He sits in Caracas in 1828 with power in his hands and enemies at the door, having just been hailed as the ‘president-liberator’ of Colombia. Yet this is the same Simón Bolívar who, by then, has already crossed the Andes, entered Bogotá in 1819, won Carabobo in 1821, and helped break Spanish rule across lands that became Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Bolivia.

He was born on 24 July 1783 in Caracas, the youngest child of Juan Vicente Bolívar y Ponte and María de la Concepción Palacios y Blanco, into one of the wealthiest criollo families in the Spanish Americas. Childhood came early and hard: his father died in 1786, his mother in 1792, and he was raised apart from his siblings by African house slaves, especially Hipólita, whom he treated as both mother and father. A boy of privilege, then, but also of loss.

His education was irregular until Simón Rodríguez and the intellectuals Andrés Bello and Francisco de Andújar took him in hand. In 1799 he sailed from La Guaira to Spain, studied in Madrid, and in 1802 married María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alaysa. She died of yellow fever in Caracas in 1803, and grief drove him back to Europe, where in Rome, on 18 August 1805, he swore at the Mons Sacer to end Spanish rule in the Americas.

By 1807 he was back in Venezuela, talking independence with other wealthy creoles. Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808 weakened Spanish authority, and Bolívar became a militant in the Spanish American wars of independence. In 1810 he joined the diplomatic mission to London with Luis López Méndez and Andrés Bello, met Francisco de Miranda there, and returned determined to see the break through.

The first Republic of Venezuela declared independence on 5 July 1811, but it was fragile. Earthquake, Royalist pressure, and political division shattered it in 1812. At Puerto Cabello, Bolívar failed to hold the fortress, Miranda surrendered, and Bolívar helped arrest him on 30 July before escaping to Curaçao and then Cartagena. In 1813 he issued the Cartagena Manifesto and launched the Admirable Campaign, entered Caracas on 6 August, and earned the title El Libertador.

The triumph did not last. José Tomás Boves and Royalist forces crushed the republic in 1814, and Bolívar fled through Cartagena to Jamaica, then Haiti. There he met Alexandre Pétion, who gave him money and supplies after Bolívar promised to abolish slavery in the lands he freed. Back in Venezuela in 1816 and 1817, he proclaimed emancipation, fought alongside men like José Antonio Páez, Francisco de Paula Santander, and Antonio José de Sucre, and built the base at Angostura.