Miranda was captured and ended his days in a Spanish prison, but Bolívar escaped into New Granada and soon had full sway in the revolutionary councils of the northern provinces. In 1813 he founded at Bogotá an active revolutionary _junta_ and a military organization. With the latter he struck the Royalists at Cucutá, just within the eastern border of Colombia, and passed over the mountains to Caracas, proclaiming war to the death. Here his rôle of Dictator began. His career, however, was punctuated by many disasters before the decisive battle of Boyacá placed Bogotá permanently in his hands and gave assurance of eventual success. But from this triumph Bolívar hurried to the revolutionary congress he had some time before called at Angostura and procured the enactment of a law providing for the union of Venezuela and New Granada, to form the Republic of Colombia, and was elected President; and by the end of the year 1821 all of this territory, except Panama and Puerto Cabello, near La Guayra, had been freed from the control of Spain. The famous battle of Pichincha, won on the 24th of May, 1822, by Bolívar’s great lieutenant, Antonio José de Sucre, gave Ecuador also to the northern federation; later it was formally incorporated into the new Colombian Republic. Still for two years the final clash between the Royalists and the patriots was deferred, during which time the confusion of sectional interests and negotiations by the now desperate mother country threatened to undo the great work of the liberators. But once more Bolívar triumphed. By the withdrawal in his favor of San Martín, harmony was restored; with his victory at Junín on the 6th of August, 1824, and the decisive battle on the plain of Ayacucho, midway between Lima and Cuzco, on the 9th of December, the war came to an end. In that brilliantly fought battle the patriot army, again under Sucre, defeated a largely superior force commanded by the Viceroy in person in less than eighty minutes. The Viceroy wounded and a prisoner, and his men having deserted by hundreds, his second in command sued for terms, and that afternoon fourteen generals, five hundred and sixty-eight officers of other grades, and three thousand two hundred privates became prisoners of war. [Illustration: STATUE OF BOLÍVAR, LIMA.]