By Hugo Sanchez Aranguren

American audiences often know Simón Bolívar as the “George Washington of South America.” The analogy orients, but it compresses a life of revolution, contradiction, and state-building into a reassuring but inadequate frame. Bolívar himself warned against such simplifications. “To judge revolutions and their actors,” he wrote, “one must observe them closely and judge them from a distance.”^[1] El Libertador (The Liberator) is widely commemorated in bronze across the world with “about a thousand” monuments to Bolívar in more than fifty countries.^[2] Even his name has been absorbed into geography and symbolism, from the town of Bolivar, Missouri, to the Cold War-era submarine USS Simon Bolivar.^[3]Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” and its continuation under Nicolás Maduro – currently in US federal custody^[4] – illustrates how some mobilize Bolívar in ways that diverge from his thinking. This contemporary appropriation leverages the Liberator’s image to consolidate executive control of a charismatic leader, under a populist framework. The resulting institutional shift, evidenced by international human rights cases,^[5] economic collapse,^[6] and an unprecedented regional diaspora,^[7] stands in sharp contrast to the administrative discipline Bolívar practiced in his final years. By confronting an administrative paper trail from 1829, we pierce through today’s political theater to explore how authority was meant to be routed through legal procedures rather than a leader’s whim. Bolívar’s image has often been transformed into an object of devotion, making it particularly susceptible to appropriation.^[8] Bolívar’s career resists reduction, requiring instead a contextual understanding of the political, intellectual, and institutional complexities of Spanish American independence.^[9]

Historians have long debated whether Bolívar was a reluctant guardian of the republic or an aspiring autocrat. Some, like John Lynch and Elías Pino Iturrieta, view his dictatorship as a departure from republican principles, a move toward centralization fueled by a growing distrust of representative government.^[10] This critique reached its peak in Karl Marx’s 1858 essay, which depicts Bolívar as opportunistic and autocratically inclined. Conversely, scholars like David Bushnell frame these extraordinary powers as a reluctant response to political collapse.^[11] This logic is echoed by contemporary actors: while Francisco de Paula Santander invoked “eternal reason” against what he saw as arbitrary authority,^[12] Rafael Urdaneta justified the dictatorship as a “vigorous” necessity to preserve the State.^[13] Documents from the era prove that regardless of his sweeping executive powers, Bolívar consistently routed his authority through bureaucratic chains of custody, demonstrating a reliance on institutional discipline rather than personal whim.

This article examines an administrative decree from 1829 to better understand Bolívar’s daily governance, revealing authority as a process rather than a myth. My interest in history “at a desk level” began with Bolivar’s most loyal officer and fellow native of Maracaibo, General Rafael Urdaneta. As a Boy Scout in 1986, I volunteered at his house-museum, delivering tours following a familiar script of portraits, weapons, and bronze.^[14] The most revealing moment, however, came at the end when I had to show a daguerreotype of Urdaneta on his deathbed in Paris, displayed alongside the massive kidney stone removed from his body. This encounter with human fragility and physical exhaustion shattered the myth of the invincible hero. I began to see the figures of independence as human beings defined by bodily limits, a reality often absent from the official narrative.

After I moved to the United States, Bolívar reappeared. In 2025, I purchased an 1829 military decree at auction.^[15] Beyond the allure of his iconic signature, the document’s administrative traces, the clinical marks of power in practice, captivated me. The decree’s heavy woven paper still bears the blind-embossed seal of the República de Colombia, not “Gran Colombia,” a term used only retrospectively. This distinction speaks of a functioning administration, offering a raw glimpse into how the Republic described itself during its final, strained years, free from the interpretive lens of future historians.

In brown ink at the bottom of the first page appears a large and unmistakable autograph, “Simón Bolívar” and just beneath it, “Raf. Urdaneta” in a beautiful handwriting. Those signatures transform individual will into the starting point of an institutional act of State. They are joined by the names of Generals Perú de Lacroix and Antonio Gravete, a veteran from the Carabobo Battle.^[16] By looking past the famous signatures to this obscure captain, we find a more granular, human history of power. Annotations in different inks trace the document’s Andean passage from Bogotá to Tunja, documenting its history of circulation. These marginalia provide a map that demands active analysis rather than a simple repetition of inherited historical narratives.

The date matters. A few months before, in September 1828, Bolívar survived the Septembrina conspiracy in Bogotá, escaping assassination thanks to the heroic Manuela Sáenz.^[17] As Nicola Foote notes, “Sáenz earned the title ‘La libertadora del Libertador’ (the Liberatrix of the Liberator) for repeatedly thwarting assassination attempts against him.”^[18] The plot and its aftermath brought private loyalty and public fear into sharp relief. Amid growing regional fractures, in 1828 Bolívar accepted extraordinary powers to hold together the large and conflict-ridden republic.

The Lugo decree reveals a productive tension between crisis and principle in Bolívar’s governance. Emerging from a climate of existential threat, the document shows that even routine promotions required the validation of figures like Urdaneta and entry into official ledgers. Bolívar appears here less as an autocrat than as a guardian of procedure, fighting his final battle not for personal power, but for the survival of the state through disciplined administration. At first glance, the decree seems routine. It is a promotion drafted in careful legal language on pre-printed stationery, marked with a seal, signed, countersigned, routed, and recorded. Yet even as opponents denounced Bolívar as a dictator, his authority in practice continued to move across the page through signatures, validations, and fiscal notations rather than by command alone.^[19]

The decree outlines a clear administrative sequence: authorization, validation, registration, and fiscal implementation. The document reflects Bolívar’s lifelong war against ignorance and institutional weakness. He argued at Angostura that freedom required more than symbolic authority; it demanded the cultivation of legal habits. Specifically, he famously mentioned at this address that “Popular education must be the first care of the paternal love of Congress. Morals and enlightenment are the two poles of a republic; morals and enlightenment are our first needs.”^[20]  In the same address, he envisioned the importance of education in his philosophy, proposing the inclusion of a fourth Power (the Moral Power), in charge of political education. A routine promotion like Lugo’s was part of this broader project: a conscious effort to build a state through the discipline of form. By adhering to meticulous procedural steps for a minor officer’s rise, Bolívar used the machinery of state to teach a lesson in republican discipline. Power was no longer a personal whim; in the hands of this institutional tutor, it became a visible process of law, procedure, and record. The Septembrina conspiracy of 1828 appears to have confirmed these fears, reinforcing the need to contain instability through structured administrative practice rather than reliance on personal authority alone.

The name that held my attention was not Bolívar’s, or Urdaneta’s, or the controversial Perú de Lacroix. It was the beneficiary at the center of the text: Lugo. Unlike the others, Lugo does not linger in public memory through plazas bearing his name, familiar portraits, or statues. What might an otherwise obscure officer reveal about how republican authority operated?

Lugo’s career reveals a broader political logic: the use of administrative procedure to reward service, reinforce loyalty, and stabilize authority. A government act dated May 23, 1823, records Lugo’s earlier promotion from sub-lieutenant to lieutenant, signed by Interior Secretary José Manuel Restrepo and entered in the records of the Consejo de Gobierno.^[21] In the Gazeta de Colombia of June 17, 1827, amid a public “Exposición” on constitutional controversy, “el teniente 1º Eustaquio Lugo” appears again as one name among officers affirming their position.^[22] Placed alongside the 1829 decree, these documents form a line: the 1823 promotion, the 1827 public declaration, and the 1829 elevation to captain, signed by the Liberator.^[23] The decree becomes more than a personnel decision by a powerful leader; it demonstrates that under Bolívar’s command, procedure and institutional behavior persisted even under political pressure.

Bolívar exists for me in two scales. First, as the towering hero of my youth in Maracaibo and my adulthood in the U.S. But the second angle, found at my desk in Denver, is more intimate. Bolívar appears here as one link in an administrative chain, a leader subverting his own power to the discipline of record. This is Bolívar at desk level: a man using procedure to teach a fragile republic how to survive. Rather than a figure governing by arbitrary will, the document shows that even in a moment of crisis, marked by conspiracy, fragmentation, and institutional breakdown, Bolívar insisted on channeling his authority through the rule of law. Bolívar’s insistence on bureaucratic rigor can be understood as an effort to depersonalize power at the very moment it was most vulnerable. By requiring his generals to submit to the discipline of administrative processes (signatures, countersignatures, and recorded entries), he sought to move away from a model in which authority resided in individuals and toward one in which it operated through procedures.

While scholars have shown that authoritarian regimes can operate through formal procedures rather than pure arbitrariness, the Lugo decree represents a departure from what Juan Linz defines as “sultanistic” rule, typically associated with personalist authority.^[24] Instead, Bolívar aligns more closely with a tradition exemplified by Napoleon Bonaparte, in which law serves as an instrument for constructing the state itself rather than merely concentrating power.^[25] In this sense, Bolívar appears less concerned with using law to legitimize authority than with using it to build a political order capable of surviving his own rule. Bolívar’s late dictatorship was understood by contemporaries not simply as a seizure of power, but as a response to a “constitutional emergency,” in which administrative rigor functioned as a substitute for absent civic virtue.^[26]

In the end, this is a story about how Bolívar sought to preserve his Pan-American dream by accomplishing two feats at once: using the immense gravity of his persona to keep the republic together, while funneling the chaos of revolution into the orderly discipline of the written word. The decree suggests that the survival of a republic depends on the careful construction and sustained practice of legal and administrative forms, structures designed to endure beyond the authority that first set them in motion. Instead of just picturing the iconic equestrian, we should also remember Bolívar as the weary statesperson at his desk, quill in hand; as the architect, the visionary, the insistent teacher, showing us that a free country must revere its laws as much as its heroes.

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Hugo Sánchez Aranguren is a Data Storytelling expert for Western Union, with a professional foundation in accountancy and a Master’s in Public Management. He is the co-author of a book on performance management within justice systems and a multidisciplinary researcher dedicated to recovering narratives of Americana and Simón Bolívar. By connecting historical artifacts to cultural touchstones, he collapses the distance between the mythic past and our documented reality.

Title Image: Bust of Simón Bolívar. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Further Readings:

Carbonell, Diego. La Psicopatología de Bolívar. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1965.

Lynch, John. Simón Bolívar: A Life. Yale University Press, 2006.

Pino Iturrieta, Elías. El divino Bolívar: Ensayo sobre una religión republicana. Caracas: Alfadil, 2003.

Endnotes:

^[1] Simón Bolívar, quoted in John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), Preface.

^[2] Rafael Pineda, Las estatuas de Simón Bolívar en el mundo (Caracas: Centro Simón Bolívar, 1983).

^[3] “USS Simon Bolivar (SSBN-641),” NavSource Naval History, accessed April 12, 2026, https://navsource.net/archives/08/pdf/0864119.pdf

^[4] Jack Queen and Jan Wolfe, “Venezuela’s Maduro to face U.S. Narco-Terrorism Charges,” Reuters, accessed April 12, 2026,
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maduro-set-appear-us-court-face-narco-terrorism-charges-2026-01-05/

^[5] Amnesty International, “Venezuela 2025,” https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/americas/south-america/venezuela/report-venezuela/

^[6] World Economic Forum, “Shapers for Venezuela, https://www.weforum.org/projects/shapers-for-venezuela/

^[7] USA for UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency, “Venezuela Crisis Explained,” 17 April 2024, https://www.unrefugees.org/news/venezuela-crisis-explained/

^[8] Germán Carrera Damas, El culto a Bolívar (Caracas: Grijalbo, 1989).

^[9] Lynch, Simón Bolívar.

^[10] Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life; and Elías Pino Iturrieta, El divino Bolívar: Ensayo sobre una religión republicana (Caracas: Alfadil, 2003).

^[11] Karl Marx, “Bolivar y Ponte,” in The New American Cyclopaedia, ed. George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, vol. 3 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1858), 219–233.

^[12] Francisco de Paula Santander, Escritos políticos y mensajes administrativos 1820-1837, comp. Guillermo Hernández de Alba (Bogotá: Fundación Francisco de Paula Santander, 1988).

^[13] Luis Perú de Lacroix, Diario de Bucaramanga, ed. Manuel Pérez Vila (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1970), https://www.bibliotecayacucho.gob.ve/catalogo/diario-de-bucaramanga/

^[14] Museo Histórico General Rafael Urdaneta, Casa Natal del General Rafael Urdaneta, Maracaibo, Venezuela, Fundación Centro Nacional de Historia, Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura; see also IAM Venezuela, “Museo Histórico General Rafael Urdaneta,” (November 2015), https://iamvenezuela.org/2015/11/museo-historico-general-rafael-urdaneta/; and the museum’s official Instagram account, https://www.instagram.com/museourdanetazulia/ accessed April 12, 2026.

^[15] República de Colombia, Eustaquio Lugo decree, April 30, 1829.

^[16] República de Colombia, Eustaquio Lugo decree, April 30, 1829.

^[17] Nicola Foote, “‘Manuela Sáenz and the Independence of South America,” World History Connected 7, no. 1 (2010), https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/7.1/foote.html.

^[18] Germán Carrera Damas, El culto a Bolívar (Caracas: Grijalbo, 1989).

^[19] Marginal notes trace the document’s movement: Bolívar and Urdaneta signed in Bogotá on April 30, 1829. It was registered on the capital’s ledgers on May 2. By May 8, it reached Tunja, where General Perú de Lacroix acknowledged receipt. General Gravete recorded it on May 9. On May 11, the Boyacá treasury added a rank-pay notation. A final entry dated June 21, 1830, shows the document was still active administratively, more than a year later, even as Bolívar’s presidency had ended.

^[20] Simón Bolívar, “Address at the Opening of the Congress at Angostura,” (February 15, 1819), accessed February 23, 2026,
https://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/documents/bolivar/sbagostura1819.htm

^[21] República de Colombia, Acuerdo del Consejo de Gobierno, May 23, 1823, in Acuerdos del Consejo de Gobierno de la República de Colombia (1821–1824), Archivo General de la Nación, Bogotá, accessed February 23, 2026,
https://repositorio.unal.edu.co/bitstreams/0cdbd5c5-a149-4d4e-989b-63aa75872650/download

^[22] “Esposición dirigida a la Nación, por varios militares presentes en esta capital,” Gazeta de Colombia 296 (June 17, 1827), accessed February 23, 2026, https://babel.banrepcultural.org/digital/collection/p17054coll26/id/4555

^[23]  República de Colombia, Eustaquio Lugo decree, April 30, 1829.

^[24] Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000).

^[25] Martyn Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

^[26] José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, The Ideology of Creole Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2010).