1828: Jose Padilla executed

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No, no, not that one. Or that one.

This date saw the 1828 execution by firing squad of Bolivarian independence hero Jose Prudencio Padilla, founder of the Colombian navy.

Padilla’s father was a shipwright, and Padilla took to the sea from his youth in the service of what was then the Spanish colonial domain of New Granada. At the age of 19, he fought Lord Nelson in the Battle of Trafalgar.

This service to the Spanish crown did not loyalty make, and in 1815 Padilla fell in with revolutionary Simon Bolivar.

The mariner’s triumph in the Battle of Lake Maracaibo, completed the Venezuelan War of Independence. (Venezuela and Colombia, along with Ecuador and Panama, were all part of Gran Colombia at this time.)

Like everyone else, however, Padilla made history but not in circumstances of his own choosing.

Independent Gran Colombia was immediately riven with internal political conflict, resolving (to oversimplify) to Bolivar as the increasingly autocratic president, as against his more liberal vice president Santander — a conflict also bound up in sectional and racial divisions that would soon break apart Bolivar’s state.

In 1828, those factions were at daggers drawn over the future shape of Gran Colombia.

Padilla, a multiracial pardo, “had taken the Liberator’s professions of racial equality to an ideological point of no return: neither birth nor skin color should carry any privilege or social status. Instinctively, Bolivar sympathized … but he knew only too well that to acquiesce to the demands of such movements would further alarm a fearful white Creole society.” (Lester Langley, Simón Bolívar: Venezuelan rebel, American revolutionary)

That put Padilla into Santander’s camp — and, like Santander, he would be inculpated for complicity in the plot against Bolivar’s life that struck (unsuccessfully) on September 25, 1828.

Neither Padilla nor Santander was linked to the conspiracy by any direct evidence. But that was only enough to save one of them. As Langley notes,

Under the retributive justice of General Urdaneta, fourteen people of varying degrees of guilt were condemned and executed. One, the pardo Padillo, bore no responsibility for the assault on the Liberator’s life but received a death sentence. Santander, who may have approved but against whom there was no compelling evidence of culpability, was sentenced to death as well, but he escaped execution when Bolivar pardoned him. In yet another instance during his career, Bolivar had drawn a color line. He spared the white Creole but not the pardo.

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