Free Hugo! by Bart Jones Page B

well read in the classics.
    He was also falling in love. At seventeen he met the daughter of
one of Spain's leading aristocratic families, Maria Teresa Rodríguez y
Alaiza, who was two years his elder. They eventually married in May
1802 and returned to Caracas. But just eight months after their wedding,
unaccustomed to the tropical climate, she contracted yellow fever
and died. Grief-stricken and half mad, Bolívar vowed never to marry
again — and never did. Instead, he was to throw himself into his dream
of liberating South America.
    A few months after Maria Teresa's death, a restless and disconsolate
Bolívar headed back to Europe. He spent several years in France
and Italy and was reunited with his mentor Rodríguez. In one famous
encounter in August 1805, no doubt embellished in the telling, the two
climbed the slopes of Mount Aventino in Rome where Bolívar took a
romanticoath, swearing to God that he would not rest until his home-land
was free. His words were immortalized and even today remain
deeply ingrained in the psyche of the Venezuelan people, learned by
schoolchildren and memorized by soldiers performing their military
service. Chávez was to invoke them in 1982 when he organized a secret
conspiracy in the military that led to the birth of his Bolivarian movement
and eventually his ascension to the presidential palace:
    I swear before you, and I swear before the God of my fathers, that
I will not allow my arm to rest, nor my soul to rest, until I have
broken the chains that oppress us . . .
    Three years later and after a trip through a United States of America
basking in its freshly won independence, Bolívar was back in Venezuela
to directly take up the struggle in Latin America. He immersed himself
in the embryonic and clandestine independence movement. Despite
his young age, he quickly rose to a leadership position. By April 1810
the movement was fully under way. A full-fledged uprising broke out
against the Spanish in Caracas, where a revolutionary junta took over.
Less than a year later, on July 5, 1811, Venezuela declared its independence.
But a decade of bloody fighting still lay ahead.
     
    Bolívar suffered defeat after defeat, some from human causes, others
natural. On March 26, 1812, a powerful earthquake struck Venezuela,
leveling entire towns, destroying much of Caracas, and burying complete
corps of independence troops. In the city of Barquísimeto alone
one regiment of fifteen hundred men was swallowed by a fissure and
vanished. In Caracas, where ten thousand people were said to have
died, Bolívar was helping dig out victims when a pro-Spanish acquaintance
came by and remarked thatnature had put itself on the side of the
Spanish. A defiant Bolívar responded, "If Nature is against us, we will
fight it and make it obey us."
    It became one of his most famous sayings. Chávez invoked it in
December 1999 whenmudslides and floods devastated Caracas and the
nearby Caribbean coast, leaving an estimated fifteen thousand dead
in Venezuela's worst natural disaster of the twentieth century. In an
echo of Bolívar's time when the pro-Spanish Catholic Church declared
that the earthquake was evidence of God's displeasure with the revolutionaries,
Caracas archbishop José Ignacio Velasco suggested from the
pulpit that the floods were a punishment against Chávez.
    Bolívar was not an entirely noble freedom fighter taking the high
road during the war. He could be as cruel and vindictive as the royalists,
whose lust for violence was legendary. They regularly executed captive
patriot soldiers with no trial. One psychopathic commander known as
theButcher, General José Tomas Boves, personally supervised the massacre
of entire villages. He often wandered through the ruins with a sinister
smile. Once, after capturing the city of Valencia, his troops found
a girl in the house of a former patriot commander, tied her to her hammock,
gang-raped her, tore her tongue out, cut her breasts off, and then
lit a fire under her