The execution of General Manuel Piar in 1817 is one of the most controversial events in the early years of the Spanish American revolution. Piar, the highest-ranking pardo officer in the insurgent army, was accused of a conspiracy to kill all white criollos, destroy the republican ‘system of equality’, and seise power as a ‘tyrant’. The evidence for the conspiracy charges is widely acknowledged to be flimsy. Prior to the trial Bolívar issued a lengthy invective against Piar. A close reading of that text shows that it draws heavily on the Catiline Conspiracy, one of the best-known conspiracies of antiquity. Behind this historical pastiche, which has gone unnoticed in the substantial literature on the Piar case, we can discern echoes of the conflict between the Haitian Republic under Pétion and the secessionist monarchy under Henri Christophe, a conflict witnessed first-hand by the criollo leadership while living in exile in Haiti. Conjuring Piar as Catilina, Bolívar replaces the voices of writers who on behalf of a ‘tyrant’ claimed a position of blackness and denounced Western civilisation, with images of pillage and demagoguery.