Bolívar’s Botched Bequest

Bolívar: American Liberator BY MARIE ARANA. Simon & Schuster, 2013, 544 pp. $35.00.

When he died of tuberculosis in 1830, the Venezuelan revolutionary Simón Bolívar -- a military leader and politician who guided Latin America to independence from colonial Spain and who is known throughout Latin America as El Libertador -- was buried in the Cathedral of Santa Marta, in what is now Colombia. But Bolívar has enjoyed little rest since then: the Liberator's bones have been dug up several times, ultimately finding their way to present-day Venezuela. The most recent exhumation was carried out in 2010, at the behest of Venezuela's