An Address of Bolivar at the Congress of Angostura (February 15, 1819)

By: Simón Bolívar

Narrated by: Russell Stamets

With all the authority obtained at the cost of numberless sacrifices, firm in his belief, justified by six years' experience, Bolivar expresses once more the same fundamental ideas of the Manifesto of Cartagena and the Kingston Letter.

This is a decisive moment for the fate of the young nation. Was there to be a repetition of those errors springing from a generous spirit which had already proved to be incapable of protecting and fostering the onward march of the revolution, or was the new era of regular government to rely on the wealth of experience gained through contrast, sacrifice, and failure? It would have been an unpardonable mistake to fall a prey to the same disappointing illusions of the republic's first legislators.

Eight years of strenuous life in the midst of the hardships of a war, which did not tolerate indifference nor remissness, had definitely enlisted in political and social activities the classes constituting the majority of the population of Venezuela. They had to be accepted with their good qualities, their defects, their potential energies, their natural limitations. The idea was to establish a republic, not philosophic and abstract, but a concrete democracy whose subjects and direct agents stood out clearly and precisely in that midst. This is the wide difference existing between the exalted Congress of Angostura and the exalted Congress of 1811.

Public Domain (P)2022 Russell Stamets