This compelling biography offers a unique perspective on the life and
career of one of Latin America's most famous--and most
adulated--historical figures. Departing from the conventional, narrow
treatment of Bolívar's role in the Spanish-American wars of independence
(1810-1825), leading historian Lester D. Langley frames this remarkable
figure as the quintessential Venezuelan rebel, who by circumstance and
sheer will rose to be the continent's most noted revolutionary and
liberator. In the process, he became both a unifying and a divisive
presence whose symbolic influence remains powerful even today. Twice
Bolívar gained power, twice he confronted a formidable
counterrevolution, twice he was compelled to flee. His ultimate tactic
of using slave and mixed-race troops aroused both the admiration and
fear of U.S. leaders and became a topic of heated discussion in the
critical debates of 1817 and 1818 over U.S. policy toward the
Spanish-American wars as well as the arguments over the admission of
Missouri as a state in 1820-1821 and the U.S. decision to participate in
the ill-fated Congress of Panama. Although he earned the sobriquet of
the George Washington of South America, Bolívar in victory became more
conservative and critical of the democratic tide of the era. Unlike
Washington, Bolívar was forced into exile, the victim of his own
ambitions and the fears of others. In his tragic end, he symbolized the
glorious warrior so consumed by his own ambition and hatreds that he was
destroyed. In death, he became a cult figure whose life and meaning
casts a long shadow over modern Venezuelan history. As the author
convincingly explains, he remains the most relevant figure of the
revolutionary age in the Americas.
