The Venezuelan-born military commander and political leader who liberated most of Spanish South America between 1813 and 1825, governing as president or dictator across Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia — and who spent his final years watching the republics he had created fragment, federate against him, and slide toward the caudillo instability that would define Latin American politics for generations.
Simón Bolívar liberated six nations and governed none of them successfully. He spent the last decade of his life attempting to hold together a Gran Colombia that was already disintegrating, issuing constitutions that were ignored, assuming dictatorial powers he justified as temporary, and watching the republican ideal he had fought for become, in practice, a competition among regional strongmen. He died in 1830, en route to exile, having resigned the presidency of a country that no longer existed. He is remembered across South America as El Libertador. The question of what he actually liberated — and for whom — has never been settled.