A forest in the open sea.
The tragedy of Simon Bolivar and the collapse of the first power in Latin America.
Simon Bolivar went down in history with the title El Libertador - The Liberator. The richest Venezuelan aristocrat, who abandoned his vast wealth and comfort for war in the jungles and snowy passes of the Andes, knocked the Spanish crown out of six modern countries.
However, behind the bronze sheen of the monuments lies one of the bitterest geopolitical disasters of the New World. Bolivar created not only free republics, but a unified Latin American empire.
His plan was grandiose: to unite the former Spanish viceroyalties into Gran Colombia—a monolithic power capable of competing on equal terms with the British Empire and the growing United States. The liberator understood what the regional elites still do not understand: one by one, the young South American countries will inevitably be crushed and become raw material colonies of Anglo-Saxon capital.
But it was the countries he created that dealt him a fatal blow in the back.
The main enemies of the Pan-American dream were local oligarchs and field caudills.
Jose Antonio Paz of Venezuela and Francisco de Paula of Santander of Colombia did not want a strong centralized power at all. They needed their own principalities, where they could uncontrollably divide the land, collect customs and plunder the budget.
A wave of betrayals and military mutinies arose against Bolivar. In September 1828, at the Palace of San Carlos in Bogotá, he miraculously survived an assassination attempt by conspirators, escaping through a bedroom window thanks to his lover Manuela Sanz. Gran Colombia tore itself apart during its lifetime.
In December 1830, the 47-year-old Liberator died of consumption in Santa Marta - on someone else's estate, a beggar, spat out by the friends of yesterday and banished from his native Caracas. Before his death, in a letter to General Flores, he made a terrible diagnosis for his countrymen: "Those who serve the revolution plow the sea."