Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"'The Liberator' was a wealthy Venezuelan Creole aristocrat of Spanish descent, who was educated abroad and returned to South American in his twenties in 1807 to launch a crusade against Spanish rule. He made himself dictator of Venezuela, but was driven out and fled to the Caribbean. He returned in 1819 with an army to inflict defeat on the Spaniards and loyalists in Columbia. He appointed himself dictator of his new republic Great Columbia, which was a federation including Columbia, Venezuela, and Ecuador (the fact that Venezuela and Ecuador we're still under Spanish rule was considered a technicality). . . . He and Sucre went on to secure the independence of both Peru and Bolivia." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "Bolívar, who helped create five nations, was the single greatest general of independence. Bolívar was from Caracas, the son of a plantation-owning family who gave him a privileged education--including a European walking tour with his brilliant tutor, Simón Rodríguez, a man afire with new ideas. But white, upper-class generals like Bolívar could not win independence without the support of Latin America’s nonwhite majority." [Born in Blood & Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, 4th Ed., p. 94]