Thinkers Timeline

Simón Bolívar was a military leader and political thinker who led much of South America to independence from Spain. In Latin America he is known as 'El Libertador', the Liberator. He was born on 24 July 1783 in Caracas, in what is now Venezuela. His family was part of the wealthy Creole class: people of Spanish descent born in the Americas. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by uncles and a close teacher, Simón Rodríguez, who shaped his ideas deeply. As a young man, Bolívar travelled in Europe. He saw Napoleon crowned emperor in Paris in 1804. He watched the French Revolution's promises turn into Napoleon's empire. He also read widely: Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and other Enlightenment thinkers. These experiences shaped his sense of what politics could and could not achieve. Bolívar returned to South America determined to free it from Spanish rule. Between 1810 and 1825, he led long military campaigns across huge distances. He crossed the Andes mountains with his army in conditions that killed many of his soldiers. He won key battles at Boyacá (1819), Carabobo (1821), and Ayacucho (1824, commanded by his general Sucre). By the end of these wars, Spain had lost its mainland American colonies. Six modern countries were born from this struggle: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia (named after him), and Panama. Bolívar hoped to unite these new nations into one great republic. He called it Gran Colombia. But the project failed. Regional rivalries, personal ambitions, and the size of the territory tore it apart. Bolívar died of tuberculosis on 17 December 1830, aged 47, on his way into exile. He died disappointed, saying famously that he had 'ploughed the sea'.

Moisés Naím is a writer, political analyst, and journalist. He was born in 1952 in Tripoli, in Libya, into a Jewish family that later moved to Venezuela. He grew up in Venezuela and is Venezuelan. He trained first as an economist, earning a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. Naím has had several careers. In Venezuela, he taught at a business school and served in government. He was the country's Minister of Trade and Industry and a director of its central bank. He also worked as an executive director at the World Bank. He then became a journalist and editor. For fourteen years he was editor-in-chief of the magazine 'Foreign Policy', which he turned into a modern, award-winning publication. He is now a widely read newspaper columnist, with columns published across many countries. Naím is best known for his books about power and politics in the modern world. His most famous are 'Illicit', about global crime, 'The End of Power', and 'The Revenge of Power', about modern strongman leaders. It is important to be clear about what kind of thinker Naím is. He is not a university researcher writing for other scholars. He is a public analyst and journalist. He once said he is a columnist before an analyst.