The Last Dictatorship: Betrayal or Consummation?

Abstract

HAT the final dictatorship of Simon Bolivar in Gran Colombia added little, if anything, to his glory while embittering his days with personal disappointments and political frustration is a proposition that admirers and detractors alike can readily accept, however much they may differ as to the reasons why. Somehow, as Alvaro Valencia Tovar expressed it, those last years were aios que sobraron en la vida del Libertador.1 Bolivar's admirers show a natural tendency to dwell on other aspects of his life and times, so that in the memorable collection of citations that enrich El culto a Bolivar, by Germ'an Carrera Damas,2 it is striking how few make reference to the period in question. Nevertheless, the Bolivarian dictatorship that constituted the last phase of the Gran Colombian experiment in unity as well as the penultimate stage in the life of the union's creator is something that neither Bolivar's biographers nor other historians of the early national era can ignore altogether. And the way in which they approach it reveals, incidentally, perhaps more clearly than the treatment of any other aspect of Bolivar's long and remarkable career, the historiographical and ideological leanings of the authors. A preliminary detail on which contemporary observers and later historians have sometimes disagreed is the precise chronological dimensions of the dictatorship. When Bolivar resumed the presidency at Bogota in September 1827-after settling, he thought, the rebellion of Jose Antonio Paez in Venezuela, which had been his first concern on returning from Lima the year before-his political opponents in New Granada feared that he would at once establish a regime of military repression whose victims they would be. A few went into hiding, and though they soon emerged, there did occur some arbitrary actions by the government or