Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
from these victories, Bolívar traveled to Guayaquil to meet San Martín,
a man he considered his rival.
San Martín, however, had decided that it was necessary to combine
his own forces with those of Bolívar. When San Martín met Bolívar in
Guayaquil, he was bogged down and discredited in Peru, and Bolívar
had just triumphed in Ecuador. Bolívar had the upper hand in the
negotiations and was not willing to share command with anyone else.
The interviews between the two liberators were less than cordial.
Abject and disillusioned, General San Martín turned over his forces to
Bolívar and retired. San Martín traveled through Santiago, crossed the
Andes, and departed immediately from Buenos Aires in 1824 for a self-
imposed political exile in France.
Not all Peruvian elites were happy at the prospect of yet another
foreign army coming to “liberate” them. When he finally entered Peru
with an army in 1824, Bolívar confronted the royalist forces in the high-
lands at Junín and then at Ayacucho. Bolívar routed them in a famous
cavalry battle in which his Venezuelan, Argentine, and Chilean horse-
men defeated the royalists. The Creoles of the high Andes won their
independence in 1825 when Bolívar's army beat the royalists in the
last battle of the wars of independence, at Tumusla, Bolivia; Peruvian
independence was assured in January 1826 when the last Spanish forces
left. After 16 long and destructive years, the era of civil war in the
former colonies of Spain had come to an end. The grateful patriots of
Bolivia named their new nation for the Venezuelan-born liberator, who
promptly wrote for them a constitution. The new nation severed its ties
to the former viceregal capital of Buenos Aires.
The problem of governing Peru and Bolivia, therefore, now thrust
itself on Bolívar, who responded with characteristic confidence that
his wisdom could fashion the perfect constitution for the new govern-
ments. He had long ago shed the liberal ideas of his youth and had
come to design constitutions that featured strong executive powers (for
example, a hereditary president in Bolivia), aristocratic congresses, and
moralistic judiciaries. However, as a troop commander, he recognized
the sacrifices and motivations of his mostly nonwhite soldiers, so his
constitutions outlawed slavery and ended Indian tribute, recognizing
the political equality of all Americans even though countenancing the
inequality of their education and property holdings. (Once the Great
Liberator returned to Colombia, however, his Peruvian associates
rejected the complete end to slavery and the new Bolivian rulers reim-
posed Indian tributes.)
