III.

First Attempts at Independence

The movement for independence in Spain’s American colonies gained strength as a result of developments in Europe. In 1808 Napoleon ousted and imprisoned King Ferdinand VII of Spain. Colonial leaders in Caracas formed a junta—a governing council—to rule Venezuela in the name of the deposed king. However, for all practical purposes, the junta functioned as an independent government. Its members refused to recognize the authority of Napoleon’s colonial administrators or of a regent council that royalists in Spain created to govern Ferdinand’s empire.

The junta granted Bolívar the rank of lieutenant colonel in the militia and sent him to Britain in an unsuccessful attempt to win British support for the junta. In Britain, Bolívar met with Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan who was the most widely known advocate of independence for Spain’s American colonies. Bolívar invited Miranda back to Venezuela. They arrived at the end of 1810. Miranda quickly became the leading figure of the independence movement.

On July 5, 1811, Venezuela became the first of Spain’s American colonies to declare its independence. Despite calls from Miranda and Bolívar for the creation of a strong central government, the Republic’s new constitution adopted a federalist approach, granting considerable autonomy to local governments within the nation. It also divided executive authority among three men. Venezuela's First Republic lasted only one year. In March 1812 royalists—Venezuelan supporters of King Ferdinand—began a revolt in the west. The junta gave Bolívar command of the strategic coastal town of Puerto Cabello, which he lost in early July. Revolutionary forces surrendered to the royalists later in the month.

A.

Defeat and Exile

In defeat, Bolívar made his way to Cartagena in New Granada (now Colombia), where he issued the Cartagena Manifesto (1812), a public statement giving his views on how to achieve independence. Bolívar argued the need for a professional military in place of the more informal militia units. He also advocated strong central governments. Bolívar attributed the fall of Venezuela's First Republic partly to its federalist constitution, which he felt had given too much power to regional governments at the expense of the central government. Forever after he would favor strong central governments.

In New Granada, independence leaders appointed Bolívar an officer in the army. In early 1813, at the head of a small army, he set out to retake Caracas. On August 6, 1813, Bolívar entered the city in triumph, establishing Venezuela’s Second Republic with himself as dictator. A congress named Bolívar El Libertador (the Liberator).

Bolívar’s forces controlled only a small portion of Venezuela surrounding Caracas. Various factions controlled the rest of the country. The most powerful opposition came from a royalist, José Tomás Boves, who controlled the central plains of Venezuela with the support of the llaneros, the rugged cowboys who lived on the plains. In June 1814 Boves roundly defeated Bolívar’s forces and took Caracas. Bolívar fled to Cartagena. Determined to continue the struggle for independence, he led a military expedition that captured Bogotá, the current capital of Colombia, in December 1814.

At this juncture events in Spain greatly altered the direction of Spanish American struggle for independence. In February 1814 Ferdinand VII regained the throne of Spain, and a year later he sent a large army to Venezuela. The royalist army entered Caracas in May 1815. Bolívar fled to a self-imposed exile in Jamaica.

B.

The Jamaica Letter

It was in Jamaica in 1815 that Bolívar made one of his first public statements about his vision for the future of Spanish America. In the so-called Jamaica Letter (1815), he revealed himself to be a strong admirer of Britain’s parliamentary system of government (see Parliament, British). He also expressed his belief in the idea of balance of powers, the theory that political power should be divided among different branches of government to prevent any one branch from becoming too strong.

However, Bolívar also believed that popular democracies, in which people vote directly for all their political leaders, were not suitable to the character, customs, and political background of Spanish Americans. He was concerned that most citizens of the Spanish colonies had never participated in elected governments and therefore would be unprepared for the responsibilities involved. Instead, Bolívar believed that individuals with more political experience should guide the people until they learned how to participate fully in the political process.

Again, he expressed his dislike of federalism and his preference for strong centralized republics. He felt that Venezuela and New Granada should unite into a centralized republic, which would be called Colombia. This new republic would have an elected executive and a legislature consisting of an elected lower house and a hereditary upper house. Lastly, he spoke about the need for a union of all the countries in Spanish America to ensure prosperity and security after independence.