commandant general of Magdalena, Mariano Montilla, frankly instructed an underling to extract the right sort of acta from Mompós “aunque cueste sangre.”¹¹

Well before even Ocaña came through with its required manifesto (in October 1828), Bolívar felt sufficiently authorized to issue a decreto orgánico (on August 27) setting forth the organization and procedures of the new regime and at the same time making clear that it was not intended as a permanent political solution. The final article convoked yet another constituent convention, for which elections would perhaps turn out better, to meet in January 1830.¹² Meanwhile, Bolívar used his unlimited personal authority to roll back such innovations adopted since the beginning of the independence movement as, to him, appeared ill-adapted to the current state of Spanish America. These included, but were scarcely limited to, measures on educational curriculum, the religious orders, tax structure, and executive-judicial relations. Bolívar’s policy of frank retrogression—or intelligent adaptation to reality, depending on one’s point of view—hardened in the wave of reaction and repression that followed the unsuccessful attempt made on his life in September 1828. No repression, however, could halt the spread of internal unrest, which was marked by abortive military rebellions in New Granada and growing alienation in Venezuela, and was further complicated by the outbreak of a brief foreign war with Peru. By the time the next convention, ironically known as the Congreso Admirable, finally opened, most of Venezuela had already seceded, to the unconcealed relief of many Granadinos. By March 1830, Bolívar felt he had no choice but to resign, and he did; yet really, from the time the Congress met, most aspects of his government that could properly be called dictatorial were already at an end. The simplest chronological definition of the dictatorship is thus June 1828-January 1830, although it goes without saying both that many of its features were anticipated before the first of these dates and that others remained in effect for some time after the second. Nor does the choice of time span really affect a historian’s assessment, positive or negative, of the regime; if anything, it is the other way around.

The Historiographic Spectrum

For those authors who take a strongly positive view of the dictatorship, however its length may be measured, it simply was not long enough. The nineteenth-century Colombian José Manuel Groot, whose Historia eclesiástica y civil de la Nueva Granada was militantly conservative in political terms and at the same time unabashedly ultramontanist in religion, was hard put to find anything to criticize in Bolívar’s policies and official actions other than the fact that he raised the See of Quito to archiepiscopal status without first obtaining the papacy’s concurrence. This almost unconditional approval of the Liberator even in the role of dictator derived in large part from Groot’s still more intense distaste for the foreignizing and anti-Catholic tendencies that he associated with the previous regime of Vice-President Francisco de Paula Santander, who was acting chief executive during Bolívar’s absence. He felt that Bolívar, despite his excessive regalism and vestigial enciclopedismo (not that Groot wholly acknowledged the latter detail), was more disposed to protect the cause of traditional Catholicism than Santander had been. And he was therefore quite sure that if Bolívar, on returning from Peru, had without more ado imposed on Gran Colombia the quasi-monarchical constitution he earlier invented for Bolivia, naturally with himself as quasi-monarch or presidente vitalicio, the nation would have fared much better.¹³

Certain others have arrived at a comparable position because of their admiration for the sheer authoritarianism expressed in the dictatorship, or else for the two reasons—traditional Catholicism and authoritarianism combined—used by the twentieth-century Conservative party leader and academic historian Lucio Pabón Núñez, who served as minister of government under both Laureano Gómez and Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in the 1950s and as such exemplified the rightist deviation from conventional liberal democracy that was a major, albeit transitory, force in Colombian Conservatism of that period. Pabón Núñez saw in the Bolívar of 1828-30 not just a fit precursor of Gómez and Rojas (of Rojas qua dictator more than of Rojas the would-be social reformist), but of Portugal’s Antônio de Oliveira Salazar. Not only did Bolívar correct what Pabón frankly accepted as errors in his previous religious policy by now placing the state fully at the service of Roman Catholicism, but by accentuating the predominance of the executive over other branches of government, he displayed “sorprendentes similitudes” with what had been done

One more twentieth-century Colombian who expressed enthusiasm for the Bolivarian dictatorship, though with a quite different perspective, was Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, the country’s premier historical revisionist. Liévano Aguirre’s interpretation of the entire independence period set a pattern quickly taken up by members of what may be called the populist left. And, to him, what was distinctive about Bolívar among the leaders of his era was a conscious indentification with the masses as against the oligarchy of that day—whose representative figure, at least for New Granada, he chose to see in the same Santander who a few generations back was almost universally admired by Colombian Liberals as well as members of the prepopulist old left. Liévano Aguirre stressed Bolívar s rejection of “el liberalismo antiestatal” and described the Liberator’s Bolivian Constitution as his “solución al problema, tan antiguo, del desequilibrio entre los fuertes y los débiles.” Naturally, the privileged minorities would have none of it. Instead, working together with the forces of endemic caudillismo and regionalism and in the name of that “liberalismo antiestatal,” they dedicated themselves (as at Ocaña) to weakening the state lest Bolívar use it to undermine their interests. The Liberator’s response, according to Liévano Aguirre, was the assumption of dictatorial powers, by means of which he proposed to “conseguir que la República fuera vía amplia y generosa para todos sus ciudadanos y no monopolio de esa oligarquía simuladora de cultura.” Nowhere, unfortunately, did Lié-vano Aguirre offer a detailed discussion of the dictatorship itself, although he did recognize its ultimate failure, attributable to a lack of sufficient forcefulness on Bolívar’s part and to the tactical compromises he had to make with the church and certain antipopular elements.¹⁵

Superficially, perhaps, Liévano Aguirre’s concept of the Bolivarian dictatorship as a means of defending the weak and poor against the rich and strong may recall that of cesarismo democrático, which provided the title for the best known work of the Venezuelan archapologist of Juan Vicente Gómez and positivist essayist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz. The latter argued, it will be recalled, that in Spanish America only a powerful, caudillesque ruler could both maintain order and dispense justice to the population as a whole; any other system would be manipulated by scheming lawyers and narrow vested interests. Vallenilla Lanz attributed to the Liberator himself the discovery of the principle in question, which he called the “Bolivian law,” and though he never dealt at length with Bolívar’s final dictatorship, he obviously could not blame the Liberator for practicing that “law” himself. Rather, he is another who logically would have preferred a longer and even more vigorous exercise of dictatorial powers.¹⁶

A Venezuelan historian who comes closer to the specific interpretation given by Liévano Aguirre—and who would indignantly reject any suggestion of a parallel with Vallenilla Lanz—is the prolific and often suggestive Adeco militant José Luis Salcedo-Bastardo. He says less than others about the need for the dictatorship, but he does come to grips more directly than Liévano Aguirre with its subsequent actions, which he does not hesitate to describe as revolutionary:

Salcedo-Bastardo is probably unique in seeing even the Liberator’s dictatorial decrees in ecclesiastical matters as revolutionary, and he makes no serious attempt to prove the point. He spends more time on slavery and Indian policy, where he does cite specific provisions, even if his assessment of them may be debatable.¹⁸

A step removed from frank approval as exemplified by the writers cited so far is the thesis that Bolívar’s dictatorship was a necessary evil: a regime whose negative features cannot be glossed over but that was still the only one possible once the constitutional order established by the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821 suffered general repudiation and the Convention of Ocaña proved unable to devise an acceptable substitute. The fullest exposition of this argument is still to be found in the classic history of Colombian independence by José Manuel Restrepo, whose ambivalence is easily explained in light of his position of secretary of the interior under Bolívar (as previously under Santander) combined with his further condition as a self-conscious Granadino civilian ill at ease with the prominence of Venezuelan and other “foreign” military figures in the Bolivarian apparatus. Restrepo welcomed the retreat from the excessive innovation characteristic of the earlier years of Gran Colombia, though in more moderate terms than Groot; after all, he had helped administer those innovations. On the other hand, he was increasingly disheartened by the expansion of military power, privilege, and sheer expense, and on this theme in his history he minces no words. He merely felt that the chief blame for the dictatorship and resulting military “cancer” rested with the party of Santander, whose intransigence both before and during the Convention of Ocaña made impossible the middle course of practical compromise and common sense for which Restrepo (one is tempted to say, like the good Antioqueño that he was) clearly yearned. Only the personal rule of the Liberator stood between the new republic and the horrors of anarchy.¹⁹

Restrepo’s belief that the dictatorship was some kind of necessary evil continues to be widely shared, though often expressed only implicitly. It is, moreover, the only position possible for those who cannot bring themselves either to approve the broad lines of policy and action of the dictatorial regime or to accept the notion that Bolívar really liked doing the things of which they disapprove. This is the case with such leftist admirers as the Soviet Latin Americanist I. Lavretskiy, who holds that the virulent and self-interested opposition of the likes of Santander compelled Bolívar to turn for support to an array of reactionary elements that were only too happy to give it to him in return for the adoption of regressive policies that the Liberator quite sincerely regretted.²⁰ The view that Bolívar installed a military dictatorship of reactionary bent because he needed the help of an unsavory “alianza de terratenientes, generales y obispos” is put forward also by the Ecuadorian scholar Manuel Chiriboga. Once the independence struggle was over, he argues, the regional oligarchies were less willing to put up with the liberal and populist tendencies Bolívar had previously encouraged. These oligarchies were in fact “tentados tempranamente por el federalismo,” the better to maintain their preeminence. Ever fearing disorder, and unable to rule without at least their tacit consent, Bolívar abruptly shifted to a more conservative position.²¹

This general line of interpretation is given a significant further twist by the Venezuelan historian Miguel Acosta Saignés, whose Acción y utopía del hombre de las dificultades seeks to offer a comprehensive Marxist version of Bolívar without sacrificing historical materialism on the altars of either left-wing populism or the national hero cult. For Acosta Saignés, as for Chiriboga and Lavretskiy, the dictatorship was a step backward that served primarily the creole elites. It did not wholly lack constructive features, but Bolívar, seeking above all to ward off the threat of anarchy, “confundía los anhelos populares con signos de la descomposición social.” What is more, Acosta Saignés is not afraid to recognize that Bolívar belonged to and always represented the interests of the creole landowning class, however much he at the same time professed “el sentido de una justicia más amplia.” Hence, it is misleading to say that Bolívar suddenly betrayed the masses for reasons of political expediency. At a moment of crisis he merely did what came naturally to him, which, in Acosta Saignés’s opinion, was to safeguard as best he could the ultimately repressive social structure of which his own class was prime beneficiary after, exactly as before, the coming of independence.²²

The “reaction” that most liberal and leftist authors deplore (whether or not they also seek to explain it away) becomes almost the only favorable aspect of the dictatorship discerned by that bête noire of the Bolivarian establishment, the late Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga. To him it represented a wholesome return to preindependence models—an admission that Spain, after all, had known best. But there are no redeeming features in the picture Madariaga paints of Bolívar personally in his role as dictator. The Liberator continues to display the obsessive vanity and Machiavellian lack of scruples that were always hallmarks of his pursuit of the Napoleonic model. Madariaga thus joins the minority of authors who insist that Bolívar aimed at becoming a crowned monarch, and he covers Bolívar with opprobrium for hypocritically saddling his ministers with full blame for the monarchist intrigues they hatched at his instigation, only to be disavowed when opposition proved too great. To be sure, since in Madariaga’s view Bolívar was interested in almost nothing but personal power and glory, his shift from progressive to more conservative policies was wholly superficial: he never truly believed in either.²³

Whereas Acosta Saignés finds an underlying coherence in Bolívar’s class affiliation, Madariaga thus finds the same in his devotion to self. Yet the fact remains that most critics of the dictatorship have deplored it all the more because of the contrast they see between the objectives the Liberator pursued before and those he followed now. The Venezuelan positivist historian José Gil Fortoul put the matter quite simply: “no era ya el Libertador.”²⁴ Gil Fortoul was no more averse to dictatorship in all times and places than his contemporary Vallenilla Lanz, but he considered that Bolívar’s last dictatorship was a major error. So did Roberto Botero Saldarriaga, a characteristic exponent of traditional Colombian liberal historiography who naturally stressed the political repression of the regime first and foremost. For him it was “absolutamente regresivo” and quite unworthy of the Liberator, both because of the bad influences that now surrounded him and because Bolívar, after so many struggles, was prematurely aged.²⁵ A similar emphasis on Bolívar’s physical and spiritual exhaustion as explanation for the shortcomings of the dictatorship is commonly found in other traditional historians, but neither is it scorned even by Germán Carrera Damas, another contemporary Venezuelan Marxist historian, whose El culto a Bolívar has already been mentioned:

From the smattering of examples thus far given, one can distinguish at least two key questions that are posed repeatedly in the literature. Did the dictatorship of Bolívar represent a general retreat from policies and objectives of the Spanish American revolution, or only a correcting of errors and abuses? And, whichever answer is given to the former question, did Bolívar as dictator abandon (willingly or not) his own previously held principles, or was his dictatorship a logical culmination of what he had in fact been working for all along? The answers vary, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that seldom—Restrepo being one obvious exception—have they been based on careful examination of what Bolívar and his collaborators did with the powers that they usurped, or had thrust upon them, as the case may be.

The Acts of the Dictatorship: Program, the Judiciary, the Political Order

Less than a week after bowing in principle to the people’s will as expressed by the Bogotá acta of June 1828, Bolívar succinctly outlined his plan of government in a letter to José Antonio Páez: “Mi plan es apoyar mis reformas sobre la sólida base de la religión, y acercarme, en cuanto sea compatible con nuestras circunstancias, a las leyes antiguas menos complicadas y más seguras y eficaces.”²⁷ The organic decree of August 27, 1828, then explained by what means this program was to be applied in practice. Bolívar gave to himself the right to issue decrees with force of law on any subject, to repeal laws, to name and remove all state employees. The decree further established an advisory Council of State, to consist of all the secretaries (now renamed ministers) of state plus representatives of the main geographic regions. When he proceeded to name clerical and military representatives as well, Bolívar gave it a quasi-corporatist nature.²⁸ Existence of the Council, however, in no way diminished the supreme personal authority of the Liberator.

Naturally, Bolívar’s program of “reforms” was in many respects only the intensification of what he had been doing already, ever since he again took into his own hands the conduct of national affairs. He had, for example, begun to revamp the judicial system back in March, just after assuming extraordinary faculties under the 1821 Constitution, with a decree that made provincial governors and departmental intendants judges of first instance in cases involving treasury interests (causas de hacienda).²⁹ This action reversed a law of 1825 that assigned such cases to jueces letrados de hacienda and was fully in line with the belief Bolívar expressed in his message to the Convention of Ocaña that the separation of powers in Gran Colombia had been carried much too far. In that message he stated that government really consisted of only two powers: the faculty of making laws and that of carrying them out, and he appeared to class judicial functions as a subtype of executive.³⁰ So, by a later decree of November 1828, he abolished the jueces letrados de primera instancia and transferred their duties to the local alcaldes or other administrative officials. That left the higher appeal courts standing, but by various other decrees they were reorganized, renamed, reduced in number, and, in the process, purified of unreliable elements. The Corte Superior de Justicia del Norte in Caracas was subjected to a sweeping purge in part because of the temerity of its members (their “fatua arrogancia,” in Bolívar’s words) in drawing up a rejoinder to the aspersions on the judicial power contained in the presidential message to Ocaña.³¹ The Alta Corte itself lost the jurisdiction in military cases whereby it previously functioned as Alta Corte Marcial with the addition of just two military members. The fact that civilian judges had thus enjoyed a majority on the highest military tribunal was a frequently mentioned grievance of military officers, and by Bolívar’s decree of April 13, 1829, the tables were neatly turned, for it created an Alta Corte Marcial composed entirely of military men—except for a minority of two drawn from the civilian Alta Corte.³² The role of the professional judiciary was somewhat diminished in commercial questions, too, when Bolívar first reestablished the Consulado of Guayaquil with jurisdiction over commercial cases throughout Ecuador, and shortly afterward restored the Consulado of Cargatena.³³

The revamped military high court had as its presiding officer Minister of War General Rafael Urdaneta, and received the special mission of advising the government on military affairs. By an earlier decree, Bolívar had restored the Spanish Ordinance of 1768 as exclusive code of procedure in military justice, while in a number of other instances he sought to extend and strengthen the military fuero and improve military discipline along traditional lines. One grave threat to such discipline was said to be a law of Congress permitting officers and men to marry almost as they pleased; the requirement to obtain approval from one’s military superiors before entering into matrimony was therefore reinstated.³⁴ Moreover, there would be more military men to apply these regulations to, as a result of Bolívar’s decree of August 1828, which raised the size of the armed forces to forty thousand. This was supposedly to deal with new threats of attack by Spanish forces, though more truly directed against both internal dissidents and Peru. It was a quite unrealistic measure that could never be fully carried out, but the fact that it more than quadrupled the ceiling set on the armed forces by Congress in 1827 gives some idea of the military emphasis that in the end so annoyed Minister of Interior Restrepo.³⁵

Bolívar frequently, though not invariably, chose to unite civil and military command of a province or department in the same hands, which naturally meant in military rather than civilian hands. This was nothing new, as Santander had done the same in special circumstances; it did, however, become more common.³⁶ In the organic decree Bolívar further renamed the departmental intendants as “prefects,” in accord with, among other things, Napoleonic usage.³⁷ More important, at the lowest level of administration, in November 1828 he indefinitely suspended the municipalities. These he had described as costly and useless in his Ocaña message, but he did retain them as territorial subdivisions. He merely eliminated the elected municipal councils and assigned all local government functions to agents of the national executive.³⁸

The aforementioned changes both enhanced the authoritarian character of the system and went hand in hand with additional instances of harsh treatment of political opponents, which, not surprisingly, reached a peak immediately following the attempted assassination of Bolívar on September 25, 1828. Particularly if one assumes the legitimacy of the regime itself, these instances were not always unwarranted, as various members of the anti-Bolivarian rump convention left behind at Ocaña had frankly concluded that an oppressive tyranny was about to be established, if not in place already, and that armed resistance was just and necessary. The would-be resisters included Venezuelan crypto-separatists as well as close supporters of Santander from New Granada, and several of the former were forbidden to return home afterward by order of Páez. Martín Tovar, a Caracas nobleman turned ultraliberal federalist, was thus forced to set up shop in Curaçao, where he agitated and composed propaganda against the dictatorship. Another former deputy, the Margariteño General Francisco Esteban Gómez, whose disagreements with Bolívar dated back to the war of independence proper, was arrested as he returned to Venezuela with seditious literature in his luggage.³⁹ As complementary security measures, Páez proceeded to order all individuals over seven years of age to carry a boleta de seguridad and established the requirement of an official pase for letters to and from abroad.⁴⁰ Returning Granadino deputies suffered less immediate harassment, but Diego Fernando Gómez—a Socorrano of impressive patriot credentials and an enthusiastic Santanderista—did find himself fired from the Alta Corte. And two of his relatives who were serving in the military in Quito, Alfonso and José Acevedo Tejada, were separated from the army by General Juan José Flores for refusing to sign a prodictatorial acta.⁴¹

In any case, it was in direct response to the attempt on Bolívar’s life that repression became most acute. There is little doubt that the fourteen persons executed over the following weeks were at least guilty of something, but the pardo naval hero General José Padilla was clearly not involved in the assassination plot. He died instead for a case of insubordination the previous March far less serious than that for which Páez, say, had received full pardon; he was just a strong Santanderista, and conveniently at hand in a Bogotá prison. The sentence of death handed down against Santander, then commuted to exile, was somewhat comparable. He was not one of the September conspirators, yet had never concealed his belief that resistance to the dictatorship was morally justified—even as he was accepting the diplomatic exile as minister to the United States that Bolívar graciously offered him—and he certainly had known more about the plotting than he ever told the authorities.⁴² At the same time, numerous others were expelled from the country or confined to distant provinces on the vaguest suspicion of complicity or on grounds of known friendship with Santander or the actual conspirators. A typical example was the Panamanian public servant and recent Ocaña deputy José Vallarino, sentenced to internal exile and not released until 1830, despite the fact that none other than Minister of War Urdaneta conceded his innocence and urged clemency.⁴³ Another victim of internal exile was the same Diego Fernando Gómez previously dismissed from the high court; in his case, Interior Minister Restrepo observed that the sentence was due solely to his “opiniones anteriores.”⁴⁴ As Restrepo also noted, Bolívar frankly intended to “disipar el partido del general Santander.”⁴⁵ Such further measures as the prohibition of secret societies, cancellation of the teaching license or academic degrees of conspirators or suspects, and the imposition by the prefect of Cundinamarca of a passport requirement even to cross municipal boundaries rounded out the picture.⁴⁶ At least there was no need for a crackdown on the opposition press; none existed, the potential opposition journalists being either banished or properly intimidated. Bolívar merely had to urge restraint within the ranks of his own supporters, as he did when La Luna of Cartagena— supposedly egged on by General Mariano Montilla, jefe superior of Magdalena—went a bit too far in criticizing the Bogotá administration and in particular Dr. José María Castillo y Rada, the Cartagenero president of the Council of State.⁴⁷

Even though, under the dictatorship, the executive power enjoyed something close to political omnipotence, this did not mean that ultimate authority was wholly concentrated in the hands of Bolívar (wherever he might be at the moment) and his ministers, for another striking characteristic of the regime was the extent of regional delegation of authority, which really anticipated the eventual disruption of Gran Colombia. When Bolívar departed Caracas for Bogotá in July 1827, he left Páez in charge of Venezuela with the title of jefe superior and, at least in practice, much the same exceptional powers that he had himself been exercising there since the end of Páez’s rebellion and had been using to give Venezuela in many respects a regime different from that of the nation as a whole. In some matters, what Bolívar had first done in Venezuela he later extended to the rest of Gran Colombia, but this did not make Páez any less the master of a quasi-independent fiefdom.⁴⁸ Like Bolívar, he suppressed the municipalities, but he did so on the recommendation of an assembly of notables in Caracas and without waiting for the national capital to act; he even restored the title of corregidors for the officials now placed in charge of local government functions, something Bolívar himself failed to do.⁴⁹ Bolívar often felt that Páez went a bit too far, and he once wrote to one of the latter’s associates urging him to have Páez send draft decrees and regulations to the Liberator for review before they were issued. There is no indication, however, that Páez followed this procedure, and, according to General Urdaneta, the Council of Ministers, on its part, was careful never to disapprove anything that Páez did.⁵⁰

In Ecuador, Juan José Flores came to enjoy a comparable situation, although he apparently was not Bolívar’s preferred candidate for the role.⁵¹ And, when Bolívar went south in person to direct the Peruvian war, he did not hesitate first to convoke an advisory junta to propose reforms specially geared to the needs of the southern departments⁵² and then to issue a number of decrees that created for Ecuador, as previously for Venezuela, administrative and fiscal arrangements not applicable to the rest of the nation. Only in the interior departments of New Granada was the writ of the central government normally regarded as binding, at least in principle. On the coast, Mariano Montilla, with the title of jefe superior or prefecto general del Magdalena, exercised a regional authority somewhat analogous to that of Páez or Flores. ⁵³ The fact that Montilla’s prefecture-general included not only the Department of Magdalena with its capital Cartagena, where Montilla had long been military commander, and the adjoining Isthmus of Panama, but also the Department of Zulia (Provinces of Maracaibo, Mérida, Coro, Trujillo), did not lack precedents in the colonial territorial arrangements that existed before creation of the Captaincy-General of Venezuela in 1777. Even so, it represented the one great exception to Páez’s position of supremacy in what is now Venezuela, and when Gran Colombia finally broke up, he would make certain that Zulia returned to the Venezuelan fold.

The peculiar status of Zulia underscores Bolívar’s own ambivalence concerning the relationship between the sections of Gran Colombia. At different times he toyed with the notions of frankly accepting the breakup of the union into either two or three separate republics, of maintaining the outward form of central union, and of giving to Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada—or separately to interior New Granada and something like Montilla’s coastal dominion—their own internally centralized regimes while joining them in a confederation for matters of common interest. The latter solution was similar to what Bolívar had once envisaged for the component states of his Federation of the Andes, extending from Venezuela through Bolivia, and he came close to proposing it at one point to the Convention of Ocaña. Oddly enough, it resembled a proposal already put forward at the convention by the Santanderista Vicente Azuero and defeated by the Bolivarian faction with the help of a group of independents. Led by José María Castillo y Rada, the Bolivarianos did not wish to reverse the stand they had taken from the outset in favor of a unitary government (assuming it to be the Liberator’s true preference), in order to adopt the position of a bitter adversary; and Bolívar once again allowed the idea to lapse.⁵⁴ This was perhaps unfortunate, because it was the one formula that held out any real possibility of prolonging the life of Gran Colombia. The possibility was not great, but greater than that offered either by a general federation of small provinces (such as Bolívar had cordially loathed ever since the Venezuelan First Republic), or the unitary model to which he still gave occasional lip service, even as he undermined it in practice by the sweeping delegation of authority to Páez et al. His failure to come to grips with this key issue and to adopt a consistent stand on it must be set down as the greatest single failure of Bolívar’s political leadership in its final phase.

From the Liberator’s time to the present, much more attention has been given to the monarchist schemes that were bruited about in the closing months of Gran Colombia as in so many other Spanish American nations in the early postindependence period. Did Bolívar himself see the establishment of monarchy as the last chance for preserving both his political handiwork of Gran Colombia and some modicum of social stability? If so, did he contemplate assuming a crown personally or at most plan to serve as president until his death or retirement opened the way for a European prince? Far more has been written on this question than it is worth, particularly since the correct answer was no doubt given long ago by José Manuel Restrepo, who as minister of interior and a prime mover in the monarchist intrigue had reason to know. Bolívar, of course, had never concealed his admiration for constitutional monarchy as a form of government, above all in its British version. Neither had he concealed his skepticism as to the feasibility of imposing monarchy in the new nations of Spanish America, and he was accordingly ambivalent on this issue, too. What he did do, from Quito in April 1829, was to insinuate to his ministers that they explore the possibility of a vague British protectorate, something, under existing circumstances, that they considered highly unlikely. They further assumed that neither British nor other significant European support for Gran Colombia would be available except on the basis of some kind of monarchical settlement. When they then proceeded to sound out the British and French on the prospects for recruiting a European prince, as well as the views of select power-brokers and opinion-makers at home, news of what they were doing necessarily reached the Liberator in one form or another, even though they carefully refrained from seeking a commitment from him. Meanwhile, they took his failure to protest as signifying at least tacit approval. When Bolívar did finally object, after receiving clear indications of the continuing strength of antimonarchist sentiment, his ministers understandably felt betrayed. Nevertheless, Restrepo was careful to emphasize that Bolívar had never in any way given active or explicit encouragement to the plans for monarchy. Much less had he ever indicated the least desire to have a crown placed on his head.⁵⁵

At the same time that the Liberator was disavowing those who promoted monarchy in the conviction that they were thus interpreting his own innermost thoughts, he went out of his way to invite a full and free expression of opinion by the citizenry on forms of government in preparation for the meeting of the Congreso Admirable in January 1830.⁵⁶ The electoral process, however, had been carefully revised so as to make the voting for the coming Congress, which took place in mid-1829, even less democratic than had been the case under the 1821 Constitution that limited the suffrage to free males 21 years of age, or over, or married, who either owned 100 pesos in real property or practiced some useful profession in a capacity other than hired laborer or servant. The Congress of 1827 sought to resolve a doubt that came up repeatedly in applying the constitutional provisions by expressly ruling that service in the military from the rank of sergeant down did not satisfy the stated professional requirement; it also wrote in a residence requirement in terms that would work against many military voters, and on both counts it created another grievance to be harped on in military manifestos to the Convention of Ocaña, which was elected under the new rules.⁵⁷ Bolívar’s decree convoking elections for the Congreso Admirable eliminated discrimination against the military, but it increased the minimum voting age to 25 and recast the means test in terms of yearly income, with 180 pesos needed to qualify. The owner of a 100-peso minifundio would scarcely be able to qualify this time, while the vast majority of hired workers would still be excluded. On the other hand, for those who did qualify, voting was made legally obligatory, in the hope of thereby overcoming the widespread apathy that had been noted in previous Colombian elections.⁵⁸

Because elections were indirect, and results of the first-round voting for the members of electoral assemblies are generally not available, it is impossible to calculate the rate of voter participation for the nation as a whole. One of the few exceptions is the electoral district of Bogotá, where the turnout came to roughly 14 percent of voting-age males.⁵⁹ This was some two times as many as in the 1827 voting for the Convention of Ocaña,⁶⁰ when not only was participation voluntary, but earth tremors held down the turnout. The removal of discrimination against the armed forces would also account for some part of the improvement, especially if one accepts the allegation that the government resorted to mass voting of the military. The charge is, of course, perfectly credible, because any sargento primero could meet the new income requirement; and there was obvious pressure on the military to vote right.⁶¹ Indeed, Bolívar and his supporters were determined not to repeat the error that they claimed (with some exaggeration) to have made at the time of the elections for Ocaña, which was to refrain from ignoble electioneering and thereby leave the field open for Santander and his fellow intriguers, who were not disheartened even by earthquakes. Thus, Bolívar himself sent off letters discreetly urging Páez, Montilla et al. to exert a wholesome influence on the attitude of voters in their respective bailiwicks; and in the case of Venezuela, General Carlos Soublette was able to report flatly that “agentes del Gobierno tienen una intervención muy importante en las elecciones.”⁶² It was a quite successful intervention, too, in Venezuela and elsewhere. Bolivarian stalwarts could find very little in the results to complain about, although Foreign Minister Estanislao Vergara even quibbled over the victory of an eminent moderate such as Juan de Dios Aranzazu, one of the Ocaña independents, who was elected once again from the Province of Antioquia.⁶³

Particularly striking was the outcome in Bogotá, where a mere handful of individuals who at one time were identified with the party of Santander received a smattering of votes in the primary round: an example is the paltry twenty-nine cast for Juan Manuel Anubla, co-negotiator of the 1824 foreign loan that Bolívar and others had used as an issue to discredit the Santander administration. None of them was elected to the Congress.

The Santanderistas having nearly swept the national capital in 1827, the collapse of their electoral strength only two years later was probably due as much to official mobilization of voter turnout as to whatever real changes had occurred in the thinking of the qualified electorate. It also reflected, naturally, the fact that so many opposition leaders were in foreign or internal exile and the related fact that there was no opposition press to promote antigovernmental candidacies. Be that as it may, the homogeneously progovernment nature of the election results at first seemed to be repeated in the round of actas that appeared in response to Bolívar’s call to the citizens to submit their views directly to the Congreso Admirable. These called to mind the proclamations of 1828 denouncing the Convention of Ocaña or greeting the establishment of the dictatorship; some explicitly called for lifelong presidency or monarchy. The territories subject to José Antonio Páez did not follow suit this time, however, even though they, too, had backed the administration in the late elections: they began issuing actas for Venezuelan independence instead.⁶⁴ On his part, Bolívar continued toying with assorted constitutional nostrums almost to the end.⁶⁵ Yet the message he eventually submitted to the Congress, unlike the one he sent to Ocaña, contained only generalities. Even if he had finally made up his mind on what needed to be done, which he probably had not, he was anxious to avoid any appearance of dictation.

The Acts of the Dictatorship: Religious, Social, and Fiscal

Among the generalities contained in Bolívar’s message to Gran Colombia’s final constituent assembly was the sentence: “Permitiréis que mi último acto sea recomendaros que protejáis la religión santa que profesamos. … ”⁶⁶ And among the concrete acts of the dictatorship, those which had been issued for that very purpose are the ones most often cited to prove the regressive character of Bolívar’s rule. Most notorious, perhaps, is his decree of March 1828, which prohibited the use of Jeremy Bentham’s texts in higher education.⁶⁷ Though issued before the definitive establishment of the dictatorship, it was reaffirmed in the post-September reaction, when still other steps were also taken to make sure that the young received an orthodox brand of Roman Catholic instruction; it was all the more striking in that Bolívar had previously been one of Bentham’s Latin American correspondents and admirers.⁶⁸ Almost as well known are two decrees of July 1828 reversing earlier legislation that adversely affected the religious orders. In one of them Bolívar ordered restoration of the conventos menores (male convents with fewer than eight members), whose suppression the Congress of Cúcuta had ordered in 1821. This decree did not, however, extend to any such convents whose buildings had already been put to use as schools or hospitals; neither did it restore the revenues pertaining to suppressed convents if those assets had in fact been applied (as the law of Cúcuta directed) to educational purposes. The other decree suspended the law of 1826 that set twenty-five years as a minimum age for taking religious vows. As the main reason for doing so, the decree cited the plight of Indian missions, and it therefore added that male religious who made their professions in future would have to devote five years to mission service.⁶⁹

Though no doubt most important, the above measures were not the only instances of ecclesiastical counterreform. One separate decree listing conventos menores that qualified for restoration threw in for good measure two houses of the hospital order of San Juan de Dios on the Isthmus of Panama that had been suppressed by the previous Spanish authorities.⁷⁰ A circular of July 1828 restored to the Juzgados de Diezmos “su régimen antiguo de proceder”—and thus, it was hoped, more energetic collection methods—by ending the requirement to consult an asesor letrado before pronouncing sentence. Bolívar revived the positions of military chaplains and vicars-general suppressed by Congress in 1827, and he indefinitely postponed application of a provision in the 1826 law of public credit that would have authorized the redemption of ecclesiastical censos by means of payment in government obligations. (The article had earlier been suspended by Congress itself, but only until the end of 1828.⁷¹) One of his very last decrees, in January 1830, suspended the article of the law of 1824 prohibiting establishment of entails that required goods left to mortmain to be sold at auction, with the product of the sale then invested in the national treasury. Such property was still to be sold, but with the sale price becoming instead a debt owed directly to the church, as an ecclesiastical censo.⁷² Meanwhile, too, the antiheresy laws, which had never been expressly repealed, but were often haphazardly enforced in the days of Santander, acquired new vigor of implementation. One instance was the seizure in Ecuador of “más de 2,341” copies of the Bible in Spanish translation sent out from London, on the ground that they did not represent a canonical version. At least they were allowed to be reexported.⁷³ Another curious sign was the brief notice that appeared in the Gaceta de Colombia in September 1828 deploring an article published at Cartagena in mockery of the religious orders. The author had been acquitted when brought before a press jury on the charge of violating the existing prohibition of attacks on the Catholic religion, and the national government did not overturn the verdict. It did order the Gaceta to take note of the episode as an example of “la facilidad con que se abusa entre nosotros de la preciosa libertad de escribir, i de la dificultad que ofrece nuestra lei de imprenta para correjir tan escandalosos abusos.”⁷⁴ Together with the decrees on Bentham and the like, such a lament concerning irreligious publications could only be a warning to writers and editors to be more discreet, and to jury members to be more zealous.

All this was in addition to the continual stream of rhetorical tributes to the clergy and other expressions of positive support for the church from the Liberator and his principal underlings, which have repeatedly been emphasized as proof of the reactionary tendencies of the dictatorship. Bolívar’s message to the Congreso Admirable has been noted, and well before that the organic decree of August 1828 explicitly listed protection of the Roman Catholic religion as a function of the national authorities. Additional examples could be given ad infinitum. Yet the tangible value of such statements was not always very great, and neither was support for the clergy at all unconditional among Bolívar’s associates. Such a key individual as Foreign Minister Vergara warned Bolívar against the efforts of the papacy to compensate for loss of power in Europe through domination in South America, and the fervently Bolivariano Juan García del Río, whose Meditaciones colombianas were a plea for the monarchical solution, used the same tract to assail clerical corruption and call for relief from tithes, censos, and other ecclesiastical burdens.⁷⁵ Likewise, Bolívar’s Irish aide and confidant, Daniel F. O’Leary, recorded that many of the Liberator’s closest friends disliked the restoration of convents, to which Bolívar allegedly replied: “It is necessary to oppose religious fanaticism to the fanaticism of the demagogues.”⁷⁶ In effect, the move did enjoy wide support among the masses, whatever the more educated Bolivarians may have thought about it.⁷⁷

What few have noticed, in any case, is the number of measures adopted by the Liberator himself that represented a prolongation of, rather than reaction against, the generally moderate program of ecclesiastical reform begun in 1821 by the Congress of Cúcuta and continued under Vice-President Santander. Indeed, as early as October 1827—a month after resuming the presidency—Bolívar decreed the absolute prohibition of burials within churches and required each town to build a proper cemetery for hygienic disposal of cadavers. This was not precisely an anticlerical measure, even though an innovation dear to the hearts of eighteenth-century philosophers, but it did represent a civilly mandated change in religious customs. In Argentina it had been a pet cause of Bernardino Rivadavia and his imitators, whereas in Gran Colombia it was Bolívar who made the first serious attack on the problem. He really meant business: when a few days later a distinguished citizen was illegally interred in a church in Bogotá, the body was ordered exhumed.⁷⁸ A year later Bolívar did allow burials in the church of San Diego, just outside the then-settled urban area of Bogotá, in view of the inadequacy of the public cemetery that had been built and until another could be added. Before much longer, the local government of Bogotá was regularly selling licenses for burials to be performed inside churches. Bolívar, who by then had left for the South, would probably not have approved. Indeed, he even rejected the plea of the abbess of the Convento de la Concepción in Cuenca for nuns to continue to be buried in their convent church pending completion of a public cemetery there.⁷⁹

Though the clergy in general seems to have raised no serious objections to the new burial policy, the church can hardly have been happy with Bolívar’s December 1828 decree exempting from payment of tithes any grain crops introduced in future on plantations of coffee, cacao, and indigo, or with that of August 1829 authorizing the payment of censos in kind in highland Ecuador.⁸⁰ The first of these continued a series of special exemptions for purposes of economic reconstruction and development that proclerical spokesmen had normally opposed on principle; the second was a measure repeatedly demanded by private landowners, which allowed them, in the words of Restrepo, to make interest payments in produce that the creditors (generally ecclesiastical) “no necesitaban y que las más veces no podían vender.”⁸¹ Neither was there the least hesitation over accepting a provision for freedom of conscience and private worship according to Non-Roman Catholic rites in a treaty signed with the Netherlands in 1829.⁸²

Bolívar as dictator continued to insist on the republic’s right to exercise the patronato exactly as Santander had done before, despite ultramontanist objections that this required explicit papal agreement. At most he chose to leave the appointment of mere curates to the ecclesiastical ordinaries; but he gave the same ordinaries jurisdiction over the nation’s religious for the sake of closer supervision and discipline, in violation of accepted ecclesiastical procedure.⁸³ As noted before, he raised Quito to archiepiscopal status without waiting for papal concurrence. And, finally, even his patently proclerical moves often carried significant limitations apparent only to those who read the fine print. Not only was the reestablishment of convents far less than universal—a mere four out of eighteen of those lost by the Dominicans satisfied the conditions for restoration⁸⁴—but the linkage between relaxation of the ban on early professions and a renewed emphasis on Indian missions was not necessarily to the liking of the friars. Their preference for the delights of Bogotá and Quito over such mission areas as the eastern llanos had more to do with the missions’ decline than anything the Congress of Gran Colombia had voted concerning them.

The fact that in case of conflict Bolívar easily sacrificed the interests of the church to those of the landed elite is no doubt indicative of the relative weight he assigned to those two sectors of society. But the measures cited on tithes and censos were not the only ones to favor the landowning class. There was, for example, the regulation of February 1829 that the Liberator issued concerning the cattle industry on the llanos of New Granada. In addition to providing for registration of brands and so forth, it specified that only ranch operators with a property of at least one square league—and twenty-five or more animals branded yearly— should have the right to unmarked animals that strayed onto their land. That size threshold does not appear unduly high, even though its precise significance in the society of the llanos is hard to evaluate; but the measure also contained strict prohibitions against trespassing on private property by humans, and in every respect it revealed an obvious commitment to private ownership as against the treatment of cattle and range land as a common resource. The decree closely paralleled one issued the previous August by Páez for the Venezuelan llanos as replacement for the repressive ordinance of the llanos enacted in 1811, which had fallen into disuse. And neither Páez’s decree nor Bolívar’s demanded that all peons have a job and a “passport” to prove it, as in the previous ordinance, although a Reglamento general de policía that Páez also issued did establish a somewhat comparable requirement for farm workers. The government of Bolívar was thus a bit less socially repressive, or simply more realistic, than was that of the Venezuelan First Republic; but the prime beneficiaries of social policy had not changed.⁸⁵

A similar conclusion logically follows from the decree of October 1828 that restored the Indian tribute, although the latter was also adopted for fiscal reasons and has been cited by Salcedo-Bastardo as one more example of Bolívar’s solicitude for the oppressed.⁸⁶ The text of the decree did indeed cite Indian demands for a revival of the tribute, in return for which they had always been exempted from various other burdens. It is no less true that the tribute was restored at a slightly reduced rate. The decree provided, in addition, for the fiscales of the regional appeal courts to act as protectores generales de indígenas, and it was followed by a number of miscellaneous actions that at face value reflected the government’s paternal care for the Indian. Among these were two circulars from the Interior Ministry calling for the establishment of schools in Indian parishes and spelling out that the fiscales’ functions would be the same as those of Indian defenders under the Spanish regime.⁸⁷ The Indian schools, however, were to be paid for by the Indians themselves. The second circular, though at least it rejected the liberal fiction of the Indian as equal citizen capable of fending for himself on the same terms as anyone else, was probably more an example of the tendency to reembrace prerevolutionary patterns of administration than anything of practical benefit to the Indian, who had not fared notably well under the old regime either.

The tribute, of course, was an even more striking instance of return to former ways. As a tax, it fitted in with the Liberator’s oft-stated view that the old revenues, because of their familiarity, were easier to collect; and it was especially important in the South, where the problem with Peru increased the need for revenue. But the tribute was likewise a mechanism of social control, which is certainly the main reason why the great landowners of the Cauca and Ecuador yearned for its restoration. Their viewpoint was well expressed by Tomás C. Mosquera in a report that he submitted, as intendant of Cauca, supporting the move. Since the abolition of the tribute (in Gran Colombia in 1821) and thus of the need to earn money with which to pay it, said Mosquera, the Indians had reverted to “un estado casi salvaje. … [N]o han hecho otra cosa que abandonarse a sus placeres brutales.” Production suffered, and even population was dwindling, by which he presumably meant the population of Indians accessible to creole control.⁸⁸ That the landowners wanted the tribute back as a way of compelling the Indians to work was frankly recognized by Bolívar himself.⁸⁹ One need not conclude that this was his primary objective in restoring it; but he can hardly have imagined that he was simply helping the Indians.

One other dimension of the Indian problem, particularly in New Granada, was the continuing erosion of the resguardos, or communal lands. Their distribution among the Indians in the form of small private holdings was ordered in 1821 by the Congress of Cúcuta, ostensibly for the Indians’ good, but it obviously could facilitate usurpation of Indian lands by creoles and mestizos and, as an indirect consequence, the exploitation of Indian labor. Though not much progress had been made as yet toward carrying out the measure. Hence Liévano Aguirre emphasizes Bolívar’s displeasure on hearing of abuses in the distribution of Indian lands on his return from Peru and cites his order for an administrative inquiry into the problem as evidence of his populist bent.⁹⁰ Yet there is no indication that the policy objective of dividing the common lands (which Bolívar had likewise espoused on other occasions in Gran Colombia and Peru) was ever abandoned. Zeal in carrying out the distribution of resguardos earned the jefe politico of La Mesa formal commendation from his superiors;⁹¹ and in his report to the Congreso Admirable on the achievements of Bolívar’s government, José María Castillo y Rada—as president of the Council of Ministers—emphasized what it had done to improve the lot of the Indians by, among other things, ordering the division of their communal holdings. There was, he admitted, a long way to go, for it had found the Indians “tan desidiosos como antes, negados al trabajo e indolentes. ”⁹²

If even the intent of measures relating to the Indians is sometimes debatable, at least the one decree relating to Black slavery was unequivocal. Issued on June 27, 1828, three days after Bolívar’s acceptance of the dictatorship, it made certain administrative changes to improve functioning of the manumission juntas created by the free-birth law of 1821. This decree, and the mere fact that Bolívar continued to resist demands to reverse or water down that law, itself attests to his real commitment to the extinction of slavery. The decree simply was not very effective. Even if it had been, it would mainly have entailed better collection and use of the special inheritance taxes set up to purchase the freedom of slaves born too soon to benefit from the free-birth principle. As long as slavery remained a legally accepted institution, and as long as the very people whose inheritances were to he taxed for its abolition retained both social prestige and political influence, it was obviously unrealistic to expect much from the procedure in question.⁹³

A number of other economic measures sought to promote particular branches of production. In October 1829, for example, Bolívar put his seal of approval on a reglamento de minas that mostly reaffirmed colonial precedents and, where not in conflict with other sections of the reglamento, declared in force the mining ordinance of New Spain. It aimed not to nationalize exploitation of the subsoil, but to clarify procedures for the awarding and cancellation of private mineral concessions and to establish more summary methods for adjudicating mining disputes. There soon followed a circular exempting mining tools and machinery from payment of alcabala, and exemption from military service was granted mine employees.⁹⁴ At another point Bolívar commissioned the Cartagena merchant Juan de Francisco Martín to import the cochineal bug, by stealth if need be, from Guatemala or Mexico along with persons knowledgeable of the industry.⁹⁵ An attempt was even made to promote indigo production in Ecuador by sending specimens and workers from Cúcuta in New Granada, which, if actually done—and it seems unlikely—would have represented an unusual case of economic coordination across sectional lines.⁹⁶ In slightly different vein, in July 1829 Bolívar placed restrictions on the exploitation of nationally owned forests, for conservationist purposes that were remarkably far-sighted, even though one must again suspect that not much came of them.⁹⁷ At any rate, such measures as these only continued the sort of public-spirited attention to economic endeavors of which numerous examples could be found in either late colonial or early republican administration. They were scarcely meant as structural reforms. Moreover, it was Bolívar as dictator who halted the effort to promote steam navigation on the Magdalena River by means of an exclusive privilege granted to the German-born, though naturalized Colombian, Juan Bernardo Elbers. The Elbers contract was cancelled in 1829 on grounds of both his inability to fulfill its precise terms and his overly close connection with United States interests.⁹⁸

Some more attempts to assist economic activities can be found in the area of foreign trade: the granting of free-port privileges to Pampatar on the Island of Margarita;⁹⁹ the lifting of the absolute ban on trade with Spain despite persistence of a technical state of war;¹⁰⁰ or the relaxation of restrictions on the export of livestock from Venezuela and Magdalena that had initially been imposed for the rebuilding of war-depleted herds.¹⁰¹ But to what extent did Bolívar use import duties and regulations for protectionist purposes? Demands for protection kept appearing from such diverse sources as José Antonio Páez in Venezuela, agriculturalists and manufacturers of central New Granada, and, above all, the textile interests of highland Ecuador.¹⁰² Páez, who on this issue seems to have parted company with Venezuela’s agroexporting socioeconomic elite, did not go so far as to raise tariffs on his own authority, but he did offer a four-year exclusive privilege to anyone who introduced some new line of manufacturing to Venezuela, which is another nice example of the quasi-autonomy asserted by Venezuela under his rule.¹⁰³ It was the Ecuadorians, in any event, who mainly won the ear of Bolívar. After going south to direct the Peruvian war, Bolívar agreed to prohibit the importation into the southern departments—not the nation as a whole—of specified competing textiles. He also prohibited the introduction of salt into Ecuador, although in this case he merely tried to protect the interests of the state salt monopoly and of the tax farmers who ran it.¹⁰⁴

Bolívar furthermore kept raising general tariff levels, a tendency that was undoubtedly reinforced by protectionist considerations, even though he normally spoke of his tariff policy as designed to produce greater revenue.¹⁰⁵ He adhered, in effect, to the somewhat simplistic notion that an increase in tariff rates will necessarily lead to an increase in receipts, and he had been convinced for some time that Gran Colombian import tariffs were too low. In March 1827, therefore, Bolívar had decreed a general tariff reform for the ports of Venezuela in which he replaced the previous ad valorem duties with a system of specific duties—for the most part levied as a percentage of theoretical values set down in an official arancel—that were assumed to be more productive. According to the unanimous report of the combined finance committees of the Gran Colombian Senate, numerous merchant ships reaching Venezuela after the new duties went into effect simply continued elsewhere rather than pay them. He extended the same system, however, to the entire nation in March 1828. There were further changes in May of the following year, when the duty on flour was more than doubled (even as certain other duties were being cut) and the government eliminated (supposedly for the sake of greater simplicity) the additional discriminatory duties on goods introduced by way of West Indian colonies such as Jamaica rather than from Europe directly.¹⁰⁶ Be that as it may, in the view of foreign diplomats and even a good many functionaries and backers of the dictatorship, the net effect of all this was to raise tariffs to exorbitant levels.¹⁰⁷

As always, the real impact of the customs duties is hard to determine, because it depended not only on their legal rate but on fluctuations in the market price of goods imported and in the accepted terms of payment, meaning in particular the possibility of paying at least part of the sums owed in depreciated government obligations. Bolívar at various times sought to limit or suspend the acceptance of vales in payment of duties, but he never eradicated the practice.¹⁰⁸ Relative ease of smuggling similarly affected the true situation. One can only assume that higher duties in themselves must have encouraged it. If contraband did not become even worse than it was, one reason was that legal and illegal trade alike suffered from the drainage of specie and lack of suitable return cargo that led to a falling off in foreign commerce almost everywhere in Spanish America after the brief spurt associated with the final ending of colonial prohibitions and first large-scale entry of foreign merchants. The United States consul in La Guaira estimated that his country’s trade through that port had declined by one-half from the beginning of 1828 to mid-1829; official United States statistics for trade with Colombia as a whole suggest a more modest but still unmistakable falling off.¹⁰⁹ Bolívar’s dictatorship, like other Latin American governments, was inevitably blamed for the depressed condition of foreign trade, but it is highly unlikely that his concrete measures were the main determinant.

The charging of duties by arancel was one more instance of a return to preindependence procedures. So was reestablishment of the aguardiente monopoly, which had been abolished by the Congress of Cúcuta, but was brought back, at least in New Granada and Ecuador, by Bolívar’s decree of March 13, 1828. The omission of Venezuela underscored again its special status within the union, and eventually Cauca was excepted also on the ground that aguardiente there was produced by numerous small operators (drawn from “la porción más miserable de los habitantes”), so that introduction of the monopoly would create too many problems, both human and administrative. Of course, this did not mean that aguardiente went untaxed in either Venezuela or Cauca, and where the monopoly did remain in force, the theoretical penalties for defrauding it ranged up to and included death.¹¹⁰ The medias anatas and other special levies on new civil or ecclesiastical appointees were restored, too, in partial replacement of the innovative but not very productive contribución directa, which was abolished in late 1826 by a decree that Santander issued at the Liberator’s behest, after the latter returned from Peru. On that same occasion the alcabala, abolished by the Congress of Cúcuta precisely to make way for the direct tax, had also been brought back, and Bolívar generously reduced its rate from 5 to 4 percent in December 1828.¹¹¹ Yet even the contribución directa was revived, in one sense, in the form of various contribuciones extraordinarias to defray costs of the Peruvian war. These extra levies weighed mainly on Ecuador and New Granada, and their collection was subject to a good bit of discretion on the part of regional officials. One measure affecting public employees, however—always the easiest victims because of the possibility of withholding from their pay—established a progressive scale that went from 3 to 20 percent of an official’s salary, over a period of three months. By contrast, the previous contribución directa had taxed such income at an annual rate of either 2 or 3 percent.¹¹² Forced loans likewise took their toll, perhaps above all in the battlefront Prefecture of Azuay, where they accounted for roughly one-third of treasury receipts in fiscal year 1829.¹¹³ And, finally, the spurt of military expenditures led to such bad practices as diverting the operating capital of the tobacco monopoly, which could only reduce future revenues.¹¹⁴ None of this was exactly new, but the return of financing methods that were commonplace during the independence struggle and then largely set aside for a brief time does help explain the lack of enthusiasm in Gran Colombia for the conflict with Peru.

The Bases of Support for the Regime

In spite of salary deductions and arrears, and whether or not they deserve the label of “burócratas sin ideales políticos” bestowed on them by Acosta Saignés,¹¹⁵ it would seem that the civil servants and judiciary, at least in New Granada and Ecuador, remained among the most reliable supporters of the dictatorship. Not only did the cabinet members who served Santander continue to serve under Bolívar until replaced in normal fashion, but there is apparently no record of any high civil or judicial official resigning in protest against the Liberator’s supposed tyranny. To be sure, Vicente Azuero, after the Convention of Ocaña, simply did not return to his position on the Alta Corte,¹¹⁶ and a few others were purged even before they had a chance to resign. But neither did the September 1828 conspiracy against Bolívar’s life nor the closely synchronized revolt of José María Obando and José Hilario López receive significant support from civilian officeholders. Obando and López obtained at most the collaboration of Manuel José Castrillón, the departmental accountant of Cauca whom they promoted to intendant, and of other lesser figures who subsequently, like Castrillón, claimed to have gone along under threat of force. When José María Córdova made his ill-fated uprising in Antioquia the following year, he had the full support of Governor Manuel Antonio Jaramillo, who happened to be his brother-in-law, as well as that of Colonel Fermín Vargas, governor of the neighboring province of Chocó, who was an uncle of the young Septembrino Florentino González.¹¹⁷ Both governors carried a number of underlings with them. It is nevertheless true that the vast majority of government functionaries stayed clear of dabbling in subversion, whether out of sincere loyalty to the de facto authorities, gratitude for salaries received, or fear of the consequences.

The same inertial tendency to support the regime could be seen among the clergy, who, under the republican patronato, as under the Spanish, owed their jobs and advancement to official favor. A particularly good example of the pull of bureaucratic ambition is Dr. Juan Fernández de Sotomayor, a decided Santanderista as late as Ocaña, who one year later stood out for the effusiveness of his public praise of the Liberator. His sudden conversion was attributed by one of Bolívar’s confidants to “el olor de la mitra,” i.e., his hope of being designated bishop of Cartagena; and in that hope he was not disappointed.¹¹⁸ The ecclesiastical policies of the dictatorship, however, gave the clergy still other reasons to back it, and they did so both in pastoral statements and by sharing the secrets of the confessional with the guardians of order.¹¹⁹

A third pillar of the regime was the military, even if a slightly less reliable one than those of the bureaucrats and the church. Rafael Urdaneta of Zulia, who eventually combined the Ministry of War with the title of jefe superior of Cundinamarca, Boyacá, and Cauca, and with command of a central reserve army poised to move against foreign or domestic threats, came closer than anyone, after the Liberator himself, to being the dominant figure of the dictatorship.¹²⁰ And the very highest echelons of the armed forces uniformly supported the regime until the final secession of Venezuela got under way late in 1829, at which point the fact that they were overwhelmingly made up of Venezuelans—all seven of Gran Colombia’s generales en jefe were from Bolívar’s native region¹²¹—became as much a liability as an asset. Even before that, however, there were serious cases of disaffection among officers of lesser standing. In New Granada this was only to be expected, in view of the personal ties of many officers with Santander, who was a general, too, not to mention the way in which top commands were being monopolized by Venezuelans. Only a few Granadino officers may have engaged in overt rebellion, and only a handful of quite junior rank participated in the plot against Bolívar’s life; but equally few were those like Tomás C. Mosquera and his future son-in-law, Pedro A. Herrán, whose loyalty was at all times above suspicion. Curiously, one of the two highest-ranking military participants in the September conspiracy was a Venezuelan, Commandant Pedro Carujo, and that is just one of various indications that Venezuelan military support for the dictatorship was always less than monolithic. There were also, for example, the two slightly maverick Generals Francisco E. Gómez and Miguel Guerrero, from Margarita and the western llanos respectively, identified with the party of Santander and automatically assumed to be working for the overthrow of Bolívar. Gómez, indeed, had apparently been planning to follow up the September conspiracy with a rebellion in the East just as Obando and López did in the Cauca.¹²²

Disaffection among Ecuadorian officers was less of a problem, if only because there were so few of them to become disaffected. The highest-ranking native Ecuadorian, though several places removed from Venezuelan-born Juan José Flores, jefe superior del sur, was Colonel Vicente Aguirre, who had served as departmental intendant and was named to the advisory junta created in Ecuador in April 1829 by Bolívar; but Aguirre was important as much for his social credentials within the regional landed aristocracy as for his military title.¹²³ He thus bears out the observation of British Minister Patrick Campbell to the effect that the Liberator had gathered to himself the support of “all that is respectable in point of talent, birth and wealth.”¹²⁴ Mosquera especially in New Granada, along with Venezuelan officers of Mantuano origin, such as the satrap of Cartagena, Mariano Montilla, exemplify the same proposition. In general, however, the military were a good bit less socially distinguished than the civilian members of Bolívar’s inner circle. Apart from the inevitable Manuela Sáenz, the latter during the period of the dictatorship consisted above all of men drawn from the traditional upper classes of Bogotá, Popayán, and Cartagena—groups that had never been entirely happy with Santander and his upstart coterie recruited disproportionately from Antioquia and from eastern New Granada.

If cabinet ministers are considered ex-officio members of the inner circle, then Antioquia itself was represented by José Manuel Restrepo, who served the Liberator loyally, if not uncritically, until early in 1830, when Bolívar finally yielded to his repeated requests to be relieved of cabinet duty.¹²⁵ Cartagena, on the other hand, supplied the one highest-ranking civil functionary in José María Castillo y Rada, who as president of both Council of Ministers and Council of State filled the gap created when the post of vice-president was abolished by the 1828 organic decree. He was perhaps a surprising figure to rise so high under the dictatorship, since he was the brother of the same Manuel Castillo with whom Bolívar once bitterly contended for control of Cartagena during New Granada’s Patria Boba and as Santander’s secretary of finance had been the cabinet member most firmly committed to the kind of doctrinaire economic liberalism that Bolívar sincerely distrusted. To Liévano Aguirre, his presence at the heart of government represented a necessary evil: a means to win over the Cartagena mercantile interests and use them against the equally or more sinister oligarchy surrounding Santander. More likely, it was his personal integrity combined with a personal alienation from Santander (dating back at least to his rival candidacy for election as vice-president in 1826) that recommended him.¹²⁶ And certainly Bolívar’s contacts with the Cartagena establishment extended well beyond Castillo y Rada, who was not even an active merchant in his own right. Closest to the Liberator of all the coastal magnates was Juan de Francisco Martín, a wealthy businessman who never served in the cabinet, but who was named prefect of Magdalena and was a faithful correspondent and, eventually, executor of Bolívar’s will.¹²⁷

Popayán provided no cabinet member, but as home of the potent clans of the Mosqueras, Arboledas, and Arroyos—for whom Bolívar himself professed only the highest respect¹²⁸—it hardly needed that distinction. The Popayán aristocracy was never quite unconditional in its allegiance, so that Tomás Mosquera had to complain of the excessive moderation shown by his own relatives at the Convention of Ocaña; yet the mere fact that Obando, during his abortive rebellion, levied a combined forced loan of fifty thousand pesos on those three leading families suggests both their basic commitment to the regime and the value of their backing.¹²⁹ In Bogotá, to be sure, since it was a larger city and at the same time seat of government, Bolívar had an even more important group of supporters. These included Dr. Estanislao Vergara, member of an esteemed New Granada family and, as minister of foreign relations, another dedicated promoter of monarchy. Bolívar s appointment of Vergara to succeed José Rafael Revenga, who then was given a special assignment to straighten out government finances in his native Venezuela, incidentally put an end to the even division of cabinet posts between Venezuelans and Granadinos that had existed with brief lapses since 1821.¹³⁰ Venezuela retained the War Ministry under Rafael Urdaneta, but the one other ministry, that of finance, remained in Granadino hands only with the substitution of Nicolás Tanco in 1828 for Castillo y Rada. Tanco was of slightly less prominent family and in fact Cuban-born, but as a long-time bureaucrat in New Granada and permanently established in Bogotá since his royalist-imposed exile, he was well connected with the local elite.¹³¹ The Bogotá upper class provided more than its share of second-rank officials, too, not to mention the prefect of Cundinamarca, Pedro A. Herrán, the same who once offered a public toast for Bolívar to retain power as “Rey o Emperador, o con otro título.”¹³²

Ecuador, on its part, was always underrepresented in national-level appointments, but by naming the wealthy highland landowner José Félix Valdivieso to both Alta Corte and Council of State, Bolívar at least accomplished more than did Santander in this respect. Valdivieso’s presence symbolized the strong support Bolívar received until the very end from the aristocracy of Ecuador, which saw in strong government of any sort a guarantee of the continued subordination of highland Indians and coastal slaves.¹³³ In Bolívar’s own Venezuela, his top-level civilian backing was just a bit less solid. After the departure of Revenga, no Venezuelan civilian held any key post in Bogotá, simply because qualified Venezuelans did not wish to serve in so uninviting a location. A good many members or near-members of the Mantuano aristocracy, of whom Revenga was one, continued to serve the Liberator as a network of information, counsel, and support from Venezuela itself. Yet Venezuela also happened to be the one place where opposition to the dictatorship was well established even in the highest socioeconomic circles. Martín Tovar and José de Iribarren, both of whom worked with Santander and his friends at Ocaña and were then forbidden reentry into Venezuela, were closely linked to the principal landowning and mercantile sectors.¹³⁴ Indeed, nowhere were the general policies of the dictatorship less calculated to win support than here. As an agroexport economy, Venezuela could not entirely relish Bolívar’s halting tariff protectionism. As intellectually the most liberal part of Gran Colombia, it showed scant enthusiasm for the appeasement of clerical interests; Páez himself warned Bolívar that such a policy went against the enlightened thinking characteristic of Venezuela.¹³⁵ Venezuelans were not much interested in the Indian question one way or the other, but at least their creole slavocracy was unhappy with Bolívar’s refusal as dictator to backtrack in the area of manumission.¹³⁶

It is more difficult to say what the common man and woman thought of these matters, in Venezuela or elsewhere. They were never consulted except when occasionally herded to manifestations in favor of the Liberator-President, toward whom most likely they continued to profess a true esteem. There is, however, little reason to doubt that such esteem tended to decline as resentment spread over military impressment, financial exactions, and other real or perceived abuses. In Ecuador, all accounts spoke of deep popular discontent resulting from the fact that it was the region hardest hit by exactions of men and money for the Peruvian war.¹³⁷ Granadinos grumbled over the restoration of the aguardiente monopoly, whose abolition was one of the ploys used by Córdova to gain support for his abortive rebellion,¹³⁸ as well as over the cost and misbehavior of the military establishment, whose identification with Venezuelan influence added to the sense of grievance. Venezuelans, of course, were at the same time resentful of subordination in civil government to distant, frigid Bogotá. And everywhere, but perhaps especially in Venezuela, the bleak situation of the postwar economy inevitably lessened support for the powers-that-be.

In the concrete case of New Granada, it also appears that those few figures who had a certain populist appeal—Padilla and Obando, most clearly—tended to be followers of Santander and not Bolívar. Even after the execution of the nation’s highest-ranking pardo military officer, Bolívar continued to fear disruption of the peace on the Caribbean Coast because of “la pretensión de los pardos y amigos de Padilla. ”¹³⁹ More recently, Ignacio Torres Giraldo, writing in the tradition of the Colombian old left, has described the uprising of Obando and López against the dictatorship as the first such conflict of the postindependence period that truly featured an “afluencia de masas populares.”¹⁴⁰ He probably overstated the significance of that rebellion, but at least it was more than a simple barracks coup or quixotic personal gesture; it would not have gained even temporary control of Popayán and Pasto and lasted some five months had it not been for the personal allegiance that Obando, in particular, was able to arouse among broad segments of the population of southwestern New Granada. One may doubt to what extent either coastal pardos or Obando’s clientele were exercised over the dictatorship per se, but they did have in common a resentment toward regional social elites that happened to be identified with it.

In the Last Analysis

In attempting a final assessment of Bolívar’s dictatorship perhaps the first thing to say, though a few years back it would hardly have been necessary to make the point, is that the regime can by no stretch of the imagination be described as socially progressive. In his musings with Luis Perú de Lacroix at the time of the Convention of Ocaña, the Liberator made some acute observations on the “estado de esclavitud en que se halla aún el bajo pueblo colombiano,” and on the local magnates who bore responsibility for that slavery,¹⁴¹ yet his correspondence in later years, exactly as before, is studded with references to the perils of “pardocracia” and the need to assure the goodwill and collaboration of the same oligarchy of “talent, birth and wealth” that, according to the British minister, made up the core of the Bolivarian party. Efforts to enlist the active support of the masses for the regime were limited essentially to use of the religious issue in discrediting supposedly impious liberal opponents.¹⁴² In fact, it was Santander, according to the minister, who in the weeks leading up to Ocaña set out to cultivate “the mere rabble of the country, ’’ even to the extent of “adopting their dress and manners. ”¹⁴³ It is perhaps doubtful that the then vice-president succeeded very far in his latter-day rabble-rousing, but some of his allies did have real backing among the popular classes. While the followers of Padilla and Obando were conceivably misguided in rallying thus to the forces of Santander against those of Bolívar, one must then ask whether the Vergaras and Herráns, the Valdiviesos and Arboledas, were equally mistaken, in terms of class interest, in supporting the Liberator.

If we turn from associations to actions of the dictatorship, the list of those directly beneficial to the masses is short. Bolívar clearly intended some improvement in administration of the manumission law, to hasten the erosion of slavery, but without much effect. There is reason to doubt even that his intentions were fixed wholly on the well-being of the Indians in the actions he took regarding them, and most other socioeconomic measures were designed simply to promote economic growth (not development in the way the term is used today) or the interest of the treasury. A fuller treasury, in turn, was a means of strengthening the state itself, which was always a guiding objective of the Liberator and, in the interpretation of Liévano Aguirre, one of the ways in which he was a precursor of contemporary social democracy. It is clear, however, that Bolívar himself in this last phase saw the essential purpose of the state as simply to maintain domestic order and fight Peru. One has here, to be sure, sufficient reason to reject as well the picture sometimes drawn of an aging Bolívar as willing pawn of clerical obscurantism, or the statement of Luis Eduardo Nieto Arteta to the effect that Bolívar as dictator “entregóse con furia a destruir” what few “reformas anticoloniales” had thus far been enacted.¹⁴⁴ Neither reforms nor counterreforms as such were of great concern to Bolívar at this point, and he was interested in doing for the institutional church only enough to win the state its support. It is thus not very helpful to argue that he either did or did not consciously betray the earlier achievements of the Spanish American revolution. Nor is it probable that his own order of priorities had significantly changed: what had changed were the conditions with which he had to deal.

In the end, Bolívar’s efforts to strengthen the state were not very successful. Despite his rhetorical emphasis on strong government and national unity, his administrative system really amounted to a first step in the process of dismantling Gran Colombia; or a second step, if we count the 1826 rebellion of Páez and Bolívar’s subsequent embrace of the Venezuelan rebel as having been first. Had the delegation of vast personal authority to regional jefes superiores under one title or another formed part of a conscious plan to convert the unwieldy Gran Colombian union into a set of more effective successor states, then this in itself might have been a significant achievement; but, unfortunately, the Liberator never followed a coherent or consistent policy on the question of union. To the end, and unlike, say, Portales in Chile, he was a better analyst of the ills of Spanish America than a deviser of cures. At least he did not relapse into the sheer ferocity of the Argentine Unitarios and Federales, nor into the equally sheer irresponsibility of a Santa Anna. The Liberator was at all times, and in spite of everything, a proper son of the Enlightenment; it is just that, as the end came near, he demonstrated how little revolutionary the heritage of the Enlightenment could sometimes be.

Author notes