Simon Bolivar
Venezuelan military and political leader of Spanish American independence (1783–1830), born in Caracas into a wealthy Creole family of mine and plantation owners, orphaned of both parents before the age of nine, and partly educated in Europe, where he absorbed the Enlightenment ideas of Rousseau, Locke and Montesquieu, and where, according to tradition, he vowed to his mentor Simón Rodríguez in Rome that he would not rest until he had freed his homeland from Spanish rule. Known as 'the Liberator', over more than fifteen years of uninterrupted warfare he led the military campaigns that brought independence to six present-day nations — Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Bolivia, the last of which bears his name — distinguished by extraordinary military feats such as the 1819 crossing of the Andes to surprise Spanish forces at the Battle of Boyacá. Beyond the military man, Bolívar was a political thinker of continental ambition: in the Cartagena Manifesto (1812) he lucidly analysed the causes of the fall of the First Venezuelan Republic, while the Jamaica Letter (1815), written during a bitter exile, set out his more mature vision that Spanish America could not simply adopt North American federal models without adaptation, arguing instead for strong, centralised governments capable of containing anarchy. His most ambitious dream, the creation of Gran Colombia — a federal union of several of the new republics — and, beyond that, of a pan-American confederation proposed at the 1826 Congress of Panama, disintegrated amid regional and personal rivalries before his death, leading him to lament bitterly, shortly before dying of tuberculosis in 1830, that he had 'ploughed the sea'. A figure revered almost unanimously across Spanish America, his legend has also been the subject of constant ideological disputes over his true political legacy.