Would you say that bolivar was a success or a failure? explain.

It depends. He was a great military leader, but he left behind a disastrous ideology.

Explanation:

Bolivar was an officer of the revolutionary army and participated in several battles of liberation against the Spaniards.  In the Battle of Boyacá, which occurred in 1819, he liberated Colombia from Spanish rule. And in the Battle of Carabobo (1821) Bolivar liberated Venezuela.  The following year, and with the aid of Antonio Jose de Sucre (1795-1830), one of his army officers, liberated Ecuador in the Battle of Pichincha.

He believed in the unification of the whole South America in a single great country. He also believed that South America, unlike the United States of America, needed a tighter control. Specially if it was to become a single huge nation. He attributed the fails of early south american governments to the fact that they were trying "to copy ethereal republics". In that he was, obviously, a fail.

Bolivarianism is the ideology that characterized the government of Hugo Chávez. It is an ideological cocktail of imprecise contours, which represents a very particular reading of what was already called by the Venezuelan historian Germán Carreras Damas of cult to Bolivar.

he sent troops to protect the students as they entered the school.