Petion's Price: Haiti Arms the Venezuelan Campaign
In 1816 a defeated Bolivar sailed to Haiti and left with ships, guns, money and a condition: abolish slavery. Camila examines what Haiti gave, what was promised, and what was delivered.
La Pola and the Spy Network of Bogota
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Show notes
The seamstress who ran the network
Policarpa Salavarrieta came to Bogota in 1817 as a seamstress and used her access to royalist households to gather intelligence for the patriot guerrillas. She was caught, tried and shot in November 1817. This episode reconstructs how the network worked and who else was in it.
- Bogota under the royalist reconquest of 1816
- Sewing as cover: the households she worked in and what she heard
- The couriers, the Almeyda brothers and the route to the llanos
- Her trial, her refusal to name names and the words reported from the scaffold
- How La Pola became a banknote and what that erased
Sources include the trial record, held in the Archivo General de la Nacion.
Transcript
Hello, I am Camila Restrepo and this is Sword, Pen and Cordillera, a history of Latin American independence that goes beyond the men on horseback in the public squares. We begin in my own city. In 1816 Bogota was back under Spanish control after a brutal reconquest, and the patriot cause survived mostly in the plains to the east and in a quiet network of informants inside the city. One of them was a seamstress in her early twenties called Policarpa Salavarrieta. She sewed in royalist households and listened. For about a year the information she passed out reached the guerrillas in the llanos. Then she was caught. We follow the network, the couriers, the trial where she refused to name anyone, and the morning in November 1817 when she was shot. Then we ask what the banknote with her face leaves out. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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