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The military and political career of Simón Bolívar, (July 24, 1783 – December 17, 1830), which included both formal service in the armies of various revolutionary regimes and actions organized by himself or in collaboration with other exiled patriot leaders during the years from 1811 to 1830, was an important element in the success of the independence wars in South America. Given the unstable political climate during these years, Bolívar and other patriot leaders, such as Santiago Mariño, Manuel Piar, José Francisco Bermúdez and Francisco de Paula Santander often had to go into exile in the Caribbean or nearby areas of Spanish America that at the moment were controlled by those favoring independence, and from there, carry on the struggle. These wars resulted in the creation of several South American states out of the former Spanish colonies, the currently existing Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and the now defunct Gran Colombia. In his twenty-year career, Bolívar faced two main challenges. First was gaining acceptance as undisputed leader of the republican cause. Despite claiming such a role since 1813, he began to achieve this only in 1817, and consolidated his hold on power after his dramatic and unexpected victory in New Granada in 1819. His second challenge was implementing a vision of unifying the region into one large state, which he believed (and most would agree, correctly) would be the only guarantee of maintaining American independence from the Spanish in northern South America. His early experiences under the First Venezuelan Republic and in New Granada convinced him that divisions among republicans, augmented by federal forms of government, only allowed Spanish American royalists to eventually gain the upper hand. Once again, it was his victory in 1819 that gave him the leverage to bring about the creation of a unified state, Gran Colombia, with which to oppose the Spanish Monarchy on the continent. ==Historical background== (詳細はManuel Gual and José María España, inspired by exiled Spaniard Juan Bautista Picornell, unsuccessfully attempted to establish a republic in Venezuela with greater social equality for Venezuelans of all racial and social backgrounds. Nine years later, in 1806 long-time Venezuelan expatriate Francisco de Miranda led a small group of mostly British and American foreign volunteers in an attempt to take over Venezuela and set up an independent republic. Like Gual and España's conspiracy, Miranda's putsch failed to attract Venezuelans of any social and economic class, in fact local Venezuelans organized the resistance to Miranda's invasion and quickly dispersed it. The lack of interest on the part of the Venezuelan Criollos is often explained by their fear that the loss of the removal of Spanish control might bring about a revolution that would destroy their own power in Venezuela. Nevertheless, in the decades leading up to 1806, Criollos had often been at odds with the Spanish Crown: they wanted an expansion of the free trade that was benefiting their plantation economy and objected to the Crown's new policy of granting social privileges that had been traditionally been reserved for whites (''españoles'') to Pardos through the purchase of certificates of whiteness (''gracias al sacar''). So the Criollos' failure to support Gual, España and Miranda, which would have created a state under their control, needs to also be understood by the fact that a national identity separate from the Spanish had not yet emerged among them. In neighboring New Granada tensions also existed with the Crown but had not evolved into an outright desire for separation. In 1779 the Revolt of the Comuneros pitted middle-class and rural residents against the royal authorities over the issue of new taxes instituted as part of the Bourbon Reforms. Although the revolt was stopped and the leaders punished or executed, the uprising did manage to slow down the economic reforms that the Crown had planned for New Granada. In the subsequent decades, a few New Granadans, like Antonio Nariño, became intrigued by the ideas of the French Revolution and attempted to promote its values by disseminating translated documents like the ''Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen''. Again, this was a minority and not necessarily a sign that the majority in New Granada did not see themselves as members of the Spanish Monarchy. The break with the Crown came in 1808 with the disappearance of a stable government in Spain. The crisis was precipitated by Napoleon's removal of Bourbon Dynasty from the throne of Spain (he convinced Ferdinand VII to abdicate, and his father Charles IV to renounce any claim to returning to the throne he had abdicated only months earlier) and his invasion of Spain. As the entire Spanish world rejected the new Bonaparte Dynasty (Napoleon gave the crown of Spain to his brother, the King of Naples and Sicily), Spain itself fell into chaos and it took almost a year for a coordinated, centralized provisional government (the Supreme Central and Governmental Junta of Spain and the Indies) to form. Even then, the rapid and large French advances in the Peninsula seemed to make the idea of a stable government in Spain pointless. By 1810, the Supreme Junta was cornered in the island city of Cadiz during the two-year Siege of Cádiz. Throughout Spanish America, people felt it was time to take the government into their own hands, if a Spanish world, independent of the French, were to continue to exist at all, and therefore in 1810 juntas were set up throughout the Americas, including in Caracas and Bogotá, just as they had been in Spain two years earlier.〔Lynch, ''Bolívar: A Life'', 44-48; Madariaga, 108-116; and Masur (1969), 62-65.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Military career of Simón Bolívar」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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