Bolívar’s Jamaica Letter remains one of the clearest windows into his understanding of republicanism and its uneasy transplantation into Latin America. It is written as a long, serpentine meditation — a historical wandering through conquest, subjugation, and misrule — until the reader [myself, and perhaps you] realizes that the wandering has been deliberate. Bolívar leads us, patiently and almost deceptively, into a trap: republicanism not as preference, but as moral inevitability. When government ceases to be a matter of taste and becomes a question of justice, republicanism emerges as the only form capable of cleansing three centuries of “atrocities” and permanent tutelage imposed upon the New World.
Yet the republicanism Bolívar advocates is not naïve. He pursues republican ends while distrusting democratic means. Liberty is his animating principle, but it immediately raises a destabilizing question: do the emancipated possess the capacity to sustain liberty once it is achieved? Federalism, as he observed, collapsed into factionalism. Like Cicero, Plato, Jefferson, and other republican thinkers before him, Bolívar understood the corrosive effects of “monarchical parentalism,” the habit of rule that trains a people into obedience rather than judgment. His core problem is not theoretical but anthropological: how does one define republicanism for a population trained by Spain into passivity — how, without an apprenticeship in liberty, do the politically “nonexistent” suddenly legislate, judge, and govern as magistrates of a republic?
The question Bolívar presses, implicitly and relentlessly, is whether a people so long deprived of liberty can sustain the virtue required by the republican form.
With the ties to Spain broken — “The veil has been torn asunder.” A republic, in Bolívar’s telling, does not begin with elections but with sight. The colonized see their condition, and once seen, it cannot be unseen. This is an awakening, but Bolívar remains uncertain whether it is a moral awakening sufficient to make consent possible and servitude intolerable. Here lies the dividing line between Bolívar’s republicanism and that of Washington and Jefferson. Bolívar’s republic must secure the consent not only of property holders, but of the enslaved and the common citizen — the Mulatto, the Mestizo, the Creole. His republicanism is inseparable from political economy: commerce, agriculture, and the ordinary labor of a society finally permitted to develop on its own terms.
The American Revolution did not require the governance of a permanent minority, as Spanish rule had imposed in Latin America — “an active and effective tyranny.” This, for Bolívar, is the central dilemma: how does one confer liberty upon a population barred for three centuries from the civic muscle memory that makes self-rule possible? Latin Americans had been trained to produce and consume, explicitly forbidden to govern. Republicanism, therefore, could not simply assert abstract rights; it would have to recover a stolen capacity.
Where liberty has been stolen, there can be no romanticizing republicanism — no belief that virtue blooms spontaneously the moment chains are broken. The untrained in liberty often drift toward the simplicity of democracy. Bolívar warns that “wholly representative” institutions are not a betrayal of republicanism but an attempt to preserve it; yet untempered democracy risks exhausting liberty rather than securing it, driving republics toward the very anarchy they sought to escape. In Caracas, he witnessed party spirit in elections and assemblies that “led us back into slavery.” “Wholly popular systems,” he cautions, lacking the “abilities and political virtues” present in the American Revolution, may bring “our downfall.”
The question, then, is not whether liberty is desirable, but what institutional form can preserve it amid inexperience, faction, and the inherited “vices” of Spanish rule.
Bolívar’s answer is strikingly pragmatic. The best form of republicanism for Latin America, he writes, is “the one that is most likely to succeed.” This is his great compromise — a rejection of republican purity in favor of republican durability. It is why he proposes Colombia with an executive elected “at most, for life,” and a hereditary senate interposed between the republic and the “violent demands of the people.” These buffers were not designed to negate liberty but to shelter it. For Bolívar, this was not apostasy but engineering: a recognition that republicanism, if it is to survive, must be built for stability rather than ideal symmetry.
On the conservative end of his analysis, Bolívar regarded monarchies as possessing a “constant desire” to expand their authority and possessions. Security, under a monarchy, is purchased through war and conquest. Republican interests, properly understood, aim instead at preservation, prosperity, and glory — ends compatible with peace and internal development. A republic does not require conquest to justify itself; it requires competent governance. In a hemisphere exhausted by forced extraction, this became both a moral and practical argument for republican government. But scale remained the unresolved problem.
A republic that grows “too large” risks degenerating into despotism; one that remains too small becomes prey to imperial ambition. Bolívar’s republicanism is therefore plural. However “grandiose” the dream of continental unity, he argues that climate, geography, interests, and “dissimilar characteristics” forbid a single Latin American state. What he envisions instead is a confederation — not unity under one will, but coordination among many. Yet even here, Bolívar cannot relinquish the republican moral horizon.
He returns repeatedly to the language of regeneration: a people must “recover the rights to which the Creator and Nature have entitled them.” A hemisphere is summoned toward “justice, liberty, and equality.” His doubts about institutions do not dilute the end they serve. Republicanism restores agency. The Jamaica Letter is ultimately an inquiry into how a republic is created — and how it is preserved. Bolívar explicitly rejects the fantasy that a single heroic figure might unify the continent — Quetzalcoatl returned, a prophet, a god. He declines the myth without ridicule.
The struggle is the same one known to the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. When Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Benjamin Franklin what government the Americans had secured — “a republic or a monarchy?” — Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Bolívar echoes this sentiment in his own idiom. Founding a republic may be natural — sustaining it requires “sensible planning and well-directed actions rather than by divine magic.” This is a republican sentence. Bolívar demotes salvation, elevates deliberation, and places the future in institutions and collective discipline rather than charismatic fate. A republic, at bottom, is a wager that a people can govern themselves without waiting for a god.
Thus, the Jamaica Letter is not a celebration of republicanism’s ease or virtue, nor a promise of success. It is an argument that monarchy is structurally corrupting, politically impracticable in the Americas, and morally incapable of repairing the injuries of conquest; that liberty, once seen, cannot be unseen; and that a people denied the practice of governance must nevertheless begin learning it — because the alternative is perpetual infancy.
Bibliography | Notes
Bolívar, Simón. Letter from Kingston, Jamaica, September 6, 1815.