Free Hugo! by Bart Jones Page A

flowers in his honor. He declined repeated
offers to crown him emperor. But in the end Bolívar's dream came
crashing down as the nations he freed succumbed to squabbling
among competing caudillos , strongmen . The brief union of Venezuela,
Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador known asGran Colombia fell apart.
    Bolívar was outlawed as a traitor in his native Venezuela, where the
same crowds who had cheered him wildly just a few short years earlier
now jeered him. He died in 1830 in exile in Colombia, penniless and
nearly friendless.
Bolívar is now almost unknown to most people outside Latin
America. But in Venezuela and other parts of South America he is a
towering giant. Venezuelan schoolchildren memorize his sayings and
speak of him in reverential tones. People hang portraits of him in their
living rooms, something it is hard to imagine Americans doing with
paintings of George Washington. Even the smallest and most remote
villages have a Bolívar statue and plaza. Until the 1950s men could
not pass through the plazas unless they were wearing a tie and jacket
out of respect for the Liberator. Main streets, municipal buildings, airports,
schools, hospitals, stadiums, tunnels, and even dams are named
for him. His sayings are painted on walls all over the country. MORALITY
AND KNOWLEDGE ARE OUR FIRST NECESSITIES appears in virtually every
Venezuelan school.
    Today few historians doubt Bolívar was a genius, although his
detractors deride him as a reckless dreamer. They depict him as an arrogant,
unpredictable, and sometimes cruel man who was also a notorious
womanizer. Admirers lined up at a legendary country house he had outside
Lima, Peru, eager to offer themselves. The shrieks from Bolívar's
lovemaking reputedly made one cavalry officer move out of the residence
because he couldn't sleep. Every time Bolívar triumphantly
entered a new town, "local leaders chose the prettiest girl for the honor
of delivering a crown of flowers. If she delivered more, well, he was the
Liberator."
    Bolívar was born in 1783. By the time he was nine both his parents
were dead — his mother of a chest infection, probably tuberculosis,
his father simply of old age and an indulgent lifestyle. Simón
lived for several years with his tutor Simón Rodríguez, a brilliant and
eccentric schoolteacher who was a visionary in his own right. Along
with Bolívar, Zamora, and Maisanta, Rodríguez was to become one
of theguiding lights of Chávez's "Bolivarian" project for Venezuela
and Latin America.
    Even less known outside of Latin America than Bolívar,
Rodríguez was a young devotee of the French philosopher Rousseau.
He espoused his own radical philosophy. To the shock of the city
fathers, he publicly proclaimed that the school in Caracas where he
taught the children of wealthy whites should also admit blacks and
mixed-race pardos. His advocacy for the underclass got him into constant
trouble, and eventually he was fired from the school. He then
spent five years as Bolívar's tutor before finally fleeing Caracas in
1797, when he was implicated in one of the first revolts of the independence
movement against Spanish rule.
    Years later in the 1820s, he found himself in trouble again when he
landed in Bolivia. He insisted that the children of Indians be admitted
to the free public schools he was setting up. Before long authorities
under pressure from white parents who did not want their children educated
with Indians found an excuse to shut down the schools.
    Before he fled Caracas, Rodríguez brought his revolutionary
notions to the tutoring sessions with Bolívar, who while absorbing the
calls for radical social change was at the same time protected by great
wealth. After his formative years under Rodríguez's wing, Bolívar's
uncles sent him to Spain in 1799 at the age of fifteen. He spent three
yearsin Europe, where he was captivated by the revolutionary environment.
A sprouting intellectual, he devoured the works of Voltaire and
Rousseau. By now he was