Doña Manuela Sáenz de Vergara y Aizpuru was an Ecuadorian revolutionary who supported the cause by collecting information, distributing leaflets, and protesting for women’s rights, and received the Order of the Sun (“Caballeresa del Sol” or ‘Dame of the Sun’) for her work.
Manuela was born in Quito, the illegitimate child of Ecuadorian Maria Joaquina Aizpuru fand the married Spanish nobleman Simón Sáenz de Vergara y Yedra (or Sáenz y Verega). Maria’s family abandoned the mother and child and young Manuelita was sent to school at the Convent of Santa Catalina where she learned to read and write. She had to leave the convent at age 17, when she was discovered to have been seduced by Army Officer Fausto D’Elhuyar.
Sáenz lived with her father for several years, until 1817 when he arranged for her marriage to a wealthy English merchant twice her age, James Thorne. The couple moved to Lima, Peru, in 1819. There, she lived as an aristocrat and hosted social gatherings in her home where guests included political leaders and military officers. These guests shared military secrets about the ongoing revolution, and when Simón Bolívar took part in the successful liberation of New Granada in 1819, Sáenz was radicalized and played an active role in the conspiracy against the viceroy of Perú in 1820.
In 1822, Sáenz left her husband and traveled to Quito, where she met Simón Bolívar and eventually became romantically involved with him, exchanging love letters, and visiting him while he moved from one country to another. Bolivar referred to her as la amable loca, the dear madwoman.
Sáenz supported the revolutionary cause by collecting information, distributing leaflets, and protesting for women’s rights. As one of the most prominent female figures of the wars for independence, Manuela received the Order of the Sun (“Caballeresa del Sol” or ‘Dame of the Sun’). In public she often wore a colonel’s uniform. In 1825 and 1826, she lived with Bolívar near Lima, but as the war continued, Bolívar was forced to leave, and Sáenz later followed him to Bogotá.
On 25 September 1828, mutinous officers tried to assassinate Bolívar. Woken by the sound of fighting, Bolivar wanted to investigate but Sáenz persuaded him to leave through a window, while she confronted the intruders. She convinced them that Bolivar was somewhere in the building and proceeded to lead them to different rooms, pretending to lose her way and even stopping to attend one of the wounded. Eventually the would-be assassins lost patience and beat her before departing. Bolivar to later called her “Libertadora del Libertador” (liberator of the liberator).
Bolívar left Bogotá in 1830 and died in Santa Marta from tuberculosis. He had made no provision for Sáenz. Francisco de Paula Santander, who returned to power after Bolívar’s death, exiled Sáenz. She went to Jamaica and remained politically active until the mid-1840s before becoming disillusioned.
When she tried to return to Ecuador in 1835, President Vicente Rocafuerte revoked her passport. She went to live in the small coastal town of Paita in northern Peru. She became a destitute outcast, and for the next 25 years, Sáenz sold tobacco and translated letters for North American whale hunters who wrote to their lovers in Latin America.
In 1847, her estranged husband was murdered and she was denied her 8,000 pesos inheritance. Disabled after the stairs in her home collapsed, Sáenz died in Paita, on 23 November 1856, during a diphtheria epidemic. Her body was buried in a communal, mass grave and her belongings were burned.
On his deathbed, Bolívar had asked his aide-de-camp, General Daniel F. O’Leary to burn the remaining, extensive archive of his writings, letters, and speeches. O’Leary disobeyed the order and his writings survived, providing historians with a vast wealth of information about Bolívar’s liberal philosophy and thought, as well as details of his personal life, including his relationship with Sáenz. Shortly before her own death, Sáenz added to this collection by giving O’Leary her own letters from Bolívar.
On 5 July 2010, Sáenz was given a full state burial in Venezuela. Because she had been buried in a mass grave, no official remains existed; instead, “symbolic remains”, composed of some soil from the mass grave into which she was buried during the epidemic, were transported through Peru, Ecuador and Colombia to Venezuela. This was laid in the National Pantheon of Venezuela where the remains of Bolívar are also memorialized.
After the revolution, Sáenz effectively faded from literature. Between 1860 and 1940 only three Ecuadorian writers mentioned her and her participation within the revolution, and largely portrayed her as either exclusively the lover of Simón Bolívar or as incapable and wrongfully participating within the political sphere. These portrayals also assured her femininity as a mainstay of her characterization. However, there was significant shift in how she was viewed and characterized in the 1940s. Literature like Papeles De Manuela Saenz (1945), a compilation of documents around the life of Bolívar, effectively disproved popular stereotypes about Sáenz. Ideas about her being sexually deviant, hyper feminine and incapable were replaced by more favorable portrayals as the 20th century progressed. Shifts in her portrayals were consistent with ideological changes within Latin America, like the increase of feminism of the 1980s and nationalism of the 1960s – 1970s. Portrayals within the novel The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez and Alfonso Rumazo’s nonfictional Manuela Saenz La Libertadora del Libertador added to her humanization within popular culture and helped politicize her image. Sáenz became increasingly popular with radical Latin American feminist groups and her image was commonly used as a rallying point for Indo-Latina causes of the 1980s. The image of Sáenz riding horseback in men’s clothing, popularized by her portrayal in The General in His Labyrinth, was re-enacted by female demonstrators in Ecuador in 1998.
On 25 May 2007 the Ecuadorian government symbolically granted Sáenz the rank of General.
The Museo Manuela Sáenz is a museum in Old Town, Quito, that contains personal effects from both Sáenz and Bolívar to “[safeguard] the memories of Manuela Saenz, Quito’s illustrious daughter”.