Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Before Simón Bolívar Could Liberate a Continent, He Had to Fight an Earthquake

How the aftershocks of an 1812 quake that hit Venezuela changed the world.

On June 24, Venezuelans were struck by two powerful back-to-back earthquakes, each measuring more than seven points on the Richter scale. The destruction is widespread, especially in Caracas and the coastal city of La Guaira. There’s now more than a thousand dead and thousands missing, but those numbers are going to grow. One hesitates to politized natural disasters, to rush to impose some larger moral geopolitical morality on heartbreak. But—considering that Washington has placed Venezuela in receivership and has seized billions in oil revenue, depositing the money in US escrow accounts—it’s hard not to. Over the lasts two decades, Washington has sanctioned Venezuelans to death. The White House, in the wake of the quakes, has lifted some of those sanctions, but the damage has been done, leaving government and society with a significant lower capacity to cope with the damage. The United States flew 149 Venezuelan deportees, including 19 women and seven children, from Miami to Caracas just a few hours before Wednesday’s earthquakes. They were brought to brought to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada in La Guaira, which collapsed. Hundreds remain missing.

What follows is an account of an earthquake that hit Caracas in 1812, one whose aftershocks changed the world. The quake led to the end of Spanish America’s first independent republic but propelled a young Simón Bolívar to the head of a continental insurgency that, about a decade later, would topple the three-century old Spanish Empire. It’s an adapted excerpt from my America, América: A New History of the New World, which is now out in paperback.

Thursday, March 26, 1812, Caracas: What image better captures the cusp between old and new than Simón Bolívar standing defiantly on a mountain of rubble? His audacity signaled not just the beginning of the end of Spanish colonialism but the breaking of the chain that linked slave, peasant, servant, man, woman, priest, master, lord, and king in a hierarchy reaching to the sky, a sky crisp and clear that tragic Thursday. The earthquake had destroyed most of the city and its hinterlands. At one point, Bolívar, who was back in Caracas from his military campaigns when the quake hit, drew his sword on a priest and ordered him to stop praying for souls and start saving lives. Pull bodies out of the rubble, Bolívar ordered the cleric. After scrambling atop a high pile of stones from a ruined convent, Bolívar came face-to-face with José Domingo Díaz, a medical doctor loyal to Spain who for two years had written weekly polemics against the foolish dreams of republican liberation. Bolívar, as Díaz described him, looked desperate. 

“What now?” Díaz asked, as if mocking the republican arrogance that it was history that mattered, that it was history that could be overcome by man’s will—that it was history and not nature that decided who ruled. Bolívar’s answer came back quick: Si se opone la naturaleza lucharemos contra ella y la haremos que nos obedezca: If nature itself opposes us we will fight nature and make it obey.

There’s nature as reason, as a justifier of beliefs and ideals. And there’s nature as force, impulsive, terrifying, and marvelous. Bolívar, climbing the convent’s rubble and pledging that he would compel nature to submit to republican will, was defying both. He wasn’t disputing the royalist argument that the natural disaster was a manifestation of God’s displeasure. But if true, then God’s will had to be defeated and the old world He presided over had to end. During this moment of earthshaking crisis, Bolívar was Milton’s rebel angel hurling defiance toward the vaults of heaven. If nature stood in the way, nature would be destroyed.

After surviving Caracas’s 1812 earthquake, Bolívar would spend the next 12 years of his life waging war against Spain, and against the institution that enriched Spain: slavery, in all its many guises. 

Caracas had been suffering from a long drought that spring, and the sky was blue on the day of the quake. But a few raindrops fell just before the church bells started to ring: at 4:07 in the afternoon, not to mark time but because their towers were swaying. The undulations of the earth came from different directions, north to south, and east to west, like two waves cutting across each other. 

The city sat at the intersection, and the waves crashing together sounded like thunder rising from “hell,” one survivor said, like the “voice of the Angel of the Apocalypse.”

Columns gave way. Balconies fell. The timing of the earthquake was uncanny. March 26 in 1812 was Maundy Thursday. On that day two years earlier, Caracas had expelled its royal overseers. On that day one year earlier, the city had commemorated the expulsion in a wild night of revolutionary exuberance, and then shortly thereafter declared independence. Believers were in the city’s many churches and convents celebrating Mass when the buildings started to collapse, and many of them, maybe most, were crushed to death. When the sun went down at 6:10, the dust rising from the rubble deepened the darkness. The “lamentations” of those buried beneath the ruins “lacerated the heart,” recalled one witness. The destruction was near total, the terror absolute. Washington’s envoy to the new republic estimated that 20,000 people had died immediately, and tens of thousands more would perish in the weeks to come from hunger, disease, and injury. Church buildings in wealthy mantuano parishes were made of heavier stone, with larger buttresses, so most of them remained standing. Casually built churches in poorer areas of the city nearly all collapsed, crushing the city’s servants, along with their children. This meant that there was a shortage of laborers and domestics to help upper-class families recover: a preview of what a world without slavery might look like.

The quake radiated hundreds of miles beyond Caracas. Town after town fell, with waves felt as far west as Bogotá in Colombia. Storehouses collapsed, burying shovels and other needed tools, medicines, linen, and food. Rescuers used their bare hands to dig survivors out from the rubble. The quake blocked springs and broke pipes running to public fountains, so there was little safe water to drink or to clean wounds. Suddenly, for the well-off, the abstractions of revolutionary slogans proclaiming liberty and equality were materialized in their worst fears: The city’s poorer survivors were seen “entering the houses that were still standing” and “carrying off everything they could lay hands on.” Some called it looting, though it might more rightly describe survival. To prevent the spread of disease, bodies were burned by the dozens. Corpses were carted to the beach of La Guaira, Caracas’s port town. There, they were burned “about forty at a time in one fire,” with the flames visible to ships far out in the Caribbean.

“The City has disappeared,” wrote the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who had visited Caracas during his American travels, upon reading of the catastrophe. So too, for many, republicanism. Congress held its last session on April 6, 1812.

Nine out of 10 prosperous caraqueño houses, compounds in the Andalusian style, thick adobe chambers surrounding lush courtyards, were destroyed. Simón Bolívar’s, just off the Plaza San Jacinto, survived. Its beams buckled but held. Witnesses recalled the 29-year-old Bolívar in a tattered, stained shirt with sleeves rolled up, alternating between pulling people from the wreckage and arguing with those who said the calamity was a divine strike against republicanism, against the “sin of independence.”

Republicanism in Venezuela, as mentioned, wasn’t anti-Catholic. In Caracas, as well as in key provincial cities, especially in the Andean city of Mérida, there existed emancipationist priests, of the kind that might read a passage from Las Casas rather than a chapter of the Gospel while saying Mass. But a larger, opposing group was mobilized by Archbishop Coll y Prat. A few conservative clerics had been preaching for years against republican perversity, warning of the wrath that might befall a people arrogant enough to believe they could rule themselves. Others held their tongue. Until Caracas collapsed.

The archbishop, born in the Cataluña........

© The Nation