Venezuela, New Granada, and Paraguay Declare Independence
Venezuela declared independence from Spain on 5 July 1811, the first Spanish American colony to do so outright rather than governing in the king's name. The distinction mattered. Juntas had formed across the Americas after Napoleon deposed Ferdinand VII in 1808, and almost all claimed to hold power for the captive king. The Caracas junta of April 1810 did the same, and then went further. Francisco de Miranda returned from thirty years in exile — he had fought in the American revolution, served as a general in the French revolutionary army, and spent decades lobbying London for Spanish American independence — and with the young Simón Bolívar pushed the congress to a full declaration. The first republic lasted a year. It was fragile from the start: the declaration alienated royalists, the church and much of the pardo majority, who saw no advantage in swapping Spanish rule for a creole aristocracy that kept slavery. An enormous earthquake struck on 26 March 1812, Maundy Thursday, destroying Caracas and killing perhaps twenty thousand people — and, disastrously, striking patriot cities far harder than royalist ones. Clergy preached it as divine judgment, and Bolívar is said to have shouted at the ruins that if nature opposed them they would fight nature. Miranda capitulated to the royalist commander Monteverde in July 1812. Bolívar and other officers arrested him as a traitor and handed him to the Spanish, and he died in a Cádiz prison in 1816. Two further republics failed before Boyacá and Carabobo settled it. Slavery was abolished in Venezuela only in 1854.
- Year: 1811 CE
- Category: Political
