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Product Description
In this "informative and inspiring volume" (Chicago Tribune), Robert Harvey reconstructs in vivid detail the gripping story of Latin America's independence and those who made it possible. Treated with contempt by their Spanish overlords, given to dissipation and grandiose proclamations, these fearless men nonetheless achieved military feats unsurpassed elsewhere in history. The aristocratic Simón Bolívar led his guerilla armies through swamp, jungle, and Andean ice to surprise his enemies and liberate most of northern South America. The inarticulate San Martín joined Bernardo O'Higgins, illegitimate son of a Spanish viceroy, to do the same in the south. These and five others waged the war for freedom against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, the American Revolution, the collapse of the Spanish Empire, and the revolutionary ferment of the nineteenth century. Despite the success of their revolutions, all seven liberators died in poverty, disgrace, or oblivion.
This fascinating and dramatic story takes in a vast range of martial experience, from butchery in the torrid Orinoco basin to a cavalry fought with lances 13,000 feet up in the mountains of Peru. It is one of the greatest and least-known epics of history, told here in unprecedented detail.
Amazon.com Review
In 1780, a Peruvian-born Spanish count named Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui organized a revolt against the Spanish crown, one that briefly united thousands of Indians in a 10-month war against Peru's European conquerors. The revolt was eventually crushed, and the count was torn apart by horses after having his tongue cut out.
Condorcanqui's revolt is all but forgotten today. But it set off events that continue to reverberate, writes Robert Harvey. Less than half a century later, across Latin America, "Spain's empire had vanished without a trace, as had Portugal's dominion over Brazil." This astoundingly rapid loss of empire was the work of a handful of sometimes flawed but gifted reformers such as Simón Bolivar, José de San Martín, and Bernardo O'Higgins, who followed George Washington's then recent example and organized great armies of liberation against powers they had come to regard as foreign. These leaders paid a great price--all of them, and others Harvey profiles, died violently--for revolts that sometimes replaced one inhumane regime with another, but that, Harvey observes, at least pointed the way toward "the independence and self-respect for which the Liberators fought so hard." A former correspondent for The Economist, Harvey writes with particular attention to England's relations with Latin America, from failed invasions of Argentina and Nicaragua to more fruitful alliances with progressive movements throughout the hemisphere. By linking developments in Latin America to political movements in North America and Europe, he does much to remove the air of isolation and exceptionalism that surrounds so much historical writing about the region. --Gregory McNamee
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