Our Sister Republics by Caitlin Fitz

Author:Caitlin Fitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

BY THE END OF 1824, Simón Bolívar was at the height of his glory. Admired around the world, he had liberated half a continent, mastered more territory than Napoleon. He had led an army across the arid and ice-tipped Andes, dangling from ropes as he crossed mortally deep ravines. He had ridden such great distances across the punishing and rain-soaked Venezuelan llanos that his men called him Iron Ass. He had foregone food and sleep, endured incapacitating fevers, slept on the naked ground and awakened with his mustache covered in frost. 5

Now, comfortably situated in an airy country home just outside of Lima, surrounded by fig trees and custard apples, he began to enjoy the pleasures of peace. Bathed, brushed, and cologned, Bolívar waltzed across Peru’s dance floors, exulting in his endless throngs of admirers. He took up with his smart and free-spirited mistress, Manuela Sáenz, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing republican who had come to serve on the general’s paid staff. (When her lovestruck husband begged her to be loyal, Sáenz matter-of-factly replied: “you are a boring man.”) 6

So Bolívar spent his nights. His days he spent sitting at his desk or sprawling in his hammock, working to implement a decade-long dream: the summoning of an inter-American congress. (“How beautiful it would be,” he had mused as a scrappy and outmatched revolutionary back in 1815, “if the Isthmus of Panamá could be for us what the Isthmus of Corinth was for the Greeks!”) Bolívar envisioned what might eventually become a permanent hemispheric assembly, one empowered to mediate disputes between members, establish a shared means of defense in the event of foreign aggression, and streamline relations with the rest of the world as well as between member states. It would be the Western Hemisphere’s answer to Europe’s Holy Alliance. 7

Interested primarily in the fate of Spanish America, however, Bolívar left the United States, Haiti, and Brazil off his guest list when he sent out invitations at the end of the year. He wanted a more homogeneous assembly, one united by history, language, and imperial origins. Indeed, for all of the love that U.S. audiences showered on Bolívar, Bolívar never really loved the United States. He begrudged a certain amount of respect to the burgeoning northern republic, admired its astonishing growth and political stability. But he thought that Spanish Americans would have to forge a different path to prosperity. “It has never for a moment entered my mind,” he declared in 1819, “to compare the position and character of two states as dissimilar as the Anglo-American and the Spanish American.” The United States and its colonial British antecedents, he said, had been “cradled in liberty, reared on freedom, and maintained by liberty alone”; Spanish Americans, he admonished, had no such history, and would need to find their own way. If they ever somehow had to choose between the Quran and the U.S. Constitution as the basis of their government, Bolívar wryly vowed to urge his countrymen toward the former, “although the latter is the best in the world.

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