The Chimera which became Colombia

To the extent Americans on average know anything about South America’s movement for independence, they have heard about Simon Bolivar exercising a role roughly equivalent to that of George Washington in our own national experience. Yet as today the Republic of Colombia celebrates 215 years of independence, there is another personage who exerted considerable influence on Colombia, yet whose renown has been largely eclipsed by Bolivar. The revolutionary in question is Francisco de Miranda, and his vision for South America offers an incisive Libertarian lesson.

In 1750 de Miranda was born in Caracas, Venezuela to a moderately affluent family. His parents invested heavily in de Miranda’s education, as he showed great promise in academia, quickly mastering the sciences, humanities and linguistics. In 1771 he travelled to Spain, becoming a captain in the army, whereby in 1781 he was deployed in the Battle of Pensacola in British West Florida, as part of Spain’s attrition against its old rival. De Miranda’s sojourn in North America allowed him to meet the American Revolution’s luminaries like Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John and Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox. It was here that de Miranda began to formulate a vision and identity for Latin America.

De Miranda observed that though North America’s thirteen colonies had diverse culture and customs, they shared enough values to cooperate effectively, acting as a national entity against a common foe. He reached the conclusion that all Spain’s colonies in the Americas should do the same, coalescing into one super-state stretching from Tierra de Fuego in Argentina northwards to Baja California in Mexico, and eastwards to Louisiana and the Antilles. To define this continental entity, de Miranda began to use the term “Colombia,” and to denominate its denizens as Colombians (colombianos). Mind you that this was at a time when – if people there called themselves anything besides Spanish subjects – they may have said that they hailed from New Granada, which was the former name of the country we now know as Colombia.

De Miranda’s downfall was that he was tall on ideas but short on practicality. In 1806, de Miranda returned to his native Venezuela at the head of a filibuster expedition recruited from combative New Yorkers with a flag which he had designed for a country then existing only in his mind. De Miranda’s first attempt at liberation flopped badly, so after exile in England de Miranda tried again in 1810, this time comfortably bankrolled by another native Venezuelan, Simon Bolivar. After initial success, royalist counterattack defeated the revolutionaries, and the Spanish authorities imprisoned Francisco de Miranda in Cadiz, Spain, where he died four years later, aged 66.

Bolivar continued the struggle for independence, and ultimately achieved the liberation of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Panama (that flag which de Miranda designed you’d easily recognize as the basis for the official flags of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador!). Adhering to de Miranda’s vision, Bolivar was obsessed with cobbling these now six separate countries into one union to be called La Gran Colombia, with expansionist plans for expeditions of liberation to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Yet from the outset regionalist pressures tore at the union. Bolivar’s insistence on centralization proved impractical in terrain dominated by the impassable Andes, dense jungles, sweltering savannas and immense plains, complicating the dissemination and enforcement of governmental decrees. More to the point, the daily experience of people in these dissimilar places had them feel less commonality with one another. Thus seceded in sequence Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia from the experiment, leaving Colombia to fend off border disputes and civil wars on average every four years for the remainder of the nineteenth century. As Libertarians like Dr. Murray Rothbard have observed, turns out that government is a burden best endured by fewer people over a given area, making bigger countries generally less stable.

Nonetheless, the Republic of Colombia has endured time’s rigors, and has achieved enviable prosperity. We pray that it so continues for many years to come!

Originally published July 20th, 2023, on Facebook.