Anita Arnon

And it feels a lot like what the Spanish did before him.

So people think, you know, what did we fight for?

What did we spend for?

What did we bleed for?

And Bolivar, after Santander is gone, and it's kind of this breaking mechanism on the things that he does, it becomes increasingly intolerant of opposition.

So you find that he starts chucking his political enemies in prison and press freedoms are curtailed.

It is not a good look for the liberator.

We'll leave it there and we'll pick up on how the autocrat manages in the next few years and how well this federation holds together.

Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon.

Hello and welcome to Empire for the second part of our series on Simon Bolivar.

Now, if you want to hear all the episodes, you don't want to wait.

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But let me just remind you all and Willie where we left off in the last episode.

Bolivar, this young man aged 22, he'd experienced a lot of personal tragedy.

We talked about that in the last episode.

We found him on top of the sacred mound, Monte Sacro Hill in Rome, vowing to remove the Spanish colonial power from his homeland.

We described the huge vastness of the Spanish Empire and how it was managed and a key part of how the Latin American colonies were kept under Spanish control.

Just to recap a little bit.

You had a local Creole elite that were doing all the work of senior civil servants.