Essential Profiles
This region gave the world Simón Bolívar — the Liberator who crossed the Andes in winter, defeated five Spanish armies, and freed five nations in a single generation — and then watched his dream of continental unity dissolve within his own lifetime. It gave the world Camilo Torres, the Catholic priest who joined the guerrillas because he concluded that loving your neighbour required overthrowing the system that killed them. It gave the world the FARC, the longest-running guerrilla insurgency in Western Hemisphere history. It gave the world Hugo Chávez, who won four elections, redistributed oil wealth to the poor, and drove Washington to attempt a coup d'état against a democratically elected government in 2002. And it gave the world Tania la Guerrillera, who died beside Che Guevara in the Bolivian highlands, fighting for a revolution that had nothing to offer her personally except the satisfaction of having tried.
Simón Bolívar liberated five nations and dreamed of uniting them into a single Latin American federation capable of standing against European and North American power. He crossed the Andes with an army of 2,500 in the rainy season of 1819 — an act the Spanish considered impossible — and routed the royalist forces at Boyacá on 7 August 1819. By 1826 he had liberated Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the country that would take his name: Bolivia. His vision of Gran Colombia collapsed before his death. He died calling it "plowing the sea."
Colombia's internal conflict — rooted in the 1948 assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the decade of partisan violence called La Violencia — produced several of the twentieth century's most significant guerrilla movements. The FARC, founded in 1964 by Manuel Marulanda and Jacobo Arenas, became the Western Hemisphere's longest-running guerrilla insurgency, surviving for over fifty years before a partial peace agreement in 2016. Alongside it, Camilo Torres's ELN, the M-19, and other movements kept the revolutionary tradition alive across half a century of counter-insurgency.
Bolivia was where Che Guevara chose to light the fuse of continental revolution in 1966 — and where it was extinguished. His column never exceeded fifty fighters and received almost no support from the Bolivian Communist Party. The guerrillas who died alongside him — Tania la Guerrillera, Coco Peredo, and others — fought in the knowledge that their campaign was failing. Inti Peredo survived and continued the fight for two more years before he too was killed.
The territory of what is now Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia has been the site of liberation struggles for over two centuries without interruption — from Bolívar's wars of independence against Spain in the 1810s through the FARC peace agreement of 2016, from the colonial uprisings of 1781 through Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution. The thread that runs through all of it is the question of who controls the land, who controls the resources, and who benefits from the wealth that the earth of this region produces in such extraordinary abundance — gold, silver, oil, cocaine, emeralds, coffee. The men and women profiled here understood that question and tried, with varying success and at varying cost, to change the answer.
Simón Bolívar was born into the Venezuelan creole elite in 1783, orphaned young, educated partly in Europe, and returned to find his country under Spanish colonial rule that he found intolerable partly on political grounds and partly on personal ones — the colonial system denied even wealthy creoles like himself the autonomy of full citizens of the empire. His military campaigns, conducted between 1813 and 1826, were among the most physically demanding in the history of warfare: he crossed the Andes three times, fought in jungles, high plains, and coastal lowlands, commanded armies that were constantly short of weapons, ammunition, and men, and repeatedly rebuilt from annihilating defeat. The crossing of the Andes in June–July 1819 — 2,500 soldiers marching through the rainy season at altitudes of over 4,000 metres, losing hundreds to cold and altitude sickness — culminating in the decisive victory at the Battle of Boyacá on 7 August 1819 — is considered one of the greatest military achievements in South American history. His vision of Gran Colombia — a federation of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama — was realised and collapsed within a decade. He died of tuberculosis at 47, disillusioned and in exile from his own countries. He had liberated a continent and achieved almost none of his political goals.
Colombia's history after independence was one of near-perpetual internal conflict between Liberal and Conservative factions. La Violencia — the undeclared civil war that followed the 1948 assassination of Liberal candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán — killed between 200,000 and 300,000 people between 1948 and 1958. Out of this catastrophe emerged the FARC. Manuel Marulanda Vélez, born Pedro Antonio Marín in 1930, had been a Liberal self-defence fighter during La Violencia. When the Colombian army attacked the self-defence communities of Marquetalia in 1964, he and Jacobo Arenas — the movement's theorist — founded the FARC. Marulanda commanded it for forty-four years, through peace negotiations, military defeats, and temporary expansions, dying of a heart attack in 2008 without ever having been captured. Alongside the FARC, Camilo Torres Restrepo offered the movement's most theologically dramatic figure — a Catholic priest, sociologist, and founder of liberation theology's Colombian strain, who concluded that Christian charity required revolutionary action, joined the ELN guerrillas in 1965, and was killed in his first combat encounter in February 1966. He was thirty-six years old. His fusion of Christianity and Marxism influenced liberation theology across Latin America for decades.
Bolivia in 1966 was where Che Guevara chose to prove his theory of the foco — the idea that a small guerrilla nucleus could create the conditions for revolution without waiting for those conditions to exist. The theory failed catastrophically. The Bolivian Communist Party refused support. The peasants did not join. Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider — Tania la Guerrillera — had spent three years infiltrating the Bolivian government as a Soviet intelligence asset before her cover was blown and she was forced into the mountains. She was killed at the Vado del Yeso ambush on 31 August 1967. Che was captured and executed six weeks later. The Peredo brothers — Coco died in the same ambush as Tania; Inti survived, wrote My Campaign with Che, rebuilt a network, and was killed in La Paz in September 1969. The Bolivia campaign was a military disaster. It was also the event that turned Che Guevara from a revolutionary into a myth.
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born in Sabaneta, Barinas in 1954, the son of school teachers. He joined the Venezuelan army, became a paratrooper, read Bolívar obsessively, and on 4 February 1992 led a coup attempt against the corrupt government of Carlos Andrés Pérez. The coup failed. When Chávez appeared on television to announce the surrender of his forces and take personal responsibility, he said it had failed "por ahora" — for now. Those two words made him famous. He served two years in prison, was pardoned, and ran for president in 1998. He won with 56% of the vote and was re-elected three times. His Bolivarian Revolution used Venezuela's oil revenues — nationalised and redirected through the PDVSA state oil company — to fund the Misiones: social programmes that reduced extreme poverty from 23% to under 9%, brought literacy to hundreds of thousands, built clinics staffed by Cuban doctors in the barrios, and provided subsidised food to the poor. Washington's response included support for the April 2002 coup that briefly removed him from office before popular protest and military loyalty restored him within 48 hours. He died of cancer in March 2013, during his fourth presidential term, still in office. His legacy — Bolivarianism, the ALBA regional alliance, the solidarity economy — remains contested, celebrated across the developing world and reviled by the Western economic orthodoxy he directly challenged.
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