Simón Bolívar looms over modern Latin American history both as a founding father of several nations and as a nodal figure among an assortment of transatlantic and hemispheric influential political, scientific and military leaders. On the bicentennial anniversary of the famous Guayaquil Interview between Bolívar and José de San Martín (1822), in which the continent’s two towering military figures met and decided who would assume leadership of the final phase of the war, this panel aims to reassess four key meetings with the Liberator. It will examine specific meeting-moments that affected not just the course of his life specifically, but also the trajectory of the Gran Colombian independence movements more generally. These were meetings and moments where two paths diverged in a wood, choices had to be made, risks taken, enmities and alliances created and undone. In each of these crucial moments, both Bolívar’s own individual fortunes – and those of the local and regional independence movements – could have gone one way or another.

By paying attention to the Liberator’s momentous meetings with key individuals at specific times, the panelists will highlight the role of personal attitudes and decisions that had an impact on the transformation of civic life and the success of the first continent-wide, anti-colonial insurgency in history. Its focus single moments within a broader trajectory of Bolivar’s life trajectory – and that of the world around him – the panel avoids teleological assumptions and escapes nation-driven narratives. Instead, it underscores the human component of larger events by acknowledging place- and time-specific contingency.

The panel employs a new methodology to engage in the close study a famous life without being a “great man” biography. Instead, it elevates subaltern voices whose different visions for the most desirable path forward may have been quite different from Bolívar’s and who forced him to act on their preferences, including his partner and trusted advisor, his royalist older sister, a regional cowboy-rival, and the President of the black Haitian republic. The panel historicizes the element of chance, choice, and material circumstance by showing how the Liberator’s range of action was constrained by a matrix of other people and factors. By combining the epistemological and analytical tools produced by social history and the New Biography, we aim to reconstruct not just the heroic life of an outstanding individual but rather the complexity and contingency of a moment.

Contributing authors have used memoirs, the periodical press, travel accounts, private correspondence public records, and new archival sources to situate these four moment-meetings.