ABSTRACT
At the beginning of 1810, about nine months before the “Grito de Dolores” in Mexico, tensions developed in northern South America, as the question of monarchical legitimacy in the “absence” of the Spanish king loomed large. In Caracas, a group of wealthy creoles decided to depose the Spanish captain-general and form a junta, which would rule in the name of Ferdinand VII, the legitimate Spanish monarch. The man who emerged as leader of this group, Simon Bolivar—one of the wealthiest men in the Americas—would play a decisive role in the process of liberating northern South America from Spanish control. A brilliant military strategist, politician, philosopher, and one of the premier thinkers of his day, Bolivar achieved numerous military victories against royalist forces. The complex geography of the region compounded the problem and made Bolivar’s dream an impractical impossibility.
