The Northern Liberation Movement

REVOLUTIONS IN LATIN AMERICA HIST 1301 | History The Northern Liberation Movement In the Viceroyalty of New Granada, in the Caracas judicial district, between 1807 and 1810, upper-class elite patriot creoles and royalists fought to establish an autonomous body. The Caracas Creoles then overthrew the Spanish administrative officials on April 19, 1810, and established a junta under the name Fernando VII to rule. The junta then ordered the formation of a congress, which convened for the first time in March 1811 and whose authority was acknowledged by other towns within the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Not every congress member supported running the country under the name of Spain's still-imprisonable monarch. Venezuela became the first South American republic when its citizens, patriots who thought the body should rule on behalf of the people of New Granada, formally declared their country's independence on July 5, 1811. The royalists retaliated. The sizable African and Pardo community in Venezuela supported them; their interests had been furthered when the Spanish government allowed them to acquire White status with the cédula real. Like the patriots in the Venezuelan congress, white creoles had opposed expanding rights for nonEuropeans. Western New Granada's cities declared their allegiance to the monarch and refused to submit to the Caracas junta's authority. They also sent delegates to the Venezuelan assembly. The tremendous earthquake that struck Caracas on the Thursday before Easter in 1812, which claimed thousands of lives, gave the royalists unexpected extra momentum in their cause. The Catholic church, who backed the royalist movement, persuaded the impoverished classes that Caracas was being punished by God for disobeying the king's divinely bestowed power. After the district's former political ties to Spain were restored by the royalist members of the administration, a bloody civil war broke out between the royalists and the patriots. Enthralled by the revolutionary principles of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palácios, a member of the upper Creole class, joined the battle in 1811 as a colonel in the rebel patriot army. He sought safety on the island of Curaçao following his initial loss before making his way to the city of Cartagena (in present-day Colombia). He was able to mount a victorious war to retake Caracas in 1813 and restore the republic from this new position. Bolívar's victory in combat stemmed from his determination to fight until the very end, a strategy that came to be known as "war to the death" (guerra a muerte). This tactic attempted to decrease support for the royalist cause and radicalise the struggle. For instance, the death penalty was applied to any Spanish citizen who did not actively support the independence struggle. Bolívar's bold military strategy resulted in the depopulation of large regions and kept his army engaged in combat nearly all the time. But his triumph did not last long. After losing in Venezuela in 1814, Bolívar made his way back to Cartagena. Following the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815, Fernando VII, the newly reestablished Spanish king, dispatched soldiers to South America in order to bolster his unwavering power. Bolívar and his rebel soldiers were vanquished by these Spanish forces, who also managed to reestablish colonial rule. After being expelled once more, Bolívar went to the British colony of Jamaica for safety, where he wrote his "Letter from Jamaica" to a newspaper. He was honest in this message, outlining his idea of a united Spanish America and restating his support for independence and belief that it would succeed. Bolívar's comprehensive examination of the past, present, and future of Spanish America was the most foresighted aspect of the paper. The letter's claim that the lower socioeconomic groups were incapable of achieving independence betrays his creole prejudice. Bolívar emphasised that the Spanish colonial system had served as a despotic parent, robbing the mixed-race people of the Americas of liberty, equality, property, and security, condemning them to civic ignorance, oppression, and immorality. They were pushed to the bottom of society, unable to engage in the social, political, or economic life of their nation. Bolívar cited his country's lack of preparation for self-government as support for his argument that Spanish Americans as a whole need strong leadership in their newly independent countries. Bolívar, in contrast to many others who just pushed for Mexico's independence from Spain, emphasised the necessity of a powerful national government as opposed to the federal structure that Mexico embraced in its 1824 Constitution, which gave local government the lion's share of power. Bolívar also advocated for the unification of Spanish America and dreamed of an American league in which delegates would meet and support one another on a regular basis. Bolívar travelled from Jamaica to Haiti, where President Alexandre Pétion gave him sanctuary and financial support. Despite their obvious compassion for one another, they experienced issues in their relationship. Although Pétion's government was truly liberal, there were divisions among its ranks, and Haiti's status as a country was still unrecognised by the US and France. Pétion helped, albeit in a covert manner. Bolívar was given hard currency, weapons, and a Black military force, but he was also given a condition: abolish slavery in the newly sovereign countries. Bolívar reversed the tide in favour of the patriot army by sailing back to the Orinoco River delta in Venezuela with the aid of those soldiers. But he couldn't accomplish that until he won the chieftain José Antonio Páez and the llaneros, the mixed-race cowboys who controlled a large portion of the area. At this crucial point, thousands of llaneros joined Bolívar's army. His ability to rally the disenfranchised Black and mixed-race communities as well as the elite creole community to his cause was probably a major contributing factor in his triumph. He was only able to continually win the battles of independence—whose definitive triumph was at Boyacá, Colombia, in August 1819—after he let common people to enlist in his army. Once Venezuela was freed, Bolívar seized the remainder of New Granada. Only after leading an army of twenty-five hundred troops up to the Orinoco River, crossing flooded rivers and plains in the middle of the rainy season, and descending on the enemy as Bolívar carried soldiers who had grown too weak to stand did Bogotá fall. Bolívar founded the Congress of Angostura in 1819 (in what is now Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela), which gave its approval to the founding of the country of Colombia, which included Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Congress gave Bolívar the authority to rule with dictatorship. He opposed monarchy because he believed it may result in tyranny, but he also cautioned against popular democracy and federalism because he believed Spanish Americans were ill-prepared for them. He supported a republican system of governance with a strong hereditary senate as its cornerstone. The senate was to act as a reliable go-between for the people and the government, and it was to be composed of qualified and educated people. Bolívar discussed how to handle delicate racial relations and strike a balance between freedom and order in his Angostura Address. However, political acumen is not often indicated by military prowess, and Bolívar's aim of pan-American union and his early hope of a representative republican system were not widely accepted in the area. It became evident over time that those concepts would not work. The decision to unite the former territories of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama) into a single federative nation called Gran Colombia was made by patriotic representatives from Venezuela and New Granada (also modern-day Colombia) during a meeting held in the city of Cúcuta in 1821. Francisco de Paula Santander was appointed to head the provincial government of New Granada by Bolívar. The revolutionary Cúcuta Congress approved a centralised constitution, gradually providing citizenship rights to all, and proposed a liberal programme of reforms. The slavery issue was the most urgent one. People who were enslaved or mixed-race desired freedom, which Bolívar had sworn Pétion he would achieve and had been promised in the rhetoric of national liberation. He gave Santander instructions in 1820 to gather an army of 5,000 eager slaves and to guarantee liberation. Santander only allowed three thousand recruits and told the remaining ones to go back to their owners out of fear of upsetting the area's landowners and mine owners, who relied on slave labour. Bolívar's stance, which he had previously expressed in his letter from Jamaica criticising Spanish colonial rule, was evidently mirrored in the constitution. Accordingly, voting rights were restricted to male property owners in the republic of New Granada, which was the first to give its inhabitants the authority to rule themselves. Minorities continued to desire for freedom and equality, including women, lowincome White people, and individuals of African origin. The Cúcuta Congress passed the Abolition of Slavery Law, which only served to keep the system of slavery in place by giving committees made up of prominent local citizens the task of a drawn-out and tedious process.