← Empire: World History
Empire: World History
354. Liberator of Latin America: Simón Bolívar vs The Spanish Empire (Part 1)
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If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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In January 2026, President Trump ordered a military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. He was seized from his compound in Caracas. He was transported to New York and now faces narco terrorism charges.
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This is the culmination of years of tension between the U.S. and Venezuela. 25 years ago, left wing populist Hugo Chavez came to power and took Venezuela's incredible oil reserves out of the hands of US companies.
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And while oil profits at the beginning were used to reduce poverty, under Chavez and then his successor Maduro, Venezuela became increasingly corrupt and more and more unstable by the day. Since 2014, economic collapse, political repression, these things have driven nearly an eye watering 8 million people to flee the country that is the largest refugee crisis in the history of the Americas.
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Why was the anti imperialist and socialist Chavez inspired to name his social revolution after Simon Bolivar? And does it reflect the views and politics of the man himself? This is what we're going to find out in this four part series. And we dive into the man who still officially towers over the Bolivaran Republic of Venezuela, as it's officially still called,
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B
Semon Bolivar, who freed not just one country, six countries from Spanish colonial rule. And then looking at his subsequent four, maybe that might tell us a bit about this present predicament that Venezuela finds itself in. So let's get straight into it. The story of Simon Bolivar, it's one of the most extraordinary I think, that we've covered here on Empire and a story that Empire Club members can have in one go without waiting. And you get so much more than just ad free listening and all the miniseries in one go. So you know, go there, join up, join the club. So the name Simon Bolivar, I mean a lot of people may have come across this name.
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A
I mean Bolivar's a famous character. Anyone that studies any colonial or imperial history comes across this name. And when I was studying obviously my East India Company history and 18th century India, there are many parallels made to Bolivar. And one of the great questions people ask is why there wasn't an Indian equivalent of a Bolvar. Why was it because there was this massive mixed race population in 18th century India and you get people like Skinner of Skinner's Horse who are similar sorts of characters, but it didn't happen. And in the end the Anglo Indians, the mixed Race leave India. And so it's very interesting to see a sort of counterfactual in a sense of. In what. In what's happening in South America.
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B
But the man in South America, his legacy is enormous. There are streets, there are plazas named after Bolivar. Across the continent, Bolivia is named in his honour. But more surprisingly, because I sort of looked it up, there are statues of Bolivar in Paris, near the Seine, a stone's throw from the Eiffel Tower. It's a really prime position, whole towns in wait for it. The United States are named after Bolivar.
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A
In Missouri, no less. Exactly, yeah.
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B
Not just Missouri. There's Tennessee, there's Ohio, there's Pennsylvania, London, Washington D.C. and New York. Central park each host their own rather impressive Bolivar statue.
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A
So where's the. The London Bolivar statue? I haven't come across it.
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B
It's a very smart one in Belgrave Square in London. And he's sort of standing there with his arm up in the air, sort of, you know, making this triumphal scene speech.
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A
He is the sort of ultimate Anita hero. He's sort of Fabio for accounts, on a horse with. With a bit of gold braid added too.
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B
Well, some may say, but it's more complicated than that, as usual. Can I just give you a few other places where Bolivar is celebrated? In India?
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A
Yeah, near where I live.
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B
Tehran has a Simon Bolivar Boulevard. So, you know, sort of legendary status. And he has a massive statue in the UN Plaza as well, on a charger, rearing up, you know, so this is an image that you will possibly have walked past in your life in disparate parts of the world without maybe knowing why. And there is a story that goes behind this legend. So if you have this kind of legendary status, there is a legend that goes with it every child in Latin America certainly knows. So the year is 1805, and this young man from Venezuela stands on a small hill in Rome with two friends and he looks out into the distance and he makes this grand declaration. Monte Sacro, the sacred mountain, was a very well chosen location because the Same Place in 494 BC, the Roman plebeians revolted against the patrician classes and it was an uprising that changed the course of Roman history. But this is the year 1805 in the same spot. This is the place where this young Venezuelan raises his hand, looks wistfully into the distance and speaks words that will echo across two centuries. I think you should read them.
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A
It's all stirring stuff. I swear before you. I swear before the God of my fathers. I swear before my fathers, I swear by my honor, I swear by my country, that I will not rest, body or soul, until I've broken the chains with which Spanish power oppresses us. It's all good stuff.
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B
He was just a 22 year old man when he made that statement. Simon Bolivar. And will he, over the next 25 years, he would make good on the promise.
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A
What I like about him is his nickname. Tell me how he got to be called Iron Ass or Coelho de Hiero or Culo. Culo de Hiero, Sorry.
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B
I will tell you why. Because he would travel in his lifetime more than 75,000 miles on horseback. Now, just to put that into some context, that is three times the circumference of planet Earth. And if you're in the saddle for that long, you get an Iron Ass. And that's what they called him. It was a loving moniker for him.
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A
Firm buttocks being necessary. Required. Thank you.
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B
I mean, you know, I'm not interested in such things. You know, these.
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A
I know you're interested in such things. Exactly.
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B
He leads armies through crocodile infested jungles, frozen peaks of the Andes. And like I said at the beginning, this is a man who will free six nations from Spanish rule. So they are Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. And altogether, that is an area larger than modern Europe.
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A
You got very excited, Anita, about the biography you were reading on Bolivar.
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B
Wonderful.
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A
Maria Arana, is it?
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B
Oh, she's amazing. This is the American Liberator. I just love it so much. Her biography of Bolivar is fabulous. And she says that, you know, this is a line from her. Neither Alexander the Great nor Hannibal nor Julius Caesar had fought across such a vast and inhospitable terrain. Charlemagne's victories would have to have doubled to match Bolivar's. Napoleon, striving to build an empire, had covered less ground than Bolivar struggling to win freedom. So, I mean, that's, you know, get an idea of what the man represents, particularly in Latin America.
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A
But what you, I think, particularly enjoyed about that biography, and you were saying how she humanizes this character who quite often just appears as sort of, you know, a character on a horse covered with gold braid, with a sword flashing in his hand. We know this sort of figure, but she manages to bring him very much to life.
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B
You felt, oh, gosh, I mean, just almost automatically. So what she does beautifully, she tells a story, she goes through archives, she, you know, has scoured the world looking for every item that is relevant.
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A
And do a lot of his letters survive? Was he a great letter writer?
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B
Yeah, a lot of his stuff does survive, but. But apart from that, what she does is she goes through official portraits and she does the measurements for them. I find I was so tickled by this. And what she shows is a man who has a rather meager chest, quite bandy, thin legs and hands that have been described by contemporaries as small and beautiful as a woman's. And she gives us these dimensions which just doesn't match the Liberator's. You know, massive, huge image. He was only 5 foot 6, so
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A
same height as Napoleon.
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B
Right, okay. And everyone thinks of Napoleon as a teeny weeny, but nobody really thinks about Bolivar that way. And maybe that's because of what he was like.
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A
That's why both of them are always shown on a horse, I suppose.
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B
Well, that was part of it. I mean, honestly, it's not even a joke because, you know, he was conscious of his height and therefore on a horse, you know, sort of when people were trying to characterise him or when he was agreeing to be painted or sketched on a horse, he was. So the thing is with him, and I think it's not the same with Napoleon. Napoleon was always described as being taciturn. When he walked into a room, everyone was scared because they thought he might kill them. But when Bolivar enters a room, he has this voice that many people in his contemporary life talked about. It was, you know, booming and galvanizing and, you know, he was, he was, he had a magnetism that, you know, just made normal sized men look like teeny weenies. One of his contemporaries had this to say. He said if you took your eye off a woman for even a moment when Bolivar was present, he would steal her right from under your nose.
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A
Ultimately, to hear it. No wonder you got so excited by this.
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B
Well, I mean, you know, but he's
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A
also a good dancer, you say, and he liked, he liked his cooking.
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B
He liked his cooking, yes. I mean, this fabulous biography gives you so many of these lovely insights. He liked good cuisine. He could, though. Even though he liked good cuisine and fine food, he could endure days, weeks of punishing hunger and, you know, these back breaking trips on his horse. He had stamina in the saddle that was legendary. Hence Iron Ass.
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A
It's a very good nickname.
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B
You like it? I like it very much. Good, good. But, you know, also he, you know, he was fluent in French. He could quote Rousseau just from his head, you know, in French and he could quote Julius Caesar in Latin. So this is a, you know, your man for all seasons.
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A
He's your kind of man. Definitely your Kind of man.
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B
I mean, describe the picture. Because I did. I included a picture of. And you're good at all of that.
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A
Well, the picture just looks like Your average early 19th century military hero on a horse, to be honest.
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B
No, don't be daft. There's the mustachioed picture that I sent you. So, you know, you've got this sort of thatch of curly dark hair, these penetrating black eyes, you know, very strong chin. Just look him up, man. I'm not making this up. It's a good looking dude. He's a good looking dude.
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A
You make him sound like he said he's in the Eurovision Song Contest or something.
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B
Okay, but for all of that, for all of that, you know, good looks, a charisma, the voice that, you know, seduce hundreds of women. He did have a weakness. Will he? And, and you might, you might appreciate it.
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A
Thank you for that.
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B
He loved flattery, maybe a little bit too much. He really enjoyed.
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A
And there are, there are many accounts, I think, of his massive ego and this was what brings him down. He has, he has this.
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B
But let's not do the tower and poor thing, we're not going to say how he dies. Okay, the death story. What can I hang on to? But you're right, and this is very
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A
much of the period. I mean, someone like Napoleon being a similar example.
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B
Sort of monstrous pride, isn't it? It's sort of egotism that goes insane
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A
and that leads these liberators to become tyrants with a sort of strange inevitability.
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B
Shall we start with what is in common with some of the huge figures that we've talked about in the past? And there are always common tropes about this. I mean, I keep going back to sort of Stalin hated his father or was an orphan or had a miserable childhood. And you have sort of that kind of tragedy in the Bolivar story. So he's born Simon Jose Antonio de la Santissima Trinidad Bolivar Il Palacios. And he's born on July 24th in 1783 in Caracas. The moment that he's born, Willi, is a moment of revolution because just months earlier, Britain had signed this treaty, effectively ending the American Revolution. And across the Atlantic, you've got the man that you've named a few times. This, you know, formerly a young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, building his reputation.
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A
Another stumpy hero of our age. Yeah.
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B
Bolivar, though, unlike Napoleon, was born into wealth. The Bolivar family was one of the richest, most respected families in Venezuela.
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A
And this also complicates his story, doesn't it? Because he's from that class who are. Are the middlemen between the things that are being extracted from Venezuela, in that case, gold and silver rather than the petroleum of today. And that he's very much not of the people. He's from the Creole landowning class.
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B
Yeah. And I should say Creoles. You know, when you say Creoles, people will think mixed race, but that isn't the Creole that we mean here. It's a disputed thing, and it's a real hot topic of debate, as it is with Alexander Hamilton.
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A
Alexander Hamilton probably was mixed race. I had a long chat with Ron Chernow, Hamilton's biographer, and he does think that Hamilton was mixed race. He also uses the same card indexes as me, where old card index people. Okay, well, this is vital dinosaur technology.
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B
Thank you. Good to know. Excellent. But Creole in the context of this time often means. And this is the argument that is had, and it is contested, as it is with Hamilton. I know Ron Chernow says it is likely, but the Creoles were people who were pure Spanish but born in the Americas. So they often had the label of Creoles because they were, you know, their parents were Spanish, but they were born not in Spain. And so those people often had that label of Creole attached to them.
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A
And his family were rich on cacao plantations.
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B
Yes. I mean, you mentioned sort of silver and gold, but it's cacao from, you know, what we now know as Venezuela.
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A
And that's for making chocolate or what?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And what's also different, I mean that, you know, you have copper and you have cacao. And the reason that it's important that this place that he was born is a little different from the rest of the Americas at this time that Spain has an interest in is that because of that backbreaking work that's needed to harvest cacao. There are. There are hundreds of enslaved Africans working here. So there is a much more sort of mixed population here in Venezuela than, let's say, even, you know, in Peru, for example.
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A
And this obviously gives him a complex profile as a liberator. But if he's a slave owner, even if he liberates his own slaves, he's from that class. He's very much from that class. Yeah.
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B
Well, so jumping ahead a little bit, because, you know, at the moment we're in his childhood where he is a brat. I mean, he's just a rich brat. Okay. So his family's net worth in this sort of Maria Rana book, which I love so much, she estimates it would be worth about $40 million today. But, but, but money can't buy you happiness, William. And it doesn't for him.
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A
It's a rough childhood, isn't it? Yeah.
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B
His father, Don Juan Vicente, dies, and he's only 2 years old.
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A
He's called Don Juan.
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B
Don Juan. Vite.
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A
Your Fabio character has a father called Don Juan. It's perfect.
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B
His mother, Donna Maria de la Concep, she's raising four children, but she is really struggling cause she has tb, which, you know, is not uncommon at this time. And by the time Simone is only nine years old, she dies too. And it was an awful death. Consumption was a horrific death. So he would have seen his mother, you know, bleeding and frothing from the mouth for days before she died.
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A
I remember watching as a child, a biopic of Moliere and he dies of consumption and sort of dripping blood all over the keyboards of a piano. I remember it marked me for life. It's the most hideous thing I'd ever seen. I didn't know about it.
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B
I mean, it is. It is a horrible, prolonged way to die. No, you're absolutely right.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So the orphaned boy, no mother, no father, and traumatized because he's seen the way his mother has died, he sent off to live with his grandfather. But that doesn't last for long because then his grandfather dies. So, you know, Simone is just faced with loss after loss after loss before he's really even 10 years old. And most of his aunts and uncles and a sister, they die as well around him because, you know, life was precious and fragile back then. He's wealthy, but he has nothing else.
- [17:03]
A
So at a time when he's lost successive parents and grandparents, he has, like Alexander the Great, an extraordinary teacher. In this case, it's Simon Rodriguez. He's a radical thinker, very much in touch with Enlightenment ideals. And he introduces the young Bolivar to the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Locke. Political thinkers whose ideas about natural rights and social contracts and the end of monarchy very much shape Bolivar's revolutionary vision.
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B
But, I mean, Rodriguez might have opened the door to his curiosity. But, you know, Bolivar was by all accounts, an autodidact who pursued learning for himself, you know, picked up books like so many of the extraordinary people we cover, who sort of rise to the top of these huge empires. They're lonely, sad children who pick up books and write poetry for themselves. And this is very much the Bolivar mould too. So he loved the classics, he loved the politics. Again, this is something that comes up again and again with the characters that we talk about. Here on Empire. He loved the politics of ancient Rome and ancient Greece and as William just said, you know, Enlightenment France, he gobbled that up. So at 14, you got this rather sort of intelligent, lonely, rich. Who is rich, but he's looking for a cause.
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A
That's the surprise of this, is that you don't normally expect liberators to come from that very coddled rich background that he comes from.
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B
By his late teens, like many wealthy brats of his age, you know, he does this Grand Tour of Europe. I mean, you can tell people, I mean, we sort of grow up with this idea of the Grand Tour. But Willi, for those who don't know what the grand tour is, I mean, just describe what it, what it actually entails.
- [18:43]
A
Well, it's a thing that I thought was very specific to British aristocrats of going around after you've studied the classics all your teens, you go and see Rome and go and visit Naples and you have these pictures of all these British 18th century figures being painted in front of the Colosseum or if they're Scottish, wearing a kilt at the Parthenon.
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B
Yes. Doing a ceilid at the Parthenon.
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A
Doing a ceiling at the Parthenon. Exactly. That I had read. This is something that also happened in Latin America, that if you were rich Latin American, American kid, you do the same.
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B
Yeah, rich Europeans did the same thing. And. And the Creole class who identified largely as being Spanish because, you know, they had all the wealth and they were exporting it to Spain primarily, they felt more Spanish, so they of course would follow that same trajectory. And then you have it sort of in 1802.
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A
Oh, this is the bit you like. You get very excited by this bit.
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B
Well, sad bits. Right? So he's only 19, so he's a baby, but he feels like a man. And in Spain, he meets a woman that changes the trajectory of his life. Maria Teresa Rodriguez del Toro y Alia. And she's an aristocratic Spanish woman.
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A
She says it.
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B
I mean, she's always depicted as this rare beauty, like, you know, really just spectacularly beautiful.
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A
So she looks a bit like Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West. She's this sort of classic Latin, lovely.
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B
Well, okay, so they fall in love. And two, these two beautiful people in love the whole of the rest of their lives ahead of them, they return to Venezuela. He says to me, my love to her. He says to her, my love, let us go to Venezuela. Let me show you my cacao plant.
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A
Anytime you want.
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B
Yeah. Anyway, so they begin their life together on the Bolivar estate. And the future looks bright. Join us after the break where it all starts to go very, very wrong.
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A
Welcome back. So eight months after their wedding, Maria Theresa contracts a fever. This is a story of epic tragedy. Anita, take it on.
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B
Well, she does. She contracts a fever, and within days, William, she's dead as well. I mean, just imagine this for poor Bolivar, who's had his more than his fair share of loss and death. And he's devastated by this death. And, you know, by all accounts, he goes into a deep, deep depression. And he makes this, you know, sort of young man's vow never to remarry for the rest of his life. He will never find a love like this. I mean, he does find love, but he doesn't marry again. So that promise he certainly does keep. And people think, or many historians certainly, of Bolivar to pronounce it properly and do forgive us for pronunciation if we mangle it. But a lot of historians think this is a key turning point in his life because having been marked by so much tragedy very early on, and then losing the love of his life, he kind of gives up on the idea that this kind of life of domesticity is something that he can ever have, that he's ever, ever going to have. And so he starts looking around for something else. I mean, I've heard some professors of Latin American history, there's one at Liverpool University who has this, you know, amazing, sort of interesting. We, we like it counterfactual on this program. What would have happened if he'd remained married and lived happily ever after, if his wife hadn't died, if she hadn't got that fever? And. And he posits that, you know, maybe
- [22:13]
A
he carried on the cacao. Exactly.
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B
He would have just carried on, you know, he would have been a Creole landowning aristocrat, exploiting the slaves, working on
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A
his land with his estancia.
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B
Yeah. But he doesn't, because that future just dies with Maria Theresa. So in this sort of distraught, he leaves Venezuela, he leaves his estate, he leaves anything that reminds him of Maria Theresa and returns to Europe, where he's
- [22:38]
A
reunited with his wonderful tutor, Simon Rodriguez.
- [22:41]
B
That's right. And that has a huge impact because again, he has something else to think about. And he dives into, you know, the radical teachings that Rodriguez is laying in front of him. And you can say sort of at this point, point, truly, his political education begins in earnest.
- [23:00]
A
And this is now 1804. And this is the moment that Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of France. And like many young men, of his generation, Bolivar is both dazzled and appalled. He admires Napoleon's military genius and his leadership and his ability to inspire men. But he's troubled by this portrayal of republican ideals. And when he's invited to attend the coronation in Notre Dame with the Spanish ambassador, Bolivar refuses. He sulks in his room and doesn't want to witness his transformation of the revolutionary general into an emperor, into a tyrant, into everything that he has rejected.
- [23:42]
B
So, I mean, this will be a theme in Bolivar's life because he wants to be like Napoleon, but he doesn't want to be like Napoleon at all costs. And it's what makes a great leader. Do you have to do what it takes, regardless of the human cost, because you believe in a better future for your people? So, you know, there is this push, pull when he's not going to Napoleon's ceremony, when he makes decisions and will haunt him for the rest of his life. This idea that he wants liberty, he wants civility, but in the end, he will end up being a man who imposes tyranny and terror. But more on that to come, will he take us back to that moment, you know, the oath that you read out to us?
- [24:26]
A
So he's gone down from Paris and the coronation to Rome, and we're a year later, it's 1805, and he's still in mourning, but he's now steeped in Enlightenment philosophy. He's got his wonderful tutor, Simon Rodriguez with him, and he stands on Monte's Sacro and he makes this famous vow. What's the circumstances of this, Anita, apart
- [24:47]
B
from, you know, the heavily laden with the Roman history that he would have been well aware of? Well, Spain's at war with Britain again, having recently suffered the devastating defeat at Trafalgar. The Spanish court, which Bolivar has been sort of swimming around in Madrid, is riven. He's seen this now firsthand with incompetence and corruption. He cannot believe these are the guys who are in charge. And he can feel that there's a political vacuum building up, that Spain's grip on its vast empire is weakening because the idiots are in charge.
- [25:20]
A
I've got a question. How prominent are the sort of Creole landowners from Latin America when they get to Spain? Are they looked down on as provincials from. From abroad, or are they given honor and. And if they're rich enough, can they pass off as sort of part of the whole sort of Spanish world?
- [25:36]
B
They are looked on exactly the same way as plantation owners from Britain when they come back, which is, we love the Money. But we'll laugh at them behind their
- [25:48]
A
backs and regard them as rich brutes or not.
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B
I mean, sort of just slightly, you know, to be tolerated for the money. I mean, that is a trope.
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A
One of the things that always surprises me is how much British plantation owners are looked down on for their brutality. You often have the accusation that it's somehow sort of retrospective 21st century liberalism to laugh at slave owners. But if you look at the writings of the time, people are very horrified by these people. And when they come back to England, they are regarded as brutes.
- [26:19]
B
Well, not always. I mean, sometimes if you look at some of the literature of the day, and we've covered some of it on this podcast, you know, these, these are sort of ruffians in, in silks is. Is what they're looked upon, you know, that they, they haven't. They don't know the courtly manners. They just ape the courtly manners because they're too far away and it's not the same where they are.
- [26:36]
A
But Bolivar's education, presumably was an unusual thing, and having Simon Rodriguez with him
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B
always, but it also, as we said, you know, sort of more a self didact, so he more going into, you know, the kind of conversations that you don't have at polite dinner parties in Spain. Why would you be having these kind of, you know, Enlightenment. Enlightenment. What are you talking about? You know, this kind of thing. He doesn't fit. He does this certainly. And he would have felt that he
- [27:00]
A
doesn't fit from his class. It's unusual.
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B
Yeah, unusual. I guess maybe, I don't know particularly whether there were others like him who picked up Rousseau and memorized it by heart. But he did not quite fit, that's for sure. But more importantly, he gets this realization that the Spaniards don't deserve to rule. You know, who are these people? And he's kind of slightly appalled from
- [27:29]
A
them at this point. Perhaps we should paint a portrait of Latin America and the Spanish empire At this moment, 1800, Columbus has arrived, what, 1492. So for more than three centuries, Spain has held this absolutely massive empire, stretching all the way from Argentina, through the whole of Latin America, through Central America, Mexico, into parts of what became the United States. Because at this point, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and Texas are all part of this empire too. Tell me how it's all organized, Anita. Presumably it's not one sort of enormous colony. There are different viceroyalties.
- [28:15]
B
Yeah, no, because it would be a nightmare. It's viceroyalties. Exactly. So a vice royalty is an Administrative division. In India, you had one viceroy, but here in South America, over this enormous landmass, you have different viceroyalties and they govern in the King's name, just as the Viceroy of India did. So you have these different places, New Granada and that comprises modern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama. You have the Viceroyalty of Peru, you have the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, which is, is comprising of what we now know as Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia. So this actually, this is really important because it will lead to great splits which somebody who wants to liberate these places from Spain's control will be able to exploit. And the reason you have, you know, different viceroyalties is because you can't govern from a center if you have so much, much land. But if you have these sort of different viceroyalties and actually, very importantly, you're not allowed to talk to each other as viceroyalties, you're not allowed to confer. Everything must go back to the center, which Bolivar has already said is, you know, run by idiots. You have this, you know, almost a competitive environment between them, but also sort of aggressively against each other. And they also have very different concerns. So you will have New Granada, which comprises Venezuela, which is where Bolivar is from. It's the least developed politically, economically of the four viceroyalties. And that's because, you know, they're agricultural workers, they're working on cacao, they're working the fields, they've got slaves. It's also therefore much more multicolored.
- [29:58]
A
So you've got all these different viceroyalties within each area. The creoles and the Spanish crown are. There is tension growing, isn't there? There is this feeling that the creoles are excluded from highest office, want to increase their power, obviously, while the Spanish crown is trying to hold on to control from the peninsula, from Spain.
- [30:21]
B
I mean, to say there's tension at this point would be, I think, an exaggeration. There is a system that has always existed which is that the so called peninsulares or the people who are from Spain hold the very highest offices. Right. So they are right at the top of the pyramid.
- [30:35]
A
They're imported grandees.
- [30:37]
B
Yeah, exactly. But underneath them, you know, the actual levers of power are being put in the hands of creoles, you know, the Spanish who are born or brought up in South America, the local elite. But this is an elite, you know, based on money, because you can have a sale of offices at this time. You know, much as we have rotten boroughs, a history of rotten boroughs in this country where if you were very, very rich, you could buy yourself a political seat at the table. You had very rich people who were taking those very powerful civil service jobs for themselves. Now, that is going to be a problem when the Spanish try to change things, because it will occur to these people who are doing the work day by day that. Hang on a minute, we're doing the work day by day. Why are we answering to some Spaniard or peninsulare who's telling us what to do? That's gonna be in the next episode.
- [31:31]
A
And this is crucial tension just to flag that this is the world which Bolivar is stepping into. This is the tension between the local aristocracies and the local elites and the crown in Spain, which is trying to keep control and increase its control.
- [31:47]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know what? He probably doesn't even question it until he goes to Spain and he sees the doofuses who are taking these top positions, you know, like, it's just the way it has always been. But when he sees them with his own eyes, when he meets them, when he talks to others in Europe about, you know, these, for want of a better word, the chinless wonders who are actually, you know, running the show. Why? Why should they? We know the country, we were born in, the country, we're doing all the work. So why is this happening? And in the next episode, that's going to be the central we're going to be looking at. Because it is going to be, you know, it is going to be really down to the peninsulares, the Spanish, who change the rules. And that is what is. Had this remained, I mean, people would have grumbled and perhaps it would have limped on. But the Spaniards are going to try and close their grip on power. And if you want to listen to that next episode right now, you don't have to wait. Go to Empire Club and you join our club and you get it all in one go, the whole Bolivar series. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan, and
- [32:51]
A
goodbye from me, William Durampel.