It was difficult to find the old sugar estate at San Mateo where Simón Bolívar had once lived. But when we finally did arrive the old plantation house and an adjoining museum were – according to the makeshift signs pegged to their gates – “closed for fumigation”. This was emblematic in a way.
I was in the middle of a trip across Venezuela to find out more about the country’s 19th-century independence hero who has achieved more recent fame as the moral and intellectual inspiration behind President Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian” Revolution.
It had been easy enough to research his life before I arrived. Two recent accounts by British writers – Robert Harvey’s racy The Liberators and John Lynch’s more scholarly Simón Bolívar: A Life – had been especially useful. But it was proving much more difficult to get a sense of what all this meant today to Venezuelans, as well as putting some flesh on the bones of dry historical fact.
This seems paradoxical because back in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, the image of Bolívar was all over the place, stencilled or roughly painted on the sides of public buildings and urban motorways. It’s usually the same representation: with his sideburns, tight white riding breeches, blue tunic, red breast plate and golden epaulettes, dismounted, his sabre at the ready, Bolívar looks like a stern aristocrat.
It was also easy to catch some words of wisdom from Chávez himself, who wastes no opportunity to express admiration for a man who led half of Latin America to independence after an epic military campaign.
On the first evening of my visit I turned on the television in my gloomy room at the Alba Hotel to find the burly president, clad in the red shirt favoured by his Bolivarian movement, waxing lyrical: “After 200 years Bolívar has returned to Caracas. Bolívar has woken up again. Bolívar is all of us. Bolívar is our people. We are obliged to triumph.”
It was, however, proving a good deal more difficult to find anyone who knew anything about the man himself. In Caracas, my first port of call had been the Casa Natal, the restored colonial mansion in the centre of the city where Bolívar was born in 1783. It was an inauspicious beginning. The house was more or less bereft of visitors and a young attendant stared blankly at first when I asked about a guide.
Ramón Vallecilla, a neatly dressed pot-bellied man in his early 50s, eventually turned up. He had worked at the house for more than 20 years but as we toured its 14 rooms and five patios his monotonous account of Bolívar’s early life failed to inspire much confidence. Vallecilla seemed to be getting his dates wrong and had nothing at all to say about the enormous oil paintings – the work, I discovered later, of a 20th century artist called Tito Salas – showing scenes from the innumerable battles that Bolívar fought.
Skirting Plaza Bolívar with its 19th-century equestrian statue of the hero and left-wing book stalls decorated by posters of Bolívar, Che Guevara and a smiling Chávez, I headed for the Panteón Nacional, the last resting place for Bolívar and other Venezuelan national heroes. There too, though, was a dearth of explanatory material. A soldier eyed me suspiciously, as I watched a team of four presidential guardsmen wearing wine-coloured tunics and helmets and white trousers, change guard over the sarcophagus that holds Bolívar’s remains.
I’d imagined that the battlefield at Carabobo, three or four hours to the west of Caracas, might have been preserved in the way sites of the American civil war or the first world war had been, with maps, helpful guides or even – as I remembered at Vicksburg – restored entrenchments with precise details of which unit had attacked where and what had happened. After all, Carabobo was where Bolívar, at the head of independence troops, had in 1821 routed his Spanish opponents and secured Venezuela’s independence.
The battle is certainly commemorated. Half a mile away from the entrance to the site is a gigantic arch, beneath which two soldiers in the scarlet and yellow uniforms of the presidential guard watch over a tomb of an unknown soldier. And a hundred metres or so away a massive baroque style monument – reputedly the biggest in Venezuela – sits above an ornamental lake. It is topped by another equestrian statue of Bolívar, alongside angels and mythological Gods, and lower down bronze friezes detail scenes from the battle.
Explanation, though, is thin and the atmosphere militaristic. Isidro Gonzalez, an 18-year-old guardsman on duty to help tourists, recited before a group of sixth-graders from the town of Guarico a stilted – and obviously painstakingly memorised – word-for-word account.
It was only on the way to Eagle Pass, the site of one of Bolívar’s most extraordinary achievements, that I really began to make progress. By 1819 Bolívar had been fighting Latin America’s Spanish colonial rulers for eight years. He had already led one larger-than-life crusade, known in history books as the “admirable campaign”, survived innumerable battles of exceptional savagery and lived through a period of exile.
Returning to Venezuela he regrouped, raised funds, bought arms and recruited several thousand British mercenaries – most of them veterans of the Napoleonic Wars – and was starting the whole process over again. Bolívar marched these troops thousands of miles through flooded lowlands and up through the pass, one of the bleakest, most inhospitable parts of the northern Andes. Many didn’t make it. Those that did were forced to survive on raw meat and arrived in Colombia with their uniforms in rags and their boots worn out.
Yet this same force was still able to inflict a stunning defeat on defending troops a few kilometres away at Boyacá in a battle that marked a decisive turning point in the war.
Not that any of this would be apparent by simply visiting the pass, where the events of 1819 are marked by an enormous statue of a condor – the high-flying Andean bird which symbolises freedom – and a blue and white chapel. Asdrúbal Pérez, the former national guardsman who had been driven up there from the city of Merida, didn´t know about the history either.
But as we drove past hillside verges of yellow cactus flowers and through villages of single-storey ochre, pink and sky blue adobe houses, he did at least offer me a glimpse into the world of popular myth that surrounds the figure of Bolívar.
Well before Chávez came along, the Venezuelan version of Santeria – a folk religion developed in slave, free black and indigenous communities that draws on Christian and pre-Colombian influences – had incorporated Bolívar into its system of lesser gods.
“People light candles for Bolívar. They say that he is a saint,” said Asdrúbal. “He was in so many battles and didn’t suffer a wound. When we were kids we used to think his jacket was magic ... And just imagine – his army came all this way on foot.”
Richard Lapper is the FT’s Latin America editor
