Interlude 3. The Colonial Wars of the 1830's
Nowadays, following a revisionist trend of Political and Historical Sciences that gained force in the 1970’s C.E., it became a sort of consensus among historians the inclusion of the so-called “Atlantic War” (known in Europe more generally as the “Luso-Brazilian War of 1831” or even the “Equatorial Naval Race”, at least according to those that believe the conflict hardly qualified as a war) into a bigger picture: that of the (also controversially named) “Recolonialist Wars”, a series of unrelated episodes of armed conflicts between the newly-born American Republics and the former colonial empires, namely Spain, France and the Netherlands.
Indeed, between 1825 and 1845, an apparently insignificant lapse of time in the ocean of time, the Americas were again set ablaze by conflicts between the decadent empires of the Old World and the young federations of the occident.
Even if it came to pass that hapless and exhausted Portugal was the one to receive the lion’s share of South America after an abridged war with the Brazil – perhaps out of one of these odd overturns of mankind’s most turbulent century –, the largest military engagements actually occurred in the Caribbean and in Central and North America.
The year of 1824 is nowadays recognized as the last year of the Spanish rule in South America, owing to the campaign of Huancavelica, in which a combined host of Platinense and Andean patriots defeated a Spanish royalist force protecting Lima, the last stronghold loyal to Spain south of the Panama strait. However useful commemorative dates and remembrance festivities might be, historical developments are seldom defined by a single event or episode, and this applies to the decline of the Spanish Empire in the occident, marked by a long (even if acute) period of institutional corrosion by hyperactive forces of social, political, cultural and economic nature, amalgamated into coherent bodies of insurgence by the revolutionary ideas coming from Europe.
In this context, one must note that by the middle 1820s, the anticolonial conflict had ended to the Andeans, Chileans, Platinenses and Orientales, but it persisted as a daily existential struggle of the Neogranadines, Mexicans, Tejanos, Californios, Cubans and Dominicans, with perhaps a few glimpses of hope in seemingly unending eon of oppression and tyranny from the Crown in Madrid.
To any Neogranadine or Mexican patriot, the struggle would only see its end when the domain of México – now fashioned as a kingdom equal to the metropolis itself, and deserving the bizarre denomination of the Kingdom of the Two Spains – fell to revolution, so that, like a line of dominos, the whole empire, from Cuba to the Phillipines, would finally see the sunset.
Nueva Granada - the country that Francisco de Miranda once believed would be heartlands of “Colombia”, a commonwealth formed from the happy republics of Hispanoamerica -, even after the triumph of Antonio Baraya against Pablo Morillo in the battle of Mérida (1821), that cemented Neogranadine independence, was in fact under a perpetual “siege” by Spanish royalist forces, either those coming from México, such as the column that attacked Panamá in 1826, or those coming seaborne from Cuba, like the troops that torched Maracaibo in 1827, and even ships coming directly from Spain. So far, none of these attempted an entire reconquest of the country, and even the despicable creature that was King Fernando VII of the Two Spains seemed to tacitly accept Neogranadine emancipation by the middle of the 1820s.
A mistake, then.
The Two Spains had but conceded a short truce to the tireless citizens of South American Granada, while King Fernando VII bide his time, accumulating wealth from the overexploited Pacific colonies, taking loans from the banks of London, Amsterdam and Berlin, and employing Prussian officers in the training of recruits, sons of the generation of men who had fought the French during the Iberian War, all while investing in the reconstruction of a legendary armada in the ports of Sevilla, Cádiz and Almería.
In 1829, an expeditionary force of almost 9,000 Spaniards and European mercenaries from Germany and Britain, and as far as Hungary, led by Mariano Ricafort Palacín y Abarca traversed the Atlantic, stopping in La Havana, and disembarked in Veracruz, whereupon they joined a large royalist force led by Agustín Cosme Damián de Iturbide y Arámburu, a rising military prodigy who was conducting campaigns against revolutionaries in Yucatán.
By late 1829, this large royalist force traversed Central America, and invaded the Neogranadine border territory of Panamá. The expedition was supposed to recapture at least the Atlantic provinces of the former Vicerroyalty of Nueva Granada, giving a strong base from whence the royalists could recolonize the whole of the country, and from there march to Perú.
However, the casualties mounted up before a single shot was fired against the enemy, with hundreds of Europeans perishing to the various tropical diseases that infested that tiny serpent of the Earth linking the Americas like an umbilical cord. The passage of the royalist troops, whose barbarous habits and mistreatments infuriated the already vexed populations of Central America, would be the first spark of a series of revolts in the region in the next few years. To make matters worse for the Spaniards, they had expected to catch the Neogranadines by surprise – having marched from Veracruz to Panamá in barely a week – but, at the moment, Nueva Granada in a state of red alert, due to a tense dispute with the generalissimos of La Plata to determine the hegemony over the nascent [Peruvian] Andean Republic. The Neogranadine heads-of-state were expecting that Peru would soon be the battleground of a war against La Plata, and thus many of its brigades were already on field and ready for the call of duty. Thus, when they heard the news about the Spanish invasion, these forces were quickly diverted to the northwest, and the reserves were rapidly mobilized, so much that in a few months, a whole host had formed under the command of António Baraya and Joaquín Ricaurte to defend Medellín, the gateway to Granada’s heartlands.
The first initial engagements, already in the year of 1830, favored the royalists, but soon the scales balanced in favor of the Neogranadines, whose victories in Antioquía forced the Spaniards to retreat back to Panamá. Nonetheless, the European side had clear advantage in sea, and the multiple amphibious and maritime attacks in the Atlantic Coast forced the increasingly desperate President Baraya to divert much-needed brigades to reinforce Venezuela, where separatist movements were gaining force due to the perceived negligence of the federal government. Indeed, the war might have ended in 1830 if the Neogranadines were fit to pursue the Spanish troops in Central America, where again their ranks were thinned by disease and exhaustion, but a short civil war broke exactly in the same year, pitting the federal centralist government of Santa Fé de Bogotá against rebellions in Orinoco and Carabobo, and a splinter government broke in Guayaquil forming the short-lived “Republic of Guayas”.
While the federal forces of Nueva Granada were dispersed to deal with these revolts, the Spaniards reassembled and launched another campaign in 1831. This time they captured and torched Medellín, and defeated a federal army near the capital, entering Santa Fé de Bogotá in the midst of August, forcing the defeated and humiliated republican government to reallocate further north to Pamplona. The Spanish triumph, preceded by a series of atrocities in the countryside and inside the largest cities, only strengthened the Granadine resolve to resist the recolonization, and the war dragged until 1833 without any other gains for the empire, as the occupation was faced with almost universal hostility and bloody campaigns of guerilla in the mountains.
The Republic of Guayas was definitely crushed by Marshal Simon Bolívar in 1833, and he maneuvered a large force skirting the Spanish-occupied territory to meet his countrymen in the eastern provinces of Cundinamarca, from whence the federal troops retook Santa Fé de Bogotá and routed the invaders in Cutucumayo.
Again, the defending armies did not pursue the enemies as they retreated to Panamá, as President António Baraya needed to commit his forces in Venezuela, a country that took almost two years to completely tame, extinguishing pro-independence partisan groups such as the Brigada de Las Mil Banderas [lit. Thousands’ Flag Brigade] and the provisory splinter government of Cumaná.
In the middle 1833, an armistice was concluded, but the Neogranadines found an even better reason to commemorate: King Fernando VII of the Two Spains had died in the beginning of the year, and the succession of his three year-old daughter Isabella was met with opposition by her uncle, Infante Don Carlos de Molina, sparking a dynastic war that would engulf both Spain and México until the next decade.
The Dutch ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, ever since the Congress of Vienna (1814) incessantly ranted about the loss of their colonial dominions, mainly South Africa, but now Surinam was included in the claims, because Portugal, of all of the nations, had no rights to these territories that now comprised the Guianas.
The Dutch authorities – that is, the young King Willem II of the Netherlands (who had succeeded his deceased father Willem I in 1828) and the Joint Parliaments in Amsterdam and Brussels – in a single irate voice denounced “Perfidious Albion”, an appellation that became once again popular in the print of Europe and now in the Americas (with the editors in Rio de Janeiro basically translating word by word the criticism of the Dutch newspapers). The haughty United Kingdom had surreptitiously devoured half of the world while Europe fought against Bonaparte’s legions, and the Netherlands, once a proud empire in the likes of the Spains and Portugal, had been reduced to but isolated outposts in Indonesia and the Antilles.
Of course, the defunct United Provinces had been joined with the former Austrian Netherlands as a fitting compensation for the loss of the colonial dominions, but the arrangement left a very sour taste in King Willem II’s metaphoric mouth, even now, because the unquiet Flemish and the Walloons elites proved to be very unruly and prone to rebellions, having recently forced the Crown in Amsterdam to give substantial (constitutional) concessions under threat of civil war. The Dutch monarch, who in his youth had served with the Duke of Wellington's British expeditionaries (then known as “Slender Billy”), proved to be an able conciliator in these tense years of Flemish factionalist insurgences, and appeased the exasperation of the Catholic majorities in the southern provinces, who had many times accused his father of despotism. By the late 1830s, a crisis resulting from a popular revolt in Brugge was peacefully defused with ample concessions to the Flemish and Walloons, and the union between the Dutch peoples was cemented, paving the way for a more stable nationhood.
The inauguration of King Willem II of the (United) Netherlands (c. 1828)
Much like Portugal and Spain, the Netherlands after the loss of their colonial empire would turn their attention to other conquests in the middle and late 19th Century. Still yearning for a strategic position in the Dark Continent to safeguard the passage to the Indian Ocean, the Dutch monarchy decided to invest in an expedition to reclaim an ancient fort in the Maputo bay, near the Portuguese colony of Moçambique. This would, in the next few decades, allow them to intervene in the endemic wars among the Malagasy kingdoms of Madagascar, and eventually colonize the island together with France.
For the time being, the Dutch government employed their energies in exploiting the increasingly unprofitable productions in the Antilles – considering that sugar had lost its place as the world’s most valuable commodity –, and initiated diplomatic overtures with the American republics, realizing the value of having allies in the New World to contain the ambitions of the Iberian empires.
1835 and 1836 were fated to be particularly tense years in the Caribbean even if the chaotic Carlist War had not happened (1833–1841). While both the Neogranadines and Hispano-Mexicans died in hundreds from muskets and mosquitoes in Nicaragua, disputing the strait stretch of the Earth separating the Atlantic from the Pacific, the Netherlands and Portugal were driven to the brink of war.
Likening the episode to the naval conflict between the United States of America and France of 1798-1800, modern historians denominated the escalating acts of privateering and naval raids of 1835 as “the Caribbean Quasi-War”, with Dutch and Flemish warships assaulting Portuguese forts in the Guianas, and Portuguese vessels raiding the Dutch Gold Coast in Africa – the sole reason why the conflict would became popularly known in vulgar memory as the “Guiana vs. Guinea War” (a rather catchy, even if senseless, name for a war in a period notable for its wars).
Despite the fact that the privateers were sponsored by the respective governments of Amsterdam and Lisboa, there was no official declaration of war, and, indeed, no clear goals, as neither belligerent tried to conquer any enemy territory. The Portuguese were too weak and broken to sustain a serious war effort – for this reason, the previous “war” against Brazil could have never been a full-scale recolonization – while the Dutch, also weakened by the Napoleonic Wars, were cautious to avoid British retaliation, as it became clear that the capitalists in London were interesting in being friends with benefits towards Portugal. In fact, the main Dutch agent in the Caribbean was yet another British expatriate, Henry Chester Sears, later knighted by King Willem II of Netherlands.
The hostility between the Netherlands and Portugal and Spain fostered a friendship with both Nueva Granada and Brazil. Dutch embassies were created in Bogotá in 1835 and in Rio de Janeiro a year later. Despite the Brazilian good disposition towards Amsterdam, the Dutch monarchy became much closer affiliated with the interests of the Neogranadine federation, especially as the Netherlands and Spain developed an urgent and unnerved colonial race in far Asia (Indonesia and Phillipines) throughout the remainder of the 19th Century – mostly remembered as "the Pacific Game". In this regard, the alliance between the Confederation of Nueva Granada and the Netherlands would last until the next century.
________________________________
Notes and Comments: Antonio Baraya is an historical leader of *Gran Colombia, a precursor to the Colombian nation much like Francisco de Miranda, but he was captured and executed by the royalist forces of Pablo Morillo y Morillo (also an historical character) in 1816, paving the way for Simon Bolívar to become the main leader of the Colombian/Venezuelan independence. In this alt-scenario, Antonio Baraya survives and becomes the first President, while Bolivar, still a war-hero, remains as a secondary political and military figure in the Neogranadine independence.
About the Netherlands, I've never really accepted how, after the Napoleonic Wars, they simply lost the relevance in global geopolitics they had until the 18th Century. ITTL, due to much better relations between the Kingdom of the Netherlands and France, flourishing as a result of a mutual fear of Prussia (remember that Prussia ITTL is already poised to form Germany proper, having defeated Austria in the War of Saxony, usurped the hegemony in the German Confederation, and still allied with Russia)
Indeed, between 1825 and 1845, an apparently insignificant lapse of time in the ocean of time, the Americas were again set ablaze by conflicts between the decadent empires of the Old World and the young federations of the occident.
Even if it came to pass that hapless and exhausted Portugal was the one to receive the lion’s share of South America after an abridged war with the Brazil – perhaps out of one of these odd overturns of mankind’s most turbulent century –, the largest military engagements actually occurred in the Caribbean and in Central and North America.
1. The Hispano-Neogranadine War (1829 – 1833)
The year of 1824 is nowadays recognized as the last year of the Spanish rule in South America, owing to the campaign of Huancavelica, in which a combined host of Platinense and Andean patriots defeated a Spanish royalist force protecting Lima, the last stronghold loyal to Spain south of the Panama strait. However useful commemorative dates and remembrance festivities might be, historical developments are seldom defined by a single event or episode, and this applies to the decline of the Spanish Empire in the occident, marked by a long (even if acute) period of institutional corrosion by hyperactive forces of social, political, cultural and economic nature, amalgamated into coherent bodies of insurgence by the revolutionary ideas coming from Europe.
In this context, one must note that by the middle 1820s, the anticolonial conflict had ended to the Andeans, Chileans, Platinenses and Orientales, but it persisted as a daily existential struggle of the Neogranadines, Mexicans, Tejanos, Californios, Cubans and Dominicans, with perhaps a few glimpses of hope in seemingly unending eon of oppression and tyranny from the Crown in Madrid.
To any Neogranadine or Mexican patriot, the struggle would only see its end when the domain of México – now fashioned as a kingdom equal to the metropolis itself, and deserving the bizarre denomination of the Kingdom of the Two Spains – fell to revolution, so that, like a line of dominos, the whole empire, from Cuba to the Phillipines, would finally see the sunset.
*****
Nueva Granada - the country that Francisco de Miranda once believed would be heartlands of “Colombia”, a commonwealth formed from the happy republics of Hispanoamerica -, even after the triumph of Antonio Baraya against Pablo Morillo in the battle of Mérida (1821), that cemented Neogranadine independence, was in fact under a perpetual “siege” by Spanish royalist forces, either those coming from México, such as the column that attacked Panamá in 1826, or those coming seaborne from Cuba, like the troops that torched Maracaibo in 1827, and even ships coming directly from Spain. So far, none of these attempted an entire reconquest of the country, and even the despicable creature that was King Fernando VII of the Two Spains seemed to tacitly accept Neogranadine emancipation by the middle of the 1820s.
A mistake, then.
The Two Spains had but conceded a short truce to the tireless citizens of South American Granada, while King Fernando VII bide his time, accumulating wealth from the overexploited Pacific colonies, taking loans from the banks of London, Amsterdam and Berlin, and employing Prussian officers in the training of recruits, sons of the generation of men who had fought the French during the Iberian War, all while investing in the reconstruction of a legendary armada in the ports of Sevilla, Cádiz and Almería.
In 1829, an expeditionary force of almost 9,000 Spaniards and European mercenaries from Germany and Britain, and as far as Hungary, led by Mariano Ricafort Palacín y Abarca traversed the Atlantic, stopping in La Havana, and disembarked in Veracruz, whereupon they joined a large royalist force led by Agustín Cosme Damián de Iturbide y Arámburu, a rising military prodigy who was conducting campaigns against revolutionaries in Yucatán.
Painting of the Spanish Army disembarking in Veracruz and meeting the Mexican regiments of Agustín de Iturbide (1830)
By late 1829, this large royalist force traversed Central America, and invaded the Neogranadine border territory of Panamá. The expedition was supposed to recapture at least the Atlantic provinces of the former Vicerroyalty of Nueva Granada, giving a strong base from whence the royalists could recolonize the whole of the country, and from there march to Perú.
However, the casualties mounted up before a single shot was fired against the enemy, with hundreds of Europeans perishing to the various tropical diseases that infested that tiny serpent of the Earth linking the Americas like an umbilical cord. The passage of the royalist troops, whose barbarous habits and mistreatments infuriated the already vexed populations of Central America, would be the first spark of a series of revolts in the region in the next few years. To make matters worse for the Spaniards, they had expected to catch the Neogranadines by surprise – having marched from Veracruz to Panamá in barely a week – but, at the moment, Nueva Granada in a state of red alert, due to a tense dispute with the generalissimos of La Plata to determine the hegemony over the nascent [Peruvian] Andean Republic. The Neogranadine heads-of-state were expecting that Peru would soon be the battleground of a war against La Plata, and thus many of its brigades were already on field and ready for the call of duty. Thus, when they heard the news about the Spanish invasion, these forces were quickly diverted to the northwest, and the reserves were rapidly mobilized, so much that in a few months, a whole host had formed under the command of António Baraya and Joaquín Ricaurte to defend Medellín, the gateway to Granada’s heartlands.
The first initial engagements, already in the year of 1830, favored the royalists, but soon the scales balanced in favor of the Neogranadines, whose victories in Antioquía forced the Spaniards to retreat back to Panamá. Nonetheless, the European side had clear advantage in sea, and the multiple amphibious and maritime attacks in the Atlantic Coast forced the increasingly desperate President Baraya to divert much-needed brigades to reinforce Venezuela, where separatist movements were gaining force due to the perceived negligence of the federal government. Indeed, the war might have ended in 1830 if the Neogranadines were fit to pursue the Spanish troops in Central America, where again their ranks were thinned by disease and exhaustion, but a short civil war broke exactly in the same year, pitting the federal centralist government of Santa Fé de Bogotá against rebellions in Orinoco and Carabobo, and a splinter government broke in Guayaquil forming the short-lived “Republic of Guayas”.
While the federal forces of Nueva Granada were dispersed to deal with these revolts, the Spaniards reassembled and launched another campaign in 1831. This time they captured and torched Medellín, and defeated a federal army near the capital, entering Santa Fé de Bogotá in the midst of August, forcing the defeated and humiliated republican government to reallocate further north to Pamplona. The Spanish triumph, preceded by a series of atrocities in the countryside and inside the largest cities, only strengthened the Granadine resolve to resist the recolonization, and the war dragged until 1833 without any other gains for the empire, as the occupation was faced with almost universal hostility and bloody campaigns of guerilla in the mountains.
*****
The Republic of Guayas was definitely crushed by Marshal Simon Bolívar in 1833, and he maneuvered a large force skirting the Spanish-occupied territory to meet his countrymen in the eastern provinces of Cundinamarca, from whence the federal troops retook Santa Fé de Bogotá and routed the invaders in Cutucumayo.
Again, the defending armies did not pursue the enemies as they retreated to Panamá, as President António Baraya needed to commit his forces in Venezuela, a country that took almost two years to completely tame, extinguishing pro-independence partisan groups such as the Brigada de Las Mil Banderas [lit. Thousands’ Flag Brigade] and the provisory splinter government of Cumaná.
In the middle 1833, an armistice was concluded, but the Neogranadines found an even better reason to commemorate: King Fernando VII of the Two Spains had died in the beginning of the year, and the succession of his three year-old daughter Isabella was met with opposition by her uncle, Infante Don Carlos de Molina, sparking a dynastic war that would engulf both Spain and México until the next decade.
2. The Orange Empire
The Dutch ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, ever since the Congress of Vienna (1814) incessantly ranted about the loss of their colonial dominions, mainly South Africa, but now Surinam was included in the claims, because Portugal, of all of the nations, had no rights to these territories that now comprised the Guianas.
The Dutch authorities – that is, the young King Willem II of the Netherlands (who had succeeded his deceased father Willem I in 1828) and the Joint Parliaments in Amsterdam and Brussels – in a single irate voice denounced “Perfidious Albion”, an appellation that became once again popular in the print of Europe and now in the Americas (with the editors in Rio de Janeiro basically translating word by word the criticism of the Dutch newspapers). The haughty United Kingdom had surreptitiously devoured half of the world while Europe fought against Bonaparte’s legions, and the Netherlands, once a proud empire in the likes of the Spains and Portugal, had been reduced to but isolated outposts in Indonesia and the Antilles.
Of course, the defunct United Provinces had been joined with the former Austrian Netherlands as a fitting compensation for the loss of the colonial dominions, but the arrangement left a very sour taste in King Willem II’s metaphoric mouth, even now, because the unquiet Flemish and the Walloons elites proved to be very unruly and prone to rebellions, having recently forced the Crown in Amsterdam to give substantial (constitutional) concessions under threat of civil war. The Dutch monarch, who in his youth had served with the Duke of Wellington's British expeditionaries (then known as “Slender Billy”), proved to be an able conciliator in these tense years of Flemish factionalist insurgences, and appeased the exasperation of the Catholic majorities in the southern provinces, who had many times accused his father of despotism. By the late 1830s, a crisis resulting from a popular revolt in Brugge was peacefully defused with ample concessions to the Flemish and Walloons, and the union between the Dutch peoples was cemented, paving the way for a more stable nationhood.
The inauguration of King Willem II of the (United) Netherlands (c. 1828)
Much like Portugal and Spain, the Netherlands after the loss of their colonial empire would turn their attention to other conquests in the middle and late 19th Century. Still yearning for a strategic position in the Dark Continent to safeguard the passage to the Indian Ocean, the Dutch monarchy decided to invest in an expedition to reclaim an ancient fort in the Maputo bay, near the Portuguese colony of Moçambique. This would, in the next few decades, allow them to intervene in the endemic wars among the Malagasy kingdoms of Madagascar, and eventually colonize the island together with France.
For the time being, the Dutch government employed their energies in exploiting the increasingly unprofitable productions in the Antilles – considering that sugar had lost its place as the world’s most valuable commodity –, and initiated diplomatic overtures with the American republics, realizing the value of having allies in the New World to contain the ambitions of the Iberian empires.
*****
1835 and 1836 were fated to be particularly tense years in the Caribbean even if the chaotic Carlist War had not happened (1833–1841). While both the Neogranadines and Hispano-Mexicans died in hundreds from muskets and mosquitoes in Nicaragua, disputing the strait stretch of the Earth separating the Atlantic from the Pacific, the Netherlands and Portugal were driven to the brink of war.
Likening the episode to the naval conflict between the United States of America and France of 1798-1800, modern historians denominated the escalating acts of privateering and naval raids of 1835 as “the Caribbean Quasi-War”, with Dutch and Flemish warships assaulting Portuguese forts in the Guianas, and Portuguese vessels raiding the Dutch Gold Coast in Africa – the sole reason why the conflict would became popularly known in vulgar memory as the “Guiana vs. Guinea War” (a rather catchy, even if senseless, name for a war in a period notable for its wars).
Despite the fact that the privateers were sponsored by the respective governments of Amsterdam and Lisboa, there was no official declaration of war, and, indeed, no clear goals, as neither belligerent tried to conquer any enemy territory. The Portuguese were too weak and broken to sustain a serious war effort – for this reason, the previous “war” against Brazil could have never been a full-scale recolonization – while the Dutch, also weakened by the Napoleonic Wars, were cautious to avoid British retaliation, as it became clear that the capitalists in London were interesting in being friends with benefits towards Portugal. In fact, the main Dutch agent in the Caribbean was yet another British expatriate, Henry Chester Sears, later knighted by King Willem II of Netherlands.
The hostility between the Netherlands and Portugal and Spain fostered a friendship with both Nueva Granada and Brazil. Dutch embassies were created in Bogotá in 1835 and in Rio de Janeiro a year later. Despite the Brazilian good disposition towards Amsterdam, the Dutch monarchy became much closer affiliated with the interests of the Neogranadine federation, especially as the Netherlands and Spain developed an urgent and unnerved colonial race in far Asia (Indonesia and Phillipines) throughout the remainder of the 19th Century – mostly remembered as "the Pacific Game". In this regard, the alliance between the Confederation of Nueva Granada and the Netherlands would last until the next century.
________________________________
Notes and Comments: Antonio Baraya is an historical leader of *Gran Colombia, a precursor to the Colombian nation much like Francisco de Miranda, but he was captured and executed by the royalist forces of Pablo Morillo y Morillo (also an historical character) in 1816, paving the way for Simon Bolívar to become the main leader of the Colombian/Venezuelan independence. In this alt-scenario, Antonio Baraya survives and becomes the first President, while Bolivar, still a war-hero, remains as a secondary political and military figure in the Neogranadine independence.
About the Netherlands, I've never really accepted how, after the Napoleonic Wars, they simply lost the relevance in global geopolitics they had until the 18th Century. ITTL, due to much better relations between the Kingdom of the Netherlands and France, flourishing as a result of a mutual fear of Prussia (remember that Prussia ITTL is already poised to form Germany proper, having defeated Austria in the War of Saxony, usurped the hegemony in the German Confederation, and still allied with Russia)
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