When García Márquez wrote The General in His Labyrinth, he surprised most readers because of his audacity to use as his main protagonist Simón Bolívar, the supreme commander of forces who freed Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia from Spanish Imperial rule. However, García Márquez did not depict Bolívar as the mighty and heroic soldier but as a defeated politician. A discussion on Bolívar, as a myth and a man, is in order to fully understand the main protagonist of García Márquez's novel. But the main focus of the novel is on the final phase of Bolívar's life, when he resigned from the presidency and sailed through the Magdalena River for European exile.