Episode Details

Simon Bolivar liberated six South American nations from Spanish rule — Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Panama — and is the only person in history to have a country named after him. He dreamed of a united South America modeled on the United States. Instead, the nations he freed immediately fractured into civil wars, his political allies turned on him, and he died in exile at forty-seven, bitter and convinced his life's work had been wasted.

This episode traces Bolivar from his Venezuelan aristocratic childhood through the independence campaigns, the dream of Gran Colombia, and the exile death of a liberator whose own creation rejected him.

• Bolivar's wealthy Caracas childhood and the European education that exposed him to Enlightenment ideals
• The independence wars — crossing the Andes, defeating Spanish armies, and liberating nation after nation
• The Gran Colombia experiment and the political fractures that destroyed his vision of continental unity
• The exile, the tuberculosis, and his deathbed declaration that "all who served the revolution have plowed the sea"