With the liberation of Peru, a lifetime of labor had come to it's fruition.
The Spanish were, at last, pushed off the continent.
Bolívar had conquered more territory than Napoleon,
and he was hailed as "El Libertador" from Lima to Bogotá.
When he looked about him, he saw a glorious army, cheering peoples, and a world full of possibility.
But, he also saw a world devastated by years of brutal war.
It would take much to turn the ashes of the Spanish Empire,
into the republic he had dreamed of in his youth...
With the expulsion of the Spanish from Peru, Bolívar had thought his work would be done,
but standing there in Lima, having just accepted the office of President of Peru,
he finally had time to look up from the business of war and see just what a state the country was in.
There were armies scattered throughout the nation, each with little loyalty but to whomever led it.
There were other claimants to the presidency, and questions not only of his political legitimacy,
but the legitimacy of the whole Peruvian congress.
The economy was in tatters,
the social inequality between native peoples, slaves, mixed race people and whites,
was a powderkeg just waiting to tear the country appart.
And, to top it all off, here he was at the head of a foreign army, having just liberated the country,
but that liberation might start to look very much like something else,
if he did not quietly return home with his soldiers soon.
But, that was never Bolívar's way. He was going to fix the whole thing.
He had congress confer upon him nearly dictatorial powers.
But even with such powers, he was stymied at every turn.
He just didn't have a sense of the tense factions and loyalties that ran deep in Peruvian politics.
He often lamented that he had never stepped foot into Peru.
But at the same time, Peru was now part of his plan, part of his ambition for a great South American state.
(Or, at least, a federation.)
If he was to achieve that, he had work to do.
He immediately set out to reorganize the government,
reform the treasury, reform the legal system, and rethink how education was provided.
He took a whirlwind tour of the country, appointing everyone from the mayors,
to the local schoolmasters in many of the towns he visited.
But it was never enough.
Peru was a royalist country, but more that that, its people were just worn out.
Much of the zeal for revolution and for all of the new projects that would bring,
was carried only by the charisma of Bolívar.
As soon as he would leave a town, it would slide back into its tourpour, his work undone.
To his joy, he found that his old schoolmaster,
the very man who had introduced him to many of the revolutionary ideas that shaped him, had returned from exile.
Bolívar immediately put his old tutor in charge of the school system.
But, like so many that Bolívar appointed, he was not a man up to the task.
He tried, earnestly, he had the passion, but he didn't have the capacity to plan and organize.
He had been a great one-on-one tutor,
but when given the job of systematizing and marshaling the logistics for a whole nation's education,
he was woefully out of his depth.
And so it went across Peru, progress and reforms were slow.
But better news was coming from other quarters.
Nations in Europe had begun to officially recognize his Republic of Gran Colombia.
And Antonio Jose de Sucre, the young general he had sent to the separate province known as Upper Peru,
had won some astounding victories and liberated the whole region.
But, Upper Peru too, came with its own questions.
It was rich in silver, and so its sovereignty was hotly in dispute.
Would it become part of the yet war torn Argentina?
Would it be put under the yoke of the newly liberated Peru?
Or would it become a new nation onto itself?
Well, when the local congress declared that they would be an independent republic, Bolívar certainly didn't object.
Maybe this was because the new rich republic could join the confederation he was putting together,
without all of the baggage that he saw coming with the rest of Peru.
Maybe it was because they invited him to come and write their constitution.
Or maybe it was because they named their new nation Bolívar.
Actually, that might have been the reason.
Of course they did change the name to Bolivia a few days later,
once somebody pointed out that, "Guys, Rome wasn't called Romulus, come on.
Really, they should just call the place Bolivia, or something."
But the gesture was there, and Bolívar was, without a doubt, eager to write their constitution.
And so the congress declared him President of Bolivia,
which is only a little awkward,
because he was technically already president of Gran Colombia, and the president of Peru.
But hey, why let your current job as the head of two different democratic states,
get in the way of a little constitution writing?
And Bolívar really thought that this would be his legacy.
He thought that this new constitution would solve all of the problems that he saw burning through Spanish America.
He worked on it feverishly, and in some ways,
it was all that you'd have expected from the idealistic young man,
who swore an oath to liberate his people on the hills outside of Rome.
The constitution abolished slavery, guaranteed freedom of the press and freedom of movement.
It established a legal system based upon trial by jury, rather than by magistrates.
But there was one difference from you might have expected out of a man enamored of the idea of liberty and of a free republic.
His constitution also stipulated that the president would serve for life, with the right to choose his own successor.
Now, Bolívar said that he had put all sorts of checks in there to make sure that the president acted in good faith,
but you can see why this "president for life with hand-picked successor" business sounded a little bit worrisome to people.
Reactions to the constitutions were, shall we say, mixed.
Very few people openly criticized it, but it was readily adopted only in Peru,
where Bolívar and his army were actually located.
Even in Bolivia, it was adopted only with reluctance.
And only when Sucre, the general who had liberated the region,
agreed to hold the post of president, but then resign after two years.
But all of this cost time, precious, precious time.
While Bolívar was hiking around Peru, while he was micromanaging towns,
while he was penning his bold constitution,
other man had been serving as the heads of the various states that he had liberated.
Venezuela, the former territory of New Granada, Bolivia, Quito, which we now know as Ecuador,
each had their own head of state, and as time passed, each became more entrenched.
Each saw their own power grow, and each found reasons to see the others as rivals.
Gran Colombia, the state which Bolívar was supposed to be running,
the first state which he had been granted the presidency of, was tottering on the edge of financial collapse.
The army which he'd been galavanting around Peru with?
It was funded from Gran Colombia.
The vice president that he'd left in charge of Gran Colombia,
had been sending him increasingly urgent letters
about the fact that they were going to have to shrink the army, or face ruin.
To make matters worse, Spanish America had never had the sense of oneness that the British colonies had.
For centuries, they'd treated each other as rivals.
They were as culturally different as the United States, north and south.
But the Spanish Crown had kept them even more separated, in terms of economic and infrastructural ties.
The Gran Colombian experiment was the first time these nations had really tried to come together,
and many in Gran Colombia felt that the experiment was going poorly.
So cracks began to show.
Caracas chafed at the rule of Bogotá, Quito questioned its place in the republic.
Soon, stirrings began for a federated system, more like the United States.
(Not the United States we know today, but rather the loose federation of states that served as the US at its inception.
The same federation that proved to weak too stand on its own,
and eventually, had to be made into a republic.)
But Bolívar knew that a federated state would never survive.
That if there was no strong central authority to hold them together,
these states would simply fall back into their national bickering,
and in the end, the whole project would be undone.
And so, he called a congress.
A meeting of the Americas, to work it all out.
Join us next time to find out where that congress leaves us,
and, where it leaves Bolívar.