5.27- The Labyrinth

At the constitutional convention in Bogotá the delegates steered the new polity away from Bolívar’s centralist model. They rendered Sucre ineligible by setting a presidential minimum age at 40, announced a constitution on May 4, 1830, and pressured Bolívar to depart—he formally resigned April 27 and left on May 8 with a modest life pension of 15,000. The episode traces the humiliations that followed: Venezuela revoked his citizenship and blocked the sale of his only remaining asset (a mine), Sucre’s assassination on July 1, 1830 crushed Bolívar’s last hopes for a stable heir, and repeated failed ship departures from Cartagena trapped him. In Santa Marta a doctor and an American surgeon tended him, but he died on December 17, 1830. The host emphasizes Bolívar’s last writings—summarized as bleak maxims that “America is ungovernable”—and places the man’s failure within a broader arc: the rise of caudillos, chronic civil violence, delayed abolition of slavery, and the long mythologizing of Bolívar into a continental icon. The narrative registers the tensions between Bolívar and rivals like Santander and Páez, notes the contested memory of Bolívar in the decades after his death (exhumation efforts and selective rehabilitation beginning in the 1840s), and ends by linking Bolívar’s disillusionment to the turbulent institutional legacy of 19th‑century South America.