The Repository Códice

Bolivar Questioned Monteagudo's Killer Alone and Kept No Record

September 26, 2026 · Runtime 11:12 · Watch on YouTube

On the night of 28 January 1825 Bernardo Monteagudo was stabbed to death in a Lima street, and the knife was left in the wound. Forty-eight hours later both killers had confessed. The case file survives - 28 folios, ending with the sentence in print. What is missing from it is one conversation.

Transcript

The knife left in the wound 0:00

On the night of the twenty-eighth of January, eighteen twenty-five, a man was stabbed to death in a street in Lima. The case file survives. Twenty-eight folios, ending with the sentence in print. It names the two men who held the knife, and both had confessed within forty-eight hours. It does not name whoever paid for it. And the answer that gets repeated today is not in the file at all.

One conversation 0:27

The dead man was Bernardo Monteagudo, and the case against his killers was solved in two days. What was never solved is one conversation. The condemned man said he would tell the truth to a single person, alone. That person was Simon Bolivar, and Bolivar agreed. No clerk went in with them.

Who Monteagudo was 0:49

Monteagudo was a lawyer from Tucuman who had written for three revolutions. He was San Martin's minister in Peru, and he ran the new state hard: expulsions, confiscations, a political police. In eighteen twenty-two the city of Lima forced him out and shipped him into exile. Bolivar brought him back, and by January eighteen twenty-five he was in Lima again, close to the Liberator, and widely hated.

28 January 1825 1:18

He was walking alone, after dark, in a narrow passage near the church of San Juan de Dios. It was between half past seven and eight in the evening. He was struck once, in the chest, above the left nipple. The surgeon who examined the body wrote that the blade reached the heart. The weapon was still in the wound when they found him.

A blade that had just been sharpened 1:41

The first arrests were not suspects in any real sense: the crime happened in front of a pharmacy, so they jailed the pharmacist. Eight days later he was released, having proved, in Palma's phrase, that he was blind and deaf. What broke the case was the knife itself. Bolivar noticed that it was new, and that it had just been sharpened. A sharpened blade is a transaction, and a transaction has another side.

Forty-three barbers 2:09

In Lima in eighteen twenty-five, the men who sharpened blades were barbers. The government summoned all forty-three barbers in the city. One of them, Jenaro Rivera, recognised the knife. He said a young man had paid him one real to sharpen it two days before the murder, at his shop in the street of the silversmiths. He did not know the name. He said he would know the face.

The proclamation 2:36

The next step is the part of this story that usually gets skipped. The barber had described his customer as a black man of about twenty. So the government published a proclamation. Every man of colour in Lima was ordered into the courtyard of the palace at noon on the thirtieth, under severe penalty. The investigation praised for its speed was a dragnet by colour, and it worked because a city could be made to line up that way.

Espinoza and Moreira 3:04

That morning the barber pointed at Candelario Espinoza, nineteen years old, who had been a soldier. Hours later the police took Ramon Moreira, twenty-two, born in Lima, enslaved. Moreira was the cook of a gentleman named Francisco Moreyra y Matute. Hold that name: it comes back at the end, and it is the reason the file can be read today.

That one has a watch 3:28

Moreira talked first, and his version was small. He said Espinoza had recruited him for a robbery. They saw a well dressed man near San Juan de Dios, and Espinoza said: that one has a watch, let us take it from him. Afterwards, running, Espinoza told him he had left the knife inside the man. Moreira said he learned only from public rumour that the dead man was Colonel Monteagudo.

Nobody paid me 3:56

Espinoza denied everything, and then confessed. He said he had killed a gentleman without knowing who he was, in order to rob him. He said nobody had instigated him and nobody had offered him anything. The judge pressed him hard, and he did not move.

Only to the Liberator 4:14

Bolivar then sent someone who was not a judge. Colonel Espinar, who had once been his secretary, got further in one visit than the court had in weeks. Espinoza agreed to reveal what he knew. He set one condition: he would say it to the Liberator in person.

No consta del proceso 4:33

Here the record stops, and the line that says so is four words long. No consta del proceso. It is not in the file. Everything you are about to hear about that meeting comes from outside the record. This episode is going to keep saying so, because the difference is the whole point.

The room, as Espinar told it 4:54

The source is Espinar, who was in the room, and who told it to Ricardo Palma in eighteen fifty-six: thirty-one years later, spoken, to a writer. By his account Espinoza was carried in at eleven, in handcuffs and leg irons, on the shoulders of soldiers. He had eaten nothing since his arrest and had been tortured in prison, so Bolivar ordered him a cup of wine. Unanue, Pando and General Heres were present. Then Bolivar shut the door on all of them.

The identical dagger 5:26

Bolivar gave the man his word that he would save his life, and the man talked. One thing leaked out of that room, and only one. A Guayaquil man named Jose Perez, doorkeeper of the city council, owned a knife identical to the murder weapon. That one was meant for Bolivar.

Three thousand pesos 5:46

After the interview Espinoza made a new declaration, and this one is in the file. He accused three men of hiring him for three thousand pesos. Francisco Moreyra y Matute, Francisco Colmenares, and Jose Perez. Moreyra y Matute was the owner of his accomplice. He had also been a founder, alongside Monteagudo, of the patriotic society of Lima.

Vidaurre reads the file 6:13

The president of the supreme court read the case and did not believe the new accusation. Manuel Lorenzo Vidaurre wrote that in his judgement this black man is hiding a great secret. And that none of the three he accuses has any part in the murder. Two sentences, written by the one man who had the papers in his hand.

A judge excuses himself 6:34

The court that was supposed to decide never did. One judge, Mariano Alvarez, excused himself with a reason he put in writing. To do the job properly, he said, he would have to begin by jailing a minister of State. Everyone understood whom he meant. On the twenty-sixth of March the minister Unanue created a different tribunal to hear the case.

Absolved 6:59

The three accused men spent more than a year in prison. Palma's words are that the file overflowed with proofs of their innocence. They were absolved. The one accusation the record does contain was examined, and rejected.

Death, and a promise 7:15

Every tribunal that touched the case agreed: death for Espinoza, ten years for Moreira. Bolivar was in the south by then, and he did not let it go. From La Paz in September, and from Oruro three weeks later, he reminded them of his promise to spare the man's life. The courts would not move.

4 March 1826 7:36

So on the fourth of March, eighteen twenty-six, Bolivar changed the sentence himself. Using the extraordinary powers with which I find myself invested, the decree begins. The death sentence became ten years in the prison of Chagres and perpetual banishment, and Moreira's ten years became six. In his whole public life in Peru, this is the only decree in which Bolivar used his dictatorial power. He used it to keep a promise made behind a closed door, with no clerk.

Where the answer came from 8:09

So where does the famous answer come from? The name everybody repeats is Jose Faustino Sanchez Carrion, Bolivar's minister and Monteagudo's enemy. That name is not in the sentence and it is not in the verdict. It enters print in eighteen fifty-one, in a short history of Peru written for schoolchildren. It becomes an argument in eighteen seventy-seven, when Palma published the essay these pages come from. The quarrel that followed ran across the continent for years.

The minister 8:41

The minister is a weaker suspect than the story needs him to be. Sanchez Carrion resigned four weeks after the murder and withdrew to a farm at Lurin, ill. He died there on the second of June, eighteen twenty-five. Poison was rumoured at once, and the autopsy found a ruptured aneurysm in the liver. A rumour is not a document, and this channel is not going to treat it as one.

Two processes 9:07

There is one more claim, and it is the most serious. In eighteen seventy-nine, in a Buenos Aires newspaper, Manuel Bilbao wrote that the process everyone had read was the second one. He said the first was led by a prosecutor named Zeballos, who was removed so the investigation would not go forward. He said that first file was made to disappear from the archive through the influence of a minister. Palma added a note: part of it had turned up, and in eighteen eighty-three it sat among the manuscripts of the library of Lima.

What survives 9:41

That library was stripped by an occupying army in eighteen eighty-one, and burned in nineteen forty-three. Forty thousand manuscripts were reported lost in the fire. Whether the first process was among them, I do not know. What I can tell you is where the surviving file is. Twenty-eight folios, in the national archive of Peru, catalogued inside the private papers of Francisco Moreyra y Matute. The record of the murder was kept by one of the men accused of paying for it, and acquitted.

What I could not show you 10:15

This channel is built on showing you the document, so it owes you an admission: I could not put those folios on screen. They were digitised and published by a bicentenary project, and that library does not answer today. What I can show is the catalogue entry, which is how I know what the file holds. An archive is not safe because it survived once. It is safe when more than one copy of it exists.

Five hundred signatures 10:42

One last thing about the minister everyone accuses. Three years before the murder, on the twenty-fifth of July, eighteen twenty-two, a petition reached the city council of Lima. It demanded that Monteagudo be removed from the government, and it carried more than five hundred signatures. One of them was Sanchez Carrion's. Next episode: the petition that threw out a minister, and the five days in which a city did it.

Description and sources

Monteagudo had been San Martin's minister in Peru, expelled by the city of Lima in 1822 and brought back by Bolivar. The investigation was fast and, in its own terms, exemplary: Bolivar noticed that the dagger left in the body was newly sharpened, the government summoned all forty-three barbers in the city, one of them recognised the blade, and a proclamation ordered every man of colour in Lima into the courtyard of the palace. Candelario Espinoza, nineteen, and Ramon Moreira, twenty-two and enslaved, were arrested within hours of each other. Both confessed to a robbery that went wrong.

Then Espinoza said he would tell the truth to one person only, in private, and that person was Simon Bolivar. The interview happened. Ricardo Palma, printing the story in 1877, marks the gap with four words: no consta del proceso - it is not in the file. Everything known about that room comes from Colonel Espinar, who was there and who told Palma about it in 1856, thirty-one years later.

What followed is in the record. Espinoza made a new declaration accusing three men of paying him three thousand pesos, including Francisco Moreyra y Matute, the owner of his accomplice. All three spent more than a year in prison and were absolved; the president of the supreme court, Manuel Lorenzo Vidaurre, had written that the man was hiding a great secret and that none of the three he accused had any part in the murder. Every tribunal condemned Espinoza to death. On 4 March 1826, Bolivar commuted the sentence to ten years at Chagres - the only decree of his whole public life in Peru in which he used his dictatorial power, and he used it to keep a promise made behind a closed door.

The answer repeated today, that the minister Jose Faustino Sanchez Carrion paid for the killing, is in none of that. It enters print in 1851, in a school history of Peru, and becomes an argument in 1877. The file itself survives in the national archive of Peru, catalogued inside the private papers of one of the three men who were accused and acquitted.

PRINT-READY, FROM THIS CHANNEL

The Document Set, Vol. 01 — Cajamarca 1532 and Buenos Aires 1595-1680 — the documents at reading size, with author, date, archive and licence

https://therepository.gumroad.com/l/document-set

SOURCES — every image in this video is a public-domain document.

Each plate below is listed with its author, date, holding archive and licence.

Vista de la ciudad de Lima, Plaza de los Toros | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
V.S. Noroña — 1876 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Antonio M. Dupard — 1859 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
José Gil de Castro — 1825 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Mariano Pelliza | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Plano de Lima | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — between circa 1850 and circa 1860 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — 1830 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — 1830 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — 1830 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Ricardo Palma — 1906 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — 1830 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Manuel A. Fuentes — 1858 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — 1830 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — 1830 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — 1830 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — 1830 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Ricardo Palma — 1906 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
Pancho Fierro — 1830 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
José Gil de Castro — circa 1825 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
Ricardo Palma — 1906 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
Ricardo Palma — 1906 | Internet Archive (Google Books scan) | Public domain
Manuel Moral y Vega — 1910 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

... and 8 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.