Plow the Sea

Most Americans in the United States devote very little time thinking about our neighbors in Latin America. That’s a shame: its history reads like an epic, filled with characters and nations attempting to achieve everlasting glory, and, when they dramatically fail, leading to unfortunate consequences for everyone involved. The Venezuelan general Simón Bolívar’s turbulent career is the prototypical example. It looked like a bust when he failed to liberate Venezuela in the 1810s, like a triumph a decade later when he did liberate Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, and then again (in his own view) like a bust in 1830 when he died of tuberculosis in a politically fractured Latin America.