Word: bolivar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...first act was to call a congress. He took no political title for himself except that of Liberator, El Libertador, given him by the people. Again the revolutionists began to squabble. Again the Spaniards came back. Again Bolivar was an exile, this time in British Jamaica...
...headlong horsewoman followed Bolivar into Peru, spent two years with him while he was liberating that country and Bolivia. More than once she saved his life, for more & more jealous political and military rivals plotted against him. One night, while Bolivar was sleeping, Manuela heard steps, barking dogs, "the thud of a body in the street," shouts of "Death to the tyrant!" She persuaded the Liberator to jump out the window. When the assassins broke in, she met them with a drawn sword, sent them in the wrong direction. Said Bolivar: "Today you have become the Libertadora of the Libertador...
...Prophecy." Bolivar was ahead of his time. His Pan-American Congress was not a success. The personal attacks on him increased. As dictator of Colombia, he was charged with planning to make himself king. The politicians and the rebellious generals began to undermine him. In 1830, the year he died, Bolivar appeared before the Congress at Bogotá and renounced his power as president and generalissimo...
...Bolivar started for the coast and exile. His letters became Timon-like. "I am resolved," he wrote before starting, "to die an exile in want and sorrow." He was ill and traveled slowly. He began to head his letters "from a deathbed, that is, a place of prophecy." He prophesied that if Latin Americans could not unite, they would "relapse into little tyrannies of all colors and races" until "devoured by all crimes and destroyed by chaos, we shall be reconquered by Europe." He did not think his warnings would do much good. "There have been three great fools...
...Bolivar's great contemporary and rival, San Martin, the Liberator of Argentina and Chile, was also in exile, also embittered, but expressed himself more philosophically. "You don't seem to know," he remarked to a friend who blamed him for leaving politics to tend his garden, "that two-thirds of the inhabitants of this earth are idiots, the rest criminals...