The Rise and Fall of Simón Bolívar, South America’s 'Liberator'

Combining the military brilliance of Napoleon Bonaparte and the visionary leadership of George Washington, Simón Bolívar was the founding father of not just one country—but six. A paradoxical figure, “the Liberator” freed nearly half of South America from the grip of Spanish imperialism, only to see his dreams of a Pan-American federation collapse once he claimed dictatorial powers.

Born into privilege on July 24, 1783, in Caracas, then part of the Spanish colony of New Granada (today’s Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela), Bolívar possessed an atypical pedigree for a revolutionary. His aristocratic family belonged to the wealthy Creole elite, people of largely Spanish descent born in the colonies who owned vast estates and collectively enslaved some 70,000 people.

By age 9, Bolívar had lost both parents to tuberculosis. Orphaned but not abandoned, he was educated in Europe under the tutelage of Simón Rodríquez, a radical intellectual who had joined a failed 1797 rebellion in Venezuela. Steeped in Enlightenment ideals and outraged by Spain’s economic exploitation of South America, Bolívar became a committed republican. “I will not rest body or soul until I have broken the chains with which Spanish power oppresses us,” he pledged to his tutor in 1805.

When Napoleon imprisoned Spain’s King Ferdinand VII in 1808 and installed his own brother on the throne, Spanish authority faltered. Bolívar seized the moment. In 1811, he joined the revolution that overthrew Spanish rule in Venezuela and established the First Venezuelan Republic. But within a year, royalist forces regained power, driving Bolívar into exile.

By 1813, he had rebuilt his forces. Bolívar’s “Admirable Campaign” swept across the Venezuelan countryside in 1813, bridging class and race divides. “He was a son of the elites whom the elites could trust,” says David A. Bell, a Princeton University history professor and author of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, “but at the same time, he spoke in grandiose terms of equality and opportunity for all, of ending slavery (which he failed to do) and he was an inspiring figure on the battlefield.”

Although raised in a slaveholding family, Bolívar declared it “madness that a revolution for liberty should try to maintain slavery.” He welcomed formerly enslaved men into his army and freed all those he enslaved after Venezuela achieved independence. Yet he could still be ruthless: His “Decree of War to the Death” ordered the execution of any Spanish-born civilians not actively aiding the patriot cause.

In August 1813, he marched into Caracas to cheering crowds, hailed as the “Liberator of Venezuela.” Less than a year later, the republic collapsed after a royalist backlash, inflamed by Bolívar’s execution of 800 Spanish prisoners. Exiled once more, he drafted his famous “Letter from Jamaica,” envisioning a grand South American federation led by a lifelong president, inspired partly by Britain’s parliament.

With support from Haiti—which had expelled its own colonizers a generation earlier—Bolívar returned to Venezuela in 1816 to renew the fight. Three years later, still mired in stalemate, the patriot leader gambled on one of history’s most daring maneuvers.

While Caracas remained heavily fortified, Spain’s colonial capital of Bogotá remained lightly defended. To reach it, Bolívar led at least 2,100 men on a near-impossible march across the snowcapped Andes mountains—an approach the Spanish thought no commander brave—or mad—enough to try.

On May 23, 1819, in a remote, ruined village with only blanched cattle skulls for chairs, the general unveiled his plan to officers—while concealing the precise, harrowing route. The march tested every limit. His army rafted rivers, slogged across flooded plains, waded through waist-high floodwaters and endured jungle monsoons before encountering the stiffest challenge. Pelted by hail and snow, Bolívar led his hungry army across the Páramo de Pisba pass and the skyscraping Andes. Starving soldiers slaughtered their horses and pack animals for sustenance. Frostbite, disease and altitude sickness decimated the army; one in four of Bolívar’s British and Irish volunteers perished.

“It was a genuinely remarkable feat, crossing 13,000-foot mountains in terrible weather, and Bolívar’s personal magnetism helped keep the force together and moving,” Bell says. “It became a central part of Bolívar’s legend.”

On August 7, 1819, Bolívar’s surviving army and reinforcements decisively defeated royalists at the Battle of Boyacá. Days later, Bogotá erupted into celebration as Bolívar entered the city. By year’s end, he oversaw the creation of Gran Colombia—a vast republic encompassing much of present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador. Victory at the Battle of Carabobo in June 1821 secured Venezuelan independence once and for all.

That September, Gran Colombia’s congress elected Bolívar president and granted him sweeping powers. The charismatic general accepted, but not without a warning: “A man like me is a dangerous citizen in a popular government—is a direct menace to the national sovereignty.”

His armies swept south, liberating Ecuador, Peru and finally, Upper Peru—renamed Bolivia in his honor in 1825. Bolívar drafted its constitution, abolishing slavery and enshrining civil rights while also making himself president for life with the power to choose his successor. “The Liberator” stood at the pinnacle of influence, his vision of a South American federation seemingly fulfilled—and his authority spanning nearly the entire northern half of the continent.

But unity proved fragile. Regional rivalries and deep social divisions fractured Gran Colombia. Losing faith in South Americans’ commitment to democracy, Bolívar tightened his grip.

“In his basic political convictions, Bolívar was a republican,” Bell says, “but … social, political and racial tensions…drove him to despair [and] left him convinced that only a charismatic strongman who made himself the center of national unity could keep the place together.”

In 1828, Bolívar dissolved the legislature and declared himself a temporary dictator.

Political discontent rose. Angry crowds protested Bolívar’s power grab and burned effigies of him. When assassins broke into Bolívar’s palace on September 5, 1828, the dictator only survived by hiding for hours under a bridge after his mistress and fellow revolutionary Manuela Sáenz helped him flee through a window and misled the sword-wielding killers.

By 1830, Venezuela and Ecuador had seceded and Gran Colombia collapsed. Bolívar, drained of wealth and strength after riding 75,000 miles in the saddle for independence, resigned. “The Liberator” did not survive the year, dying at 47 on December 17, 1830. Weeks earlier, he voiced his final disillusion:

“1. America is ungovernable for us. 2. He who serves a revolution is plowing the sea.”