The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz (review)

As we enter the bicentennial commemorations of independence from Spain, Natalia Sobrevilla Perea provides a welcome monograph on a colorful but lesser-known figure who may be new to English-language readers. The Caudillo of the Andes is as much an account of the fascinating twists and turns of Andean nation-building as a biography of Andrés de Santa Cruz, a prominent figure in his own time but largely forgotten during official celebrations of founding fathers. Sobrevilla places her study of Santa Cruz within the scholarship on caudillismo, which attempts to understand the post-independence rise to power of military leaders in Spanish America. Yet the book makes a more important and original contribution by focusing on complex questions of identity at multiple levels, from personal to national. The region that now forms the nation of Bolivia shifted in the eighteenth century between the viceroyalties of Peru and Río de la Plata. Santa Cruz was born near La Paz but identified politically with Peru, first as a loyal subject of the crown and then as a leader for independence; with the establishment of an independent Bolivia, he championed its union with Peru. Although the Peru-Bolivia Confederation did not endure, Sobrevilla reveals the contingent and contested nature of emerging borders rather than reviving traditional narratives that project nationhood going back to 1810.

In contrast to his mentor, the aristocratic Simón Bolívar, Santa Cruz's more modest and mixed genealogy was typical for the Andean highland regions. His father, a career military officer and mid-level royal bureaucrat, had been transferred from his native region of Huamanga, Peru, first to Río de la Plata and then to La Paz to fight against the major indigenous rebellion of 1780 to 1783. Working as a local official for the tobacco monopoly in the wake of the war, the father of Santa Cruz met and married the daughter of an elite indigenous leader who had remained loyal to the crown during the uprising. Much later, enemies of Santa Cruz would highlight his indigenous ancestry in an effort to denigrate him, but Sobrevilla makes the important point that in the late colonial period many middling to elite families at the provincial level were technically mestizos but represented themselves as having only European origins. Like many in the colonies, moreover, Santa Cruz initially remained a loyal subject of Spain, switching sides only after, a decade into the independence wars, he had been twice captured as a prisoner of war. Fighting against Spain, however, did not necessarily mean fighting for a clearly defined nation to take its place. Santa Cruz had been educated in Cuzco and continued to identify with the former viceroyalty of Peru. After the final defeat of royal forces, the constitutions of both Peru and Bolivia granted citizenship to all veterans, allowing Santa Cruz to serve as interim president of Peru in 1827 and to be elected to the Bolivian executive the following year. Sobrevilla cites letters from the period in which Santa Cruz explicitly stated his desire to maintain political rights in both countries, and his efforts for the next two decades were focused on bringing them into a confederation.

Sobrevilla follows the ups and downs of the federation project, favored by many in southern Peru and the bordering region of Bolivia, but resisted by those both farther north and south as well as by the neighboring nations, most notably Chile, which feared the threat posed by an Andean confederation. Although the effort ultimately failed, the support Santa Cruz enjoyed for a time and his ability to bring temporary stability to the region are important reminders of the complex process of nation-state formation. Santa Cruz was not so unusual if one considers that many of his rivals and allies likewise held political power in regions outside their birthplaces; nonetheless, he has been less commemorated, owing perhaps to his long exile in France...