section_path: Death and burial
section_name: Death and burial
paragraph_text: Death and burial
  
  Determined to go into exile, Bolívar, who had given away or lost his fortune over his career, sold most of his remaining possessions and departed from Bogotá on 8 May 1830. He traveled down the Magdalena to Cartagena, where he arrived by the end of June to wait for a ship to take him to England. On 1 July, Bolívar was informed that Sucre had been assassinated near Pasto while en route to Quito, and wrote to Flores to ask him to avenge Sucre. In September, Urdaneta installed a conservative government in Bogotá and asked Bolívar to return, but he refused. With his health deteriorating and no ship forthcoming, Bolívar was moved by his staff to Barranquilla in October and then, at the invitation of a Spanish landowner in the area, to the Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino near Santa Marta. There, on 17 December 1830, at the age of 47, Bolívar died of tuberculosis.
  
  Bolívar's body, dressed in a borrowed shirt, was interred in the Cathedral Basilica of Santa Marta on 20 December 1830. In 1842, Páez secured the repatriation of Bolívar's remains, which were paraded through Caracas and then laid to rest in its cathedral in December together with his wife and parents; Bolívar's heart remained in Santa Marta. His remains were moved again in October 1876 into the National Pantheon of Venezuela in Caracas, created that year by President Antonio Guzmán Blanco.
  
  Bolívar's death has been the subject of conspiracy theories advanced by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. In January 2008, President Hugo Chávez set up a commission to investigate his claim that Bolívar had been poisoned by "New Granada traitors." The commission exhumed Bolívar's remains on 16 July 2010. The results, made public on 26 July 2011, were inconclusive; Vice President of Venezuela Elías Jaua announced that the commission could not prove Chávez's claim. Chávez continued to claim that Bolívar had been assassinated via arsenic poisoning, citing a paper by infectious disease specialist Paul Auwaerter. Following Chávez's remarks, Auwaerter stated that the arsenic likely came from medicines Bolívar had ingested to treat his illnesses.