Gran Colombia included the Viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Colombia), the Audiencia de Quito (now Ecuador) and the Captaincy General of Venezuela.
In New Granada, Viceroy Antonio Amat y Borbón he refuses to obey Napoleon's brother. In Quito, a sovereign Board deposes the president of the audience on August 10, 1809, to avoid dependence on Bonaparte. The Creoles fail in their liberation attempt due to internal divisions and the prompt military reaction of the Viceroys Abascal and Amat.
The idea spread throughout the region, despite the failure. In Caracas, upon learning of the rapid French advance across the Peninsula, the captain general resigned due to popular pressure. The council created the Supreme Board of Caracas who immediately adopted a series of liberalizing measures and sent delegates to the Venezuelan provinces and abroad.
The example was imitated by New Granada. The council of Cartagena de Indias took power and met in Bogotá on July 20, 1810, creating the Supreme Board of the New Kingdom of Granada and Viceroy Amat is consequently expelled.
The unitarian revolutionaries chose to follow Antonio Nariño; the federalists, to Camilo Torres .
In Quito a new uprising was organized at the beginning of August 1810, which was harshly repressed by the viceregal troops. However, the people of Quito institute a Superior Board of Government (1812) rejected and fought by Viceroy Abascal, with whose troops, commanded by the Montúfar brothers, they clashed unsuccessfully.
In Venezuela, three regions of the country did not recognize the Junta de Caracas, which, faced with the desperate situation, requested the support of the United States and England, convened a National Congress and proclaimed independence on July 5, 1811 . The realistic reaction then takes place in Caracas, which is opposed by Valencia, Coro and other towns. The insurgents, led by Francisco de Miranda, are harassed by infantry troops and by the helot commanded by Captain Domingo Monteverde. On March 26, 1812, a terrible earthquake weakened the rebel positions.
Defeated by Monteverde, Miranda capitulates in San Mateo. Fleeing to La Guaira to take refuge among the English, victim of the slander of some insurgents, he is handed over to his enemy and goes through several prisons, until he dies in La Carraca (Cádiz).
The Venezuelans temporarily defeated, many take refuge in New Granada. Among them stands out Simón Bolívar y Palacios , born in Caracas in 1783 and educated by the brilliant intellectual Andrés Bello, who instilled in him his liberal and enlightened ideas. He had traveled through Spain (whose court he frequented), met the Napoleonic empire, and dealt with the scientist Alexander Von Humboldt. Before his tutor, Simón Rodríguez, ascendant over him, Bolívar swore in Rome to dedicate himself to the cause of the liberation of America.
Once the war started, he was sent with Andrés Bello as commissioner to London. Upon returning to his homeland, he joined the fight in Puerto Cabello together with Miranda .
After the first insurrectionary stage failed, he took refuge on the island of Curaçao. He then infiltrates New Granada and puts himself at the service of the revolution.
In Cartagena he is appointed colonel. He defends the Magdalena river and repulses an attack in the Pamplona area. All this earned him the rank of brigadier and enormous prestige among New Granadans.
Bolívar conceived and put into practice, with the consent of Camilo Torres, the plan to invade Venezuela from New Granada, thus demonstrating the intimate relationship between both independences. With six hundred men under his command, he invaded Mérida and Trujillo and proclaimed his famous War to the Death (June 1813).
After the successes in Niquitao and Taguanes, which forced Monteverde to take refuge in Puerto Cabello, he triumphantly entered Caracas on August 6, 1813, reestablishing the Venezuelan Republic and he returns to face Monteverde, who was harassing him from Puerto Cabello, after receiving reinforcements from Cádiz.
Despite the fact that the Caracas council had conferred on Bolívar the title of Libertador , the situation was not yet consolidated.
The revolution faltered before the energetic Spanish counteroffensive aided by the plainsmen of Boves, an Asturian who had created the infamous infernal legion . The contest had acquired the character of a war of extermination.
Bolívar and Nariño suffered a defeat on July 15, 1814 in the battle of the Puerta , as a result of which Caracas was lost again .
In New Granada, reconciled federalists and unitaries, proclaimed independence in Bogotá at the request of Nariño, on July 16, 1812 and adopted the name of Cundinamarca for the country. . But a royalist army captured Nariño. Bolívar, after several failures in New Granada and eastern Venezuela, went to the English colony of Jamaica, where he wrote in September 1815 his famous Letter in which he blamed the disasters on the disunity of the commanders.
Cartagena de Indias, the best fortified plaza in America, was besieged by the Spanish Morillo by sea and land, for one hundred and eight days, which meant the end of resistance from New Granada, since on May 6, 1816, Bogotá surrendered.
Thesecondrevolutionaryphase
Spain did not adopt in 1816 the conciliatory policy that would have neutralized the rebels and captured those who still felt respect for the peninsular monarchy. On the contrary, Ferdinand VIl ordered repressive measures against radicals and moderates.
Morillo's reprisals against the insurgents were fierce. He was shot, imprisoned, sentenced to forced labor and imposed onerous taxes on the cities that had collaborated with the independentistas.
The cruelty of Fernandino fundamentalism in America provoked a new uprising that began in the River Plate region, the only one that could welcome the exiles. Thus, San Martín and O'Higgins they brought the revolution to Chile, while Bolívar, from abroad, took it to the north. In Guayaquil the two liberators met in 1822.
In Venezuela, Páez harassed the Spanish with his llaneros. The president of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, provided Bolívar with four battalions, with which he landed at Ocumare in 1816. After many setbacks, with Páez and the English admiral Brion, he defeated General Morillo in February 1818.
Morillo chased the Páez plainsmen down the Apure River, where he suffered a defeat at Queseras del Medio.
Bolívar decided to invade New Granada across the Andes , he commissioned Páez to entertain Morillo in the plains and established a Neogranadina column on the other side of the mountain range under the command of General Francisco de Paula Santander. He traveled hundreds of kilometers with his troops on forced marches and crossed the Andes through the Pisba páramo, where he experienced heavy losses and made a first contact with the enemy in the Vargas swamp.
Boyacá's victory , on August 7, 1819, sealed the independence of New Granada.
On December 18, 1819 Bolívar proclaimed in the Congress of Angostura (with the assistance of the delegates of the provinces where the unitary Constitution was approved) the independence of Gran Colombia , of which he had been elected president and general in chief of the army, months before.
The end of the war
Despite Bolivarian successes, Morillo remained in Venezuela with loyalist royalist forces. During the liberal triennium that followed Riego's pronouncement in 1820, the contenders softened their extreme positions. Bolívar agrees with Morillo the truce of Trujillo, in November 1820 . Six months later, hostilities resumed and Bolívar obtained a great victory in Carabobo, on June 24, 1821. On August 30, 1821, the Congress of Cúcuta confirmed the union between New Granada and Venezuela , named Bolívar president and Francisco de Paula Santander vice president. On November 23, 1823, Páez dominated the last Spanish forces, thus guaranteeing the independence of Venezuela.
Guayaquil proclaimed its independence on October 9, 1820 , while Quito had become the stronghold of the intransigent royalists. To suffocate them Bolívar marched on the Pasto region and triumphed in Bomboná on April 7, 1822. Antonio José de Sucre , his lieutenant, turned Guayaquil into his headquarters for the liberation campaign of Quito that culminated in the battle of the Pichincha volcano , May 24, 1822.
With the union of Venezuela, New Granada and Quito in Gran Colombia the Bolivarian ideal was fulfilled, expressed through two historical documents:the Cartagena Manifesto (1812), anti-federalist and unitary, and the Jamaica Charter (1815).
The political ideas of Simón Bolívar served as the foundation for the state structure of many South American countries. In the Cartagena Manifesto, Bolívar analyzed the causes of the failure of the first Venezuelan revolution. Although he recognized that the federal system was the most perfect of those that had been conceived up to that time to achieve the well-being of the nations, he considered that those ideas had caused the failure of the Venezuelan insurgents, since he maintained that in the initial stages, faced with a powerful enemy Since it was the Spanish army, it was necessary to present a united front.
Paradoxically, these clear and logical theses are at the root of the civil struggles that confronted Unitarians and Federalists throughout the 19th century in the newly independent states. An unfortunate example was the short-lived union of Gran Colombia.
In the Letter from Jamaica, written while he was in exile in that country, he insisted on the union of New Granada and Venezuela in a single nation that should be called Colombia in honor of the discoverer of America, with a capital that would be called Las Casas , in honor of the illustrious defender of the indigenous people, which should dispel suspicions of anti-Hispanism attributed to him by his enemies. The structure of the future State was to follow the links of British parliamentarism, with an executive power exercised by a president elected periodically or, perhaps, only once. The parliament would be made up of a Senate of notables that would oversee the government, and a legislative chamber made up of representatives elected through free popular suffrage.