Believing that English-language readers have been denied access to the epic achievements of Latin America's liberators in the early 19th century, British journalist and former MP, Robert Harvey, seeks in this lengthy account to make their "extraordinary story more widely known".
He picks those he regards as the seven principal leaders of the region's independence struggles, including such well-known figures as Simon Bolivar, Jose de San Martin and Bernardo O'Higgins, but also lesser known leaders such as Francisco de Miranda, an intellectual precursor of Venezuelan independence, the Scottish admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, Agustin de Iturbide, briefly emperor of Mexico in 1822-23, and Brazil's first emperor, Dom Pedro I.
In Harvey, they find a sympathetic, even enthusiastic, biographer. He devotes most of his attention to Bolivar and San Martin, whom he paints as super-human figures whose heroic exploits succeeded, against all the odds, in breaking Spain's colonial rule throughout South America. His accounts of their main battles and of such feats as bringing their armies across the Andes (San Martin from Argentina to Chile in 1816 and Bolivar from Venezuela to Colombia in 1819) vividly capture their almost reckless heroism.
These accounts also portray the awful cruelty of the age, particularly that meted out to the innocent, among them women and children. For example, 3,500 civilians who had taken refuge in the cathedral in the Venezuelan town of Barcelona in 1814 were all slaughtered by royalist forces. Overall, more than a quarter of a million people were killed during the independence struggles of Gran Colombia (today's Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador).
Though he does not fail to give careful attention to the liberators' failings, such as Bolivar's voracious sexual appetite and his "policy of legitimised slaughter" in his early campaigns, Harvey loses his sense of perspective at times, getting carried away by his subjects. Thus, he describes Bolivar as "among the greatest men in world history", and Pedro I's nine-year rule in Brazil (18221831) as "one of the great royal epics".
He does, however, offer readers plenty of material with which to make their own judgements. Particularly important, given the subsequent political chaos into which most of the region's newly independent states collapsed, is his emphasis on the attention given by Miranda, Bolivar, San Martin and O'Higgins to bequeathing stable republican institutions to the states they liberated.
Harvey highlights the reforming and liberal record of those who achieved political power. Bolivar, for example, abolished slavery in Venezuela and instituted land reform in Peru while O'Higgins failed to understand the opposition that his reforms generated among the elites in Chile. He abolished aristocratic titles and was only narrowly dissuaded from publicly airing plans to outlaw clerical celibacy and confession.
But few of the liberators were as successful as politicians as they were as soldiers, with the exception of Pedro I. Their enlightened rule proved too much for the elites with their entrenched privileges, and all of those who achieved power soon stood aside so as to avoid further confrontation. Bolivar even had an attempt made on his life by former comrades-in-arms in 1828. Two years later, he left Bogota to die, a lonely and disillusioned man, in an isolated village.
Where the limitation of Harvey's biographical approach to his subject becomes most evident is when he attributes to subsequent poor political leadership the failure of Latin American states to achieve the high ideals set by their liberators. As his account makes clear, however, the roots of failure lay in the fact that the independence struggles may have changed Latin America's rulers but not the societies they ruled. In the absence of deep social and economic reforms, elites continued to exploit the region's rich resources for their own good.
In this sense, the liberators' ideals continue to inspire today. Indeed, some of their verdicts on their societies, quoted in this book, remain remarkably accurate almost 200 years later. Harvey ends on an optimistic note - that at last the region's vicious circle of economic and social underdevelopment looks like it is being broken. The evidence for the opposite conclusion remains, unfortunately, just as strong.
Dr Peadar Kirby lectures on Latin American studies in DCU and has written a number of books on Latin America, among them Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons (1992)