Jose Tomas Boves

format_list_bulleted Contenido keyboard_arrow_down

ImprimirCitar

José Tomás Millán de Boves y de la Iglesia (Oviedo, September 18, 1782-Urica, December 5, 1814), also known as the Lion of the Plains, the Capercaillie, the Beast on horseback or simply Taita, was a Spanish soldier, commander of the Royal Army of Barlovento (also called the Infernal Legion) and leader of the plains during the Venezuelan war of independence during the Second Republic (1813 -1814).

Throughout his brief but notorious military career, Boves became a true popular leader. Taking advantage of the social resentments of the lower classes against the abuses and exploitation to which they were subjected by the Creole aristocracy, he unleashed a ferocious offensive against the independence armies and became a real danger for the republican cause of the Venezuelan elites.

The leadership and actions of Boves were a fundamental cause for the fall of the Second Republic. However, he never came to rule the country as he lost his life at the command of the royalists in the decisive battle of Urica.

Biography

Beginnings

1782-Josef Thomás Bobes-1814. Portrait of Boves from the beginning of the centuryXIX.

Born on Calle del Postigo in Oviedo (Asturias), the son of Manuel Boves and Manuela de la Iglesia. His father died when he was just five years old, so both his mother and his two sisters (María and Josefa) had to work as maids. He studied Nautical and Pilotage at the recently inaugurated Royal Asturian Institute of Nautical and Mineralogy between 1794 and 1798, from where he went on to serve in the Royal Spanish Navy and on merchant or postal ships. Involved in smuggling due to the need to help support his family in Spain, he was tried and sentenced to 8 years in prison. and deported to the castle of Puerto Cabello in the then General Captaincy of Venezuela. Thanks to the fact that Lorenzo Joves, a friend of his father, got him the services of Venezuelan Creole lawyer Juan Germán Roscio, future first vice president of Gran Colombia, saw his prison sentence commuted to exile to Villa de Calabozo.

Cesáreo Fernández Duro (1830-1908) states that his real name was José Tomás Rodríguez, that he was born in Gijón and that he commanded a corsair ship. However, in his military file there is no record of his service on any privateer ship. In fact, Spain hardly organized this type of force at that time.

After his sentence, he settled in the Llanos region where he opened a grocery store, an activity considered infamous by the Mantuanos of Caracas; later expanding his commercial activities with trafficking of wild or wild cattle. Rejected by the Creole aristocracy, Boves preferred to spend his time with the plains people made up of blacks, mulattoes, mestizos and Indians, whom he treated as equals and for which they began to call him Taita (dad). There he married the mulatto María Trinidad Bolívar with whom he had a son (José Trinidad Bolívar).

In terms of his physical appearance, Boves is frequently described as having a thick body, a large head with a high, flat forehead, a reddish beard, blond hair, and "sunset blue eyes from which emanated a clear gaze with primitive radiance".

First Republic

Second Republic

See also: Second Republic of Venezuela

In Cartagena de Indias numerous exiled Venezuelan officers met. There they began to forge a plan with which to recover Venezuela, they quickly assembled an army thanks to the support of the United Provinces of New Granada and began an impressive military offensive led by Simón Bolívar (1783-1830), the famous Admirable Campaign.

Meanwhile, Boves's unit joined the army of Juan Manuel de Cajigal y Martínez (1757-1823), Monteverde's deputy, who was marching east where another group of exiles had landed on January 13, 1813 in Güiria under the command of Santiago Mariño (1788-1854), Manuel Piar (1774-1817) and José Francisco Bermúdez (1782-1831), all from Trinidad, where they had had British support. They established their base of operations in Barcelona, a city that Cajigal placed under siege and attempted to take by assault on March 20, April 11, and May 25, failing on all three occasions. For this reason the city was called by Bolívar Tomb of the Tyrants.

After the third and final failure, Cajigal abandoned the idea of taking Maturín and decided to support Monteverde, who proved unable to contain Bolívar's triumphant advance to the west. He ordered Boves to go with his unit of seven hundred horsemen to the Llanos and recruit all the locals he could in the name of the king. Boves soon used a very demagogic discourse against the classist and racist elites under the slogan War on the white exploiters of the brown and the Indian! The lands of the whites for the browns!, together with promises of loot, revenge and social advancement, led to the fact that in October, just two months after the start of his guerrilla warfare, he had more than 2,000 men under his command, and by December they reached 3,000, at which time he sent his deputy, Francisco Tomás Morales (1781-1845), to recruit more men in the province of Guayana. After the second capture of Calabozo he will have, according to the reports of the oidor of the Royal Audience of Caracas and Dominican immigrant, José Francisco de Heredia y Mieses (1766-1820), of 12,000 llanera lances. Instead, the general and historian Lino Duarte Level (1846-1929) said: "Ten and nine thousand men he had under his orders when he died (December 5, 1814) and of them he mobilized twelve thousand for the campaign. They were all Venezuelans. All organized by him". For this, he is based on what he stated in a letter from Morales: "Nineteen thousand men commanded Boves, and he had up to 12,000 assembled for actions." Boves harshly punished deserters, imposed a fierce he disciplined and lived with and like his men. The writer Rufino Blanco Fombona (1874-1944), in his 1942 essay Bolívar and the War to the Death: Boves' Time, 1813-1814 states that: «Twenty thousand llaneros follow him; or they wait for him in that immense deposit of men, horses and cattle that are the Llanos of Venezuela. In the agricultural and ranching fields, "the faithful people of color", ignorant and greedy, run after the booty that is promised to them (...)". The Venezuelan realist José Domingo Díaz affirms about the population of the Llanos: "Its numerous inhabitants, capable then of putting 18 or 20,000 men under arms, are almost universally zambos, mulattoes, Indians, and mestizos." At the beginning of 1814, in Calabozo, he would have gathered 1,000 riflemen and 5,000 to 6,000 lancers. Cajigal estimates that there were 7,000 when he tried to join Ceballos in the first campaign in the Aragua valleys. His troops, although initially acting as montoneras forcing their enemies to disperse throughout the region, at a certain point acted as a capable army to defeat regular troops in pitched battles.

On August 6, Bolívar entered Caracas and the Second Republic of Venezuela was proclaimed, but there were still nuclei of resistance scattered throughout Venezuela. According to an official estimate of the revolutionaries of January 11, 1814, there were 2,200 royalists in the province of Coro with Carlos Miguel Salomón, 500 in San Felipe under José de Milliet, 1,500 in Apure with José Antonio Yáñez and Sebastián de la Calzada. and 2000 in Calabozo by José Tomás Boves. In addition to the cities of Maracaibo and Puerto Cabello. Strangely, Boves and the other royalist llanero caudillo, Yáñez, never joined forces. Apparently, each one preferred to operate independently: Boves in the Calabozo plains (Caracas province) and Yáñez in the Barinas province.

Military Warlord

His first major military action took place in the Caño de Santa Catalina on September 21, with 800 horsemen ambushing a small republican unit sent from Calabozo in search of him. Most of the prisoners were speared. The next day I was entering the Dungeon for the first time.

The republican government of Caracas did not take long to react and General Vicente Campo Elías (1759-1814) was sent to defeat the monarchist guerrillas with 500 infantry and 1,000 horsemen. Boves went out to meet them with 1,000 infantry and 1,500 horsemen to fall into a trap that Campo Elías set for him in the Mosquiteros savannah. The caudillo escaped with Morales and just 17 followers.

Boves seemed finished but would resurface again thanks to the harsh repression unleashed by Republican troops against the inhabitants of the Llanos and the capture of fugitive slaves who lived hidden in the region since the collapse of the First Republic (a chaotic moment in that many blacks took advantage of to flee from the plantations of the coast, precisely, one of the missions of Campo Elías was to recover them). There were also numerous cases in which laborers and slaves recruited by force on the coast deserted and joined the hosts of the llaneras. These actions meant the complete rejection of the llanera population to the nascent republic, turning the fight for Independence into a caste war.

Finally, on November 1, he published a famous proclamation in Guayabal calling the popular classes to take up arms against the Mantuanos in the name of "the King, Religion and the Holy Cause"; Thus began the most brutal period of the Venezuelan war and which would not end until the arrival of Morillo's expedition:

Don José Tomás Boves, Commander-in-Chief of the Barlovento Army, etc.
I hereby commit to Captain José Rufino Torrealva so that he can gather how many people are useful for the service, and put at their head he can persecute every traitor and punish him with the last supplication; in the intelligence that only one believe (sic) will be given to him to entrust his soul to the Creator, foreseeing that the interests that are collected from these traitors will be divided between the soldiers that holy, And I ask and command the commanders of the king's troops to assist him in all that is necessary.
Guayabal headquarters, November 1, 1813.

Shortly after Campo Elías and the bulk of his men left to the northwest to participate in the battle of Araure on December 5, which was used by Boves to gather a new army.

United around Boves and with a pirate flag as the main banner, a body of 4,000 llaneros annihilated the column of Colonel Pedro Aldao at the San Marcos pass. Aldao ended up with his head stuck on a pike. This victory allowed the recovery of Calabozo, a city that was sacked on December 14. In the massacre, among the victims were a hundred peninsular royalists who came out to receive him. Later, the city would become the Asturian's base of operations.

Campaign of the Valleys of Aragua and Tuy

See also: Campaign of the Valleys of Aragua and Tuy

Boves decided to advance with 3,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry towards the Tuy and Aragua valleys; only 600 had rifles, the rest lances. Other sources say there were 2,000 riflemen, 1,100 lancers on foot and 3,700 on horseback. According to Boves' own information, there were 3,000 (barely 600 riflemen) on February 1, 1814, according to a letter to the Puerto Cabello authorities. On March 15, in a proclamation in Villa de Cura, he spoke of 2,000 riflemen, the same number of robust spearmen, and 3,000 horsemen, "it would be the largest army assembled until the great battle of Carabobo." To this contingent must be added Rosete and 3,000 warriors in the Ocumare savannah. A distinction must be made between the followers of both, "free horsemen" of Boves and "rebellious slaves" of Rosete. On the other hand, at the beginning of 1814, the Republicans added 8,000 to 10,000 of the Army of the West according to Vicente Lecuna, of which 5,000 to 6,000 were operatives, although José Félix Blanco says that in total they barely added 6,000 soldiers. Regarding the Army of the East, it contributed 3,500 to 4,500. The desertion quickly made the figures drop, Urdaneta says that both armies numbered just 5,000 men in May.

By the middle of the XIX century, the population of the plains of Cumaná, Barcelona, Caracas, Carabobo, Barinas and Apure It was estimated at 200,000 people, mainly dedicated to cattle farming. They were joined by 17,000 more in Casanare and 3,000 in San Martín.

His objective was to reach Valencia and Caracas taking advantage of the fact that Bolívar was busy in the Siege of Puerto Cabello (1813), but before that he had to force the Sierra de La Puerta, where Campo Elías was entrenched. There he found his revenge for the defeat of the Mosquiteros by annihilating the rival army on February 3, 1814. However, shortly after the caudillo verified the vulnerability of his militias when trying to assault fortified squares. He was rejected on the 12th when he attacked La Victoria where local university students and seminarians stood out as defenders, which is why in Venezuela that date is commemorated as Youth Day . Despite everything, his worst defeat was the siege he submitted to San Mateo. Three times, on February 28, March 20 and 25, he tried to break the defense led by Bolívar without success. The defeat cost him more than a thousand dead. During the siege, he entered the Bolívar family mansion on horseback and carved his name on the lobby door with a knife. Meanwhile, Colonel Francisco Rosete had been sent with 2,000 soldiers to devastate the valleys of the Tuy in their path, committing a brutal massacre in Ocumare on February 11. Subsequently, both joined their forces, around 4,000 men, almost all on horseback. The llanera infantry, who was in charge of the assault on the cities, had been annihilated.

Faced with Archbishop Coll y Prat's proposal to mediate in an increasingly violent war, Bolívar limited himself to responding "in view of the health of the Homeland, I cannot be giving in to my feelings of humanity" in a letter written in Valencia on February 8.

Bolívar, after learning of the defeat of La Puerta, fearful that 1,400 prisoners and wounded peninsulars or those of royalist affinity would take up arms to join Boves, ordered the killing of 1,253 monarchists who were in the prisons of Caracas and the La Guaira hospital between February 13 and 16, following the guidelines of the Decree of War to the Death. The executions took place mainly in the morning and at sunset in the Plaza de Armas, San Pablo, La Trinidad and the Slaughterhouse, places that were covered in blood and human remains as evidence of what happened there. The prisoners were usually stabbed or macheted in long agonies to save ammunition, the luckiest simply ended up with their throats slit or their heads crushed with large stones. In La Guaira the prisoners were insulted by ordering them to bring the bundle of firewood with which they would burn his corpse later. In those macabre spectacles, local women danced drunk on the inert bodies.

Defeated at San Mateo, Boves learned that Mariño was marching with an army to free Bolívar from his siege and decided to meet him before the two joined forces. He faced it on March 31 in the Bocachica savannah, near Villa de Cura.The ferocious charges of llanera cavalry were unable to break the lines of the Republican infantry and artillery. The battle ended when both sides ran out of ammunition, the royalist commander withdrew with 3,000 survivors to Guárico, an impassable plains region for his enemies, where his army could subsist and recover thanks to his knowledge of the terrain and his resources as well as the support of the population. Mariño, seeing his troops exhausted, refused to pursue him, later he met with Bolívar, there was immediate friction between the two and to avoid a major conflict, Rafael Urdaneta (1788-1845) was appointed chief of staff who accompanied Mariño in his actions.

During his withdrawal, Boves met José Ceballos while he was besieging Valencia. After being informed of the events in Bocachica, Ceballos lifted the siege and withdrew with his army to San Carlos (April 3). Mariño, emboldened by his victory, attacked him in the Arao savannah on April 16 despite Urdaneta's advice; Lacking ammunition he was about to suffer a military disaster. After this, finally, he recognized the need to join forces with his rival, Bolívar.

The rivalry between the Liberator-Dictator of the West (Bolívar) and the Liberator-Dictator of the East (Mariño) began to be noticed after the latter's accusation of another blaming him for the massive wave of desertions, indeed, his army had been reduced from 4,000 soldiers just before Bocachica to only 2,000 after Arao. Although the de jure command was in charge of Bolívar, de facto was divided between the two rival leaders, something very frequent in the early stages of the independence wars and which was key in their defeat. To this must be added the differences in the composition of both troops: Bolívar's soldiers were Andean and Mariño's were coastal. However, the assembled army was powerful, 5,000 experienced and well-equipped combatants stationed in Valencia, including 2,000 Caracas recruits. Ceballos, meanwhile, had only 2,500 men after Arao and had been reinforced by only 400 Apureño horsemen and the small escort that Cajigal brought from Coro probably had no more than 3,000 men to face. That is why the historian José Manuel Restrepo (1781-1863) estimated at 3,000 combatants per side when the decisive confrontation arrived in the Carabobo savannah, rejecting the traditional figures of 6,000 royalists and 5,000 republicans.

The battle was fought on May 28. The royalist army assumed a defensive posture, refusing to advance against the enemy, hoping that Boves would arrive to reinforce him but it never happened. Finally, Bolívar attacked with his troops, the Republican victory seemed decisive. Among dead, wounded, and prisoners, the royalists had lost some three thousand soldiers; Four thousand horses, five thousand rifles, all the artillery and the entire park were also captured. Ceballos escaped to Coro (the region that had contributed the largest number of soldiers to the destroyed army) and Cajigal to Apure, where he managed to recruit a host of 3,000 horsemen with whom he later supported Boves' offensive. But at that time the only royalist force capable of confronting Bolívar was the irregular host that Boves gathered in Guárico, however, the Libertador did not march immediately against him with all his forces, instead he divided his army sending 700 men with Urdaneta to the west, 1,100 soldiers to pursue Cajigal and Ceballos so that they would not help the Asturian, 700 with himself returned to Caracas to calm the political situation and get reinforcements and 2,300 with Mariño to finish off Boves.

Ribas criticized the Liberator for dispersing his forces. The truth is that there was a political reason behind it: Bolívar's position depended on the support of his officers and soldiers since the bulk of the people continued to be royalists, because of this he decided to satisfy his lieutenants by giving them independent commands. He had just committed the mistake of underestimating the caudillo of the Llanos.

The latter, despite Cajigal's requests for help, refused to get involved in the Carabobo campaign, taking advantage of the time to get reinforcements and equip his troops. He had received weapons and supplies by river, armed at new recruits and recovered the morale of his militia by organizing a flotilla in charge of secretly bringing him weapons from the Antilles. Thus, a new llanero army was raised in Calabozo, two or three thousand soldiers on foot and four or five thousand on horseback. In total eight thousand men.

Shortly before the decisive battle, the Asturian sent Archbishop Coll y Prat to negotiate with Bolívar. He was informed of the royalist successes in Chile and Mexico, that Boves had added to his army the dispersed from Bocachica and the fugitives from Carabobo and shipments of arms and horses from Guayana arrived, being able to take Caracas. He offered him an honorable armistice, if he promised to intercede in the demobilization of other insurgent forces, he could participate in the government of the Captaincy General or the Viceroyalty. Bolívar considered becoming viceroy one day, although he later rejected it.

Second Battle of The Gate

Siege of Valencia

On June 17, the Asturian advanced on La Cabrera, a town defended by 500 men led by Colonel José María Fernández. They capitulated the same day and all the survivors were beheaded. Other sources speak of 1,600 executed. Right after his victory at La Puerta, the caudillo sent his vanguard under the command of Captain Ramón González against Caracas; 1,500 horsemen, the first to enter it on July 8, sacking it immediately.

Boves arrived in Valencia on the day of the 19th. Initially he invited the defenders to surrender under the threat that if they fought he would kill everyone who lived in the city. After his offer was rejected, he ordered the attack on the city but failed. Three more days would pass before the royalists could launch a new attack, which was also repulsed. Only after managing to locate their artillery at strategic points from where they could bombard the center of Valencia did they make any progress. A new general assault was once again repulsed on the 28th, but by then the situation for the defenders was untenable. It was obvious to them that they would not receive help from abroad, more than six hundred wounded were piling up in local hospitals without medical supplies and began to slaughter all kinds of animals for food. By July 3 the defenders had been reduced to less than two hundred, then there was a new attack that managed to seize an important part of the city. The next day numerous reinforcements arrived from Cajigal, Ceballos and La Calzada. It all ended on the 9th with the capitulation of the city under the commitment of Boves to spare the lives of those who surrendered.

During the next night, one of the most infamous massacres of the war took place. Boves invited the high officials and officers of Valencia to a dance in honor of his victory, while ordering the women to dance a popular song called El Piquirico, his male relatives were executed. Three hundred soldiers, sixty officers and ninety civilians were murdered, and this despite the fact that the caudillo promised before the Blessed Sacrament to respect the conditions of the capitulation. His victims include the musician and jurist Francisco Javier Uztáriz, the poet Vicente Salías, the lawyer Miguel José Sanz Also the composers Juan Caro de Boesi and Juan José Landaeta who were forced to play El Piquirico until the end of the executions, at which time they too were shot.

The Asturian immediately divided his army: 2,000 horsemen would go under his personal command to Caracas while the rest of the troops, 6,000 or 8,000 llaneros on foot and on horseback under the direction of Morales, had to intercept the fleeing column of refugees to the east. Although other sources say that he divided his host into two halves of 4,000 warriors each.

Emigration to the East

Profile

Boves, as cruel and cunning as he was charismatic and courageous, had a brief but remarkable military career from his conscription on May 20, 1812, until his death on December 5, 1814. At his greatest power he was the absolute master de los Llanos, capable of mobilizing a host that dwarfed the units of allies and enemies, 6,000 to 7,000 cavalry and 2,500 to 3,000 infantry. Less than 160 were Europeans. All thanks to the fact that he knew how to win for his cause the social resentment of the mass of blacks, Indians, and browns with the white Mantuan owners, elite slaveholders, and hidalgos, giving them a justification for their massacres. they had started the war. This discourse of concrete promises was attractive to populations whose notions of what the monarchy was were very simple. From their point of view, royal power was seen by a large part of the population as a distant control of the power of the local elites in defense of the petty bourgeoisie and people of color. In the specific case of the llaneros, royal power was a brake on the ambitions of Caracas merchants and landowners eager to usurp their lands, thus ending their traditional way of life.

Like other caudillos, he supported his power in the prestige achieved by his victories among his lieutenants, soldiers and the people (understood as a much more concrete way than the abstractions of political ideologues) identifying his interests and objectives with theirs; Enjoying a personal, authoritarian and arbitrary power that could make him a despot for some and a savior for others, Boves, as the military chief of the individualists and distrustful plainsmen, deposited his authority in an iron discipline.

He distributed among his best warriors the aristocratic ladies he captured. Also frequently, before shooting the prisoners, he ordered gunpowder shots to see their expressions of terror when he believed they would die. >Legion Infernal used to massacre all the whites in every town it found, without distinguishing between age or gender, regardless of whether they were Spanish or Creole. According to the writings of the chaplain of the Infernal Division, Ambrosio Llamosas, Boves had been massacring whites from Mosquiteros. His massacres of whites, especially Mantuanos, reached such levels that many ended up saying that he planned to exterminate the Creoles to repopulate Venezuela with "Gallegos" He used to allow his troops to loot their enemies' goods and carry out all kinds of excesses.

Popular rebellion

After the French invasion of 1808 there was an institutional disorder that led to the collapse of the traditional political systems. As long as the official authorities remained, there was no major conflict in Venezuela, in fact, that year the second incursion of Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816) was unanimously rejected. However, thanks to the intellectual environment generated by the illustrated works among the elites Mantuanas its fall was ready, beginning a conflict between the Supreme Board of Caracas (self-styled representative of the king) and the Central Supreme Board (repository of the powers of the imprisoned monarch) in 1810. The consequences were the civil war, the popular insurrection of the marginalized and finally, the personalist governments, first Monteverde and then, more urgently, Boves. Something that the independence and nineteenth-century governments inherited.

Caudillismo arose in Venezuela as a consequence of the anarchy that reigned in the final stages of the First Republic, especially in those areas of republican domain (1812). In those moments the power was in the character with the ability to attract and arm a group of followers.

The fall of the colonial order was being followed by weak governments, which allowed regional leaders, dissatisfied with the distribution of power, to break the fragile institutional peace and mount expeditions to overthrow the power installed in Caracas. In 1812, Monteverde leaned on the Corianos; in 1813, Bolívar raised the Andeans and Mariño the Orientals or Guayanese; and, in 1814, Boves did the same with the llaneros. This phenomenon continued during the subsequent civil wars.

The causes of Monteverde's rapid success had been the anarchy and military weakness of the Miranda dictatorship, the popular rejection of the First Republic, and the black uprising.

Indeed, between 1811 and 1816, the slaves, freedmen, and peasants rebelled against the Creole ruling class and its socioeconomic order. In several places they were encouraged by the Spanish, although they had to flee when the massacres of whites began, being the most affected provinces were Cumaná and Margarita. This uprising will mean the loss of Mantuan support for Miranda and his fall.

Before the war, the area between Caracas and Cumaná had the highest concentration of slaves and plantations in Venezuela, where 60,000 slaves lived in 1810.

Between the entry of Monteverde into Caracas and the death of Boves, the phase of greatest violence and expansion of the rebellion began, which led to the collapse of a new "Mantuana republic". The war of races or castes began to become increasingly ever more bloody since 1813. A vicious circle began in which each side sought to win over or terrorize the people by being more violent than the other. In any case, since the arrival of Monteverde, the situation was terrifying for Venezuelans: the economy ruined by war, a devastating earthquake, depopulation of entire provinces, emigration of businessmen, flight of capital to the Antilles, famine due to not being able to produce food and bad policies of the tyranny of the canary and its advisers. The reconquistador never applied the Constitution of Cádiz: only its law of conquest, which was nothing more than the violent persecution of anyone suspected of being related to the rebellion, which was a key factor in the success of the Admirable Campaign of Bolivar. Then came the Guerra a Muerte, which was an effective method of financing the war: the assets of the murdered Spaniards were distributed among officers, soldiers, and the State. Bolívar himself said:

It will be sufficient merit to receive prize or degree in the army, to present a number of heads of European or island Spanish (canaries): the soldier who present 20 heads will be promoted to alferez, 30 will be worth the rank of lieutenant; 50 the captain (...).

This stage, characterized by slaughter and robbery, left the Venezuelans nothing but death and ashes. being responsible for the death of eighty thousand people in his campaigns. 1814 was known as the Terrible Year in Venezuela. During the constant fighting, massacres, and devastation that devastated that land, between 100,000 and 150,000 people died. war, 7,400 of the former had died in combat or were massacred by the patriots between July 1813 and April 1814, and 200,000 Creoles had been massacred before Morillo arrived because they were the preferred victims of Boves, Morales and Yáñez. Rufino Blanco Fombona says that between 1812 and 1816 134,487 people died (13,000 in the earthquake), while the unrealized increase, based on the data of the demographic increase produced up to 1810, was 107,254 (40,662 unproduced births). The massive emigrations of 1812, 1814 and 1816 are included. For this reason, Archbishop Narciso Coll y Prat (1754-1822) said that "Boves was a hero to destroy, not a man to build up".

Miquel Izard Llorens, a historian at the University of Barcelona, maintains that the famous cruelty of Boves and his troops is the product of a long work of defamation produced in the period after Venezuelan independence. However, most historians they maintain that Boves, his lieutenant Morales and their hosts sacked the cities of Valencia, Caracas, Cumaná, Barcelona and Maturín, committing terrible massacres and obtaining a great booty. Stocks, deearing and hanging on hooks practiced by the royalists reached a terrifying scale. As one historian notes:

(...) in Venezuela more blood was shed in that year than in the whole French Revolution. No people have known a class struggle of that magnitude.

Between 1815 and 1816 there will be a decrease in the intensity of the conflict thanks to the dismissal of many plains, the arrival of a professional army from the metropolis, the more inclusive discourse of the rebels and the absence of major war operations. When the war is reactivated, both sides will show a much more humanized side, but the war will devastate Venezuela with greater or lesser intensity until 1821, when the main military operations cease to be fought in its territory.

Caudillismo

Decimononic portrait of Boves.

The phenomenon of caudillismo was one of the worst consequences of the independence war, accompanying the country for almost a century until the final imposition of civil power in 1903. It is the reason why various historians consider the caudillos agents of the barbarism, backwardness in the country's institutional framework, fighters for equality or even national democratizers. For this reason, Boves has usually been seen as an anti-hero, a symbol of regression to the most primitive and barbaric states of society.

By eliminating the caste system, Boves was considered by historian Juan Vicente González (1810-1866) as "the father of Venezuelan democracy"; democracy understood as a factor of social equality. This statement is criticized by Augusto Mijares (1897-1979), since a character who called on Venezuelans to kill each other, in the name of their ethnic or social differences, cannot be a genuine democratizer. Democracy was not born from caudillos like him but from the ideas of the revolutionaries and fate. His hordes of llaneros followed the caudillo with a spontaneity that Bolívar never achieved from his own. A "fanaticism of an Islamic tribe" that made them extremely brave in the cavalry charges that the Asturian himself led.

The rebel leaders, on the other hand, had to constantly face highly divided populations that were reluctant to mobilize, having to depend on their personal leadership skills more than a solid institutionality, a key element in the preponderance of caudillismo during the subsequent construction of the States Hispanic Americans. They had to be soldiers (tacticians and strategists), statesmen (organizers of a State) and soldiers (combatants who knew how to do the same as the rest of the troops); people who through discipline and fraternization with the troops could win over soldiers to identify their ideological cause with their social or ethnic interests. For example, after the collapse of the traditional colonial militia military system in 1812 and the support from the regular garrisons to Monteverde, the independentistas had to carry out mass levies with which to defend the Second Republic. After the fall of the latter, it will be necessary to wait until 1817-1819 for a rebel armed troop to reconstruct itself, this time as the Ejército de la Gran Colombia.

Historian Samuel Phillips Huntington (1927-2008) proposed not using the term caudillismo but rather oligarchic praetorianism due to the low level of nineteenth-century institutionalization and political participation. It arose before modern and truly effective national armies were formed, when the caudillos through threats and violence could intervene militarily in civil politics to achieve their ends. The weakness of the state armies was the product of the lack of modernization in the war materiel and poor professionalization of officers and soldiers (many times governments only cared about the former), for this reason many soldiers had influential careers in politics. However, other scholars distinguish these Praetorians from the "genuine warlords" and they classify the military into three groups: career or professional military, who served free of personalities or political interests; praetorians or military-politicians, who exerted undue influence on politics; and political personalist caudillos or warriors. The former came from the best of Hispanic military excellence and the Bourbon reforms of the mid-18th century, the latter were the result of distortions associated with the independence process, and the third resulted from patronage ties between employers and workers of the colonial period.

Other authors also maintain that during the independence wars, two opposite poles were found on the same rebel side: politicians and career soldiers, usually coming from large cities, more imbued with ideologies, seen as representatives of the administrative elite and economically, they sought to create regular armies that would serve as the basis for organizing the new States in an orderly and coherent manner; Informal rural chiefs, owners of unipersonal power over their followers, whom their militiamen obeyed as long as they defended and satisfied their interests, since these charismatic leaders knew their living conditions and desires for material change, they commanded the local guerrillas. The independence armies are a mixture of both with a greater weight than the latter, while the former were usually officers of the American militias, later these militia corps will be replaced by professional units in the last stages of the war.

The so-called «political personalist warriors» were usually charismatic subjects, capable of identifying their personal interests with the popular ones and mobilizing followers, the latter being fundamental since a caudillo «could not stop being the head of an armed host». They are classified into three different categories: minor caudillos, gamonales, or caciques who are dominant in a small local area; provincial or regional authorities with power over a region or sub-state unit; and national, of which by definition there could only be one at a time in each country, whose power came from violence, compromises, and negotiations with their peers. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz (1870-1936) says that caudillismo expressed itself in two ways. modes: anarchic and despotic. The first period of general struggle for power where neither side manages to prevail completely as between 1846-1849 and 1859-1863. The second is when a single national leader ends up imposing himself, a "man of compromises", who prevented new periods of war.

Relationship with realistic command

Boves and Monteverde have similarities: they commanded the counterrevolutionary reactions of the local population and once triumphant they refused to recognize their legitimate superiors and started their own governments and benefited their supporters with positions of power: Monteverde to the Canaries and Boves to the pardos. Later the Monteverde regime will be recognized by Cádiz, Boves will die too soon for that.

It can be understood in this way because the popular and successful Boves refused to follow the orders coming from Cajigal, whose government was about to collapse. This became clear after La Puerta, when the captain general, a moderate but weak man, wrote to him «I have recovered the weapons, ammunition and the honor of the Spanish flags that H.E. he lost in Carabobo". Following the example of Monteverde, the ambitious Asturian of not dying prematurely in Urica would have been another dictator of the country.

Due to his lack of recognition of the authority of Cajigal, his extermination of whites or the distribution of land among the poor, some authors consider that Boves was not a true royalist, but that his adherence to this faction was a subterfuge, as Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) would declare at an official event. Perhaps because he did not want to accept that until 1815, at least, the majority of Venezuelans were monarchists and the conflict experienced was not one between countries but a civil war where Spain simply helped that majority. The projected "continental war against Spain" had failed, until then the majority of Americans were royalists and the majority of royalists were always Americans. Only the arrival of the overseas expedition allowed the end of the internal conflict. Without that support, the war could never have lasted so long or been so bloody, its loss was the determining cause of the independence victory.

On his death, command was assumed by his deputy, Francisco Tomás Morales, who is said to have been involved in the death of his predecessor. On the night immediately after Urica, he executed all the royalist officers who in the summoned assembly proposed to recognize the command of Cajigal. Morales assumed absolute power in Venezuela, persecuting the last rebel units in the country until the arrival of the Pacifying Expedition de Morillo, 10,642 veteran soldiers of the Spanish War of Independence, at which time he submitted to the new authority, leaving for New Granada. When Cartagena de Indias fell, he massacred 400 innocent civilians and in the battle of Carabobo demonstrated his indiscipline by withdrawing with the bulk of the cavalry at the beginning of the combat.

His lack of obedience to his superiors has been seen by some as a sign that if he had not lost his life in Urica, the unleashed civil war would have continued, this time between his militias and the army that had come from Spain. Everything, at the time of his death, various actors in the conflict, from both sides involved, were already looking for a way to get rid of him and put an end to the carnage. This would be one of the reasons for sending the peninsular army. It is not entirely unexpected, when the expedition landed in Venezuela, more than fighting the rebels, it dedicated itself to restoring the old social order. Its commander, Pablo Morillo (1775- 1837), he simply followed the king's lead to restore the status quo of 1808, which ultimately proved impossible.

It was called diablocracy that cruel caudillos assumed command and managed to ascend socially thanks to their brutality and ability to unleash the violence usually contained in the most humble and remote sectors of society. Men like Monteverde, Yáñez, Boves, Morales, Zuazola, Antoñanzas, Puy and Cervériz. This term was also used by the monarchists to refer to the republican and independence governments established by the revolutionaries.

But he and his lieutenants were not the only ruthless characters who stood out in the Venezuelan independence, we can mention Colonel Manuel Gogorza Lechuga (1796-1814) or Arismendi himself, both in charge of complying with Bolívar's orders regarding the War to the Death. It has also been accused that the bloody behavior of Boves was a response by the royalists, especially the Spanish and Canarians, to the massacres that began to be suffered by the rebels after it was decreed by Bolívar in 1813. Said tactic it had been initiated by Bolívar and associates, blaming the Spanish for the violence of the war after the signing of the capitulation of San Mateo in 1812, but in Venezuela there were not that many peninsulars nor were many soldiers sent. In fact, when it was finally sent The great contingent of Morillo was that the war began to lower its intensity, discharging the llanera militias and replacing them with line troops.

Despite acting autonomously, it should be noted that Boves received orders and ranks from the Council of the Indies by correspondence. After his death, he was promoted to the rank of general by order of King Ferdinand VII (1784-1833), his mother and two sisters were awarded a pension and honors for life. Certainly, Boves, more than material wealth, was interested in power and revenge against the Mantuans he considered guilty of his personal misfortunes.

The Rangers

The support of the Llaneros was essential for those who had it. His region was always rich in resources, with an inexhaustible supply of brave recruits accustomed to a hard life, horsemen very good at mobile warfare, disciplined, swift and capable of great improvisation. His almost nomadic life as cattle drivers or peons from hatos, they were accustomed to riding without mounts and fighting with handmade spears made from window bars. On the other hand, the Andean regions or the northwest coast hardly participated in the war. Sedentary populations that were not very warlike and that produced resources seasonally, whoever had the support of only the latter would undoubtedly be defeated. For example, in 1814 both sides had exhausted the resources of the Andean and coastal areas where they dominated, only the llaneros would allow to the monarchists to continue the war and win after losing the Corian army in Carabobo.

The region of the Venezuelan and New Granada Llanos had few cities, although the most important was Calabozo, its population was sparse and dispersed compared to its size, the news was slow and erratic, without formal means of communication. Its economy grew focused on the capture of wild cattle and their breeding in herds. Although the llaneros used to graze their animals freely throughout the territory, the best places remained in the hands of landowners who quickly generated ties of patronage with their peons.

Despite the fact that some scholars maintain that its inhabitants lived in a kind of society of free, equal, supportive, peaceful and even agnostic people, this clashes with the vast majority of sources and scholarly opinions (as with cruelty and warrior skill demonstrated by the llaneros). Most regard the region as "frontier territory" where rustling was common and often unpunished, as Spanish authority made little of its influence. Large parties of fugitive slaves escaped there and formed bands of outlaws. This created among the llaneros a feeling of autonomy that they would fiercely defend from anyone who threatened it. The war turned the marginalized into guerrillas and some into caudillos.

Several historians have compared the Venezuelan llaneros to the gauchos of the River Plate. Mestizo populations, nomadic lancers, from flat and open regions (Pampas and Llanos), breeders of cows and horses in royal land, accustomed to living with what they wear they went from serving from one ranch to another. They fought on the side of their caudillos all that century after independence in the Argentine and Venezuelan civil wars; and as with Boves, many historians have considered characters such as the federal leaders Facundo Quiroga (1788-1835), Estanislao López (1786-1838) and Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877) as agents of savagery while their unitarian rivals from the civilization. It would be said:

The plebe was put into arms and sprang from it as theological emanations, the warlords. For the servants and slaves, who understood nothing of constitution and legal conceptions, the natural enemy was, precisely, the great owner of land, the wealthy merchant in basic consumer goods (...). The gaucho and the plain were in their own condition, born warriors. Very soon they emerged under the orders of warlords who entered the legend as overwhelming expressions of elemental violence: a Quiroga in Argentina, a Boves in Venezuela.

Llaneros and Morillo

Cabrera flag, similar to those used by Boves and Quiroga.

Wishing to reduce the intensity of the social conflict and reconcile with the Mantuanos and revolutionaries, he had to limit the power acquired by the popular masses and their leaders. Numerous pardos and llaneros rewarded by Monteverde and Boves were removed from their posts. Defrauded by this policy, the bulk of Venezuelans will pin their hopes for a better life on the rebel leaders. In addition, promoting the humanization of the war, Morillo prohibited looting, reducing the looting loot. In fact, with the country under monarchical control, the only way to loot was by joining the rebels. It was this last factor that was possibly the main reason why so many thousands of men joined them along with the promise of social advancement, during the brief government of Boves in Caracas the most important posts were occupied by llaneros and freedmen. Anticipating the negative reaction, a large contingent of 3,000 llaneros was sent to New Granada. Initially Morales opposed this measure out of fear for his troops to desert.

As for looting, the caudillos always practiced it, especially the rebels who lacked a regular income while negotiating British economic support. For example, Páez had robbery as the exclusive method of equipping and paying his hosts. and after defeating Cajigal in Carabobo, Bolívar allowed his guerrillas to harass the enemy and keep the weapons, utensils, and clothing they captured. They also resorted to more sophisticated methods: seizure of assets, forced loans, fines, and donations.

Until the arrival of the expedition, the local caudillos had been the main enemies of the revolution, even more so than the "properly royalist armies" (regular troops) since they had greater autonomy and resources than the latter, and they used them above all to defend and expand their estates. Another cause of the loss of the support of these leaders was the fear of losing the autonomous leadership achieved against the recently arrived Morillo. In some regions the war was constant for five, ten or even fifteen years and the only authority that could be contacted resorting for protection during and after the conflict was the caudillo whose rule was thus legitimized, for this reason, after independence, a scenario of wars between rival chiefs was ready. As the Portuguese Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins (1845-1894) said about the Iberian devotio "the Iberian peoples resort as if by instinct to their most primitive traditions".

In practice, Morillo's army only served to radicalize the opponents of the monarch and make them see their fight as a resistance to the death, his harsh policy of repression against insurgents or suspects, especially Creoles, only contributed to the loss of support for the monarchy. It should be mentioned that initially the Spanish attempted an amnesty policy with previous rebels, such as Juan Bautista Arismendi (1775-1841), who was pardoned despite Morales' advice, since he had been executioner of numerous Spanish prisoners. As soon as Morillo left for Cartagena de Indias, Arismendi escaped to Isla Margarita, where he raised up the locals and massacred the royalist garrison. After this pardons became more difficult to obtain.

Neither Morales nor Morillo ever achieved dominance over the fierce llaneros, they were men like José Antonio Páez (1790-1873), Manuel Cedeño (1784-1821), José Gregorio Monagas (1795-1858), José Antonio Anzoátegui (1789 -1819), Francisco de Paula Santander (1792-1840), Ramón Nonato Pérez (1778-1819), Juan Nepomuceno Moreno (1779-1839), José María Camacaro (1793-1829) and Pedro Zaraza who with their fame they won the support of these horsemen. Bolívar skilfully obtained the support of these characters, key in his final victory. In the words of Morales, a character who left for New Granada with Morillo's expeditionary army just when the Republicans were beginning to establish their guerrillas in the Llanos, Boves had personal characteristics that allowed him to unify the parties of llaneros that not even the independentistas could:

Boves had the fortune to penetrate the feelings of the plains, bellicose people who need to know how to handle it. I ate and slept with them. I didn't know what attracted her sympathy. I dominated them with empire. He sent 19,000 men of whom he could present in an action 12,000 (...) Boves encouraged the insurrection with the Guayabal side of the first of November by which he had the ointment of the whites and the distribution of their properties (Carta de Francisco Tomás Morales a Pablo Morillo, July 31, 1816).

As Landázuri and Ayala point out, «the necessary unity between whites, browns, mulattoes and Indians was essential to overcome racism and win independence. Quoting Morales again:

Legal equality is indispensable where there is physical inequality (...).

After the fall of Caracas and Bogotá, thousands of rebels took refuge in the plains of Cumaná, Barcelona, Achaguas, San Fernando de Apure, Calabozo and Casanare, where after failing to rebuild a government like those who disappeared due to the unpopularity that resulted for the locals had to accept Páez's leadership in Arauca in September 1816. Armed with more spears than rifles, they were able to cut communications, ambush patrols, block supplies, and immobilize royalist garrisons in large cities.

Páez mentions in his Autobiography the case of a soldier named Pedro Camejo, originally the slave of an Apureño landlord who joined Yáñez's troops since all those who went to war returned enriched by what was stolen. After his defeat in Araure, he hid in Apure until Páez recruited him with the promise of more loot and a nationalist discourse. Skillfully, the man from Apureño knew how to take for himself the speech and symbols of the Asturian, attracting numerous llaneros to the independence cause. This is visible since both used a black flag with a skull as a banner and a black vulture feather as a symbol. However, at the end of the war, the groups that seized power did not keep their promises, leaving the seeds of a new great popular insurrection just as violent, the Federal War, under the command of a new caudillo: Ezequiel Zamora (1817- 1860).

The war benefited caudillos such as Monagas and Páez who went from being poor to being large landowners and men of enormous prestige, members of the new ruling class that emerged from the conflict thanks to the expropriation of the properties and weapons of the defeated. On the contrary, in the words of the historian Acisclo Valdivieso Montaño (1876-1935), the Asturian acted in a very different way:

"(...) After his death in Urica, he only bequeathed to his heir, his mother, for he died single, three hundred pesos, as a single inheritance, since the contributions only took advantage of them for the maintenance of his army and the booties produced by the looting, gave them to his troops. He was sober and detached to the end of not having to dress (...)".

Comparisons

Although Páez's favorite tactic was simply to charge his disorderly cavalry against the enemy squares until they were broken, that of Boves and Quiroga was similar to the "Turn faces!" of Las Queseras del Medio: first a charge was feigned and then they withdrew, tempting the enemy to go out in pursuit, then the horsemen turned around and attacked again while the reserve attacked the enemy rear by surprise, similar to what happened in La Puerta. The llaneros were invincible in the open field, which is why it is often argued that the caudillos won more because of the audacity and warlike skill of their troops than because of their tactics.

Another character with whom Boves has been compared is the Carlist Ramón Cabrera (1806-1877). Both had been charismatic sailors who, without previous military experience, mobilized entire towns under their command without much logistical support in moments of disorder to defend the continuity of the Catholic Monarchy, they went to the front in battle and lived like their men, they try to take the best of their tradition without giving up progress, they are decisive, practical, austere and meritocratic characters who had serious disagreements with friendly and enemy elites.

Rebellions of blacks would break out again in Venezuela with similar characteristics in Caucagua (1835) and Ocumare (1845).

In popular culture

The life of Boves is the subject of the novels Las Lanzas Coloradas by Arturo Uslar Pietri (Editorial Zeus, 1931) and Boves el capercaillie by Francisco Herrera Luque (Editorial Pomaire, 1980). In 1974, RCTV produced the telenovela Boves El Urogallo starring Gustavo Rodríguez. In 2010, the film adaptation of the novel was made: Taita Boves, a Venezuelan production directed by Luis Alberto Lamata, director of Miranda Returns (2007), starring Juvel Vielma in the role of the caudillo.

In Venezuelan secondary education

In Venezuela, the figure of Boves has become the archetype of the terrible warrior. This fact has generated a certain distortion in the teaching of the official history of Venezuelan independence, especially in the middle stage; This is how, as very rarely, it is mentioned in the textbooks used as reference in this phase of the educational process.

One of the most discussed historical facts attributed to the figure of Boves as a warrior is that, contrary to the independence army before the decree of war to the death, he managed to unite the multiple races and the inhabitants of colonial Venezuela in the same army that, rather than fighting against the independence of Venezuela, fights rather against the Caracas mantuanaje and above all the classist and racist nature of the formation of the independence republic. Another fact that generates suspicion is the omission of characters from the patriot army who were as or more cruel than Boves himself, such as Colonel Manuel Gogorza Lechuga (1796-1814) who held the position of commander of the troops of the Liberator Simón Bolivar.

Más resultados...