1815-12-00: (Pétion Welcomes Simón Bolívar to Port-au-Prince, Provides Him With Guns and Gunpowder on the Condition That He Abolish Slavery, the Haitian Cont…

1815-12-00: (Pétion Welcomes Simón Bolívar to Port-au-Prince, Provides Him With Guns and Gunpowder on the Condition That He Abolish Slavery, the Haitian Contribution to South American Independence That Latin American Historiography Has Systematically Minimized): In December 1815, Simón Bolívar arrived in Port-au-Prince after being denied aid in British Jamaica. His South American independence movement was in ruins, his armies scattered, his cause nearly extinguished. Pétion welcomed him as a fellow liberator and made a deal that would reshape the Western Hemisphere: four thousand guns and fifteen thousand pounds of gunpowder in exchange for Bolívar’s promise to abolish slavery in any territory he liberated. Bolívar accepted. He returned to Venezuela in 1816 with his Haitian arsenal and a small number of Haitian volunteers, proclaimed Venezuelan independence, and freed the enslaved. The arms that made South American liberation possible came from a Black republic that most Latin American nations would refuse to recognize diplomatically for decades. Colombia refused to sign a treaty with Haiti in 1825, and no Latin American nation sent an official diplomatic representative to Haiti until 1865. The debt was material, specific, and documented. The erasure was just as deliberate.