Note 23 — Chapter X · THE ATHENS OF SOUTH AMERICA

Elsewhere in his work, Holstein claims to “prove that Bolivar, the Republic of Colombia and its chieftains, are indebted to strangers and their powerful support for their existence, if not as a free, at least as an independent people.” There were, according to some estimates, fully ten thousand European soldiers in the republican army, and among the officers were Englishmen, Germans, Irishmen, Poles and Frenchmen. It was, according to Holstein, the Irish legion that gained the great battle of Carabobo, which secured the independence of Venezuela.23 It was the British legion, declares the same writer, that won the decisive victory of Boyacá, which broke the power of the Spaniards in New Granada. Sucre, the victorious general in the battle of Pichincha, which liberated Ecuador, was also the victor in the battles of Junin and Ayacucho—the Waterloo of colonial rule in South America—which gave freedom to Peru. Bolivar had the honor of gaining both victories, although he was ill during the battle of Ayacucho, and a hundred miles from the field of action during the struggle on the plateau of Junin.