Venezuela was one of three countries that emerged from the collapse of Gran Colombia in 1830 (the others being Ecuador and New Granada, which became Colombia). For most of the first half of the 20th century, Venezuela was ruled by military strongmen who promoted the oil industry and allowed for some social reforms. Although democratically elected governments largely held sway since 1959, the executive branch under Hugo Chavez, president from 1999 to 2013, exercised increasingly authoritarian control over other branches of government. This undemocratic trend continued in 2018 when Nicolas Maduro claimed the presidency for his second term in an election boycotted by most opposition parties and widely viewed as fraudulent.
The last democratically-elected institution is the 2015 National Assembly. In 2020, legislative elections were held for a new National Assembly, which the opposition boycotted, and which were widely condemned as fraudulent. The resulting assembly is viewed by most opposition parties and many international actors as illegitimate. In November 2021, most opposition parties broke a three-year election boycott to participate in mayoral and gubernatorial elections, despite flawed conditions. As a result, the opposition more than doubled its representation at the mayoral level and retained four of 23 governorships. The 2021 regional elections marked the first time since 2006 that the EU was allowed to send an electoral observation mission to Venezuela.
The Maduro regime places strong restrictions on freedoms of expression and the press. Since Chavez, the ruling party’s economic policies expanded the state’s role in the economy through expropriations of major enterprises, strict currency exchange and price controls that discourage private sector investment and production, and overdependence on the petroleum industry for revenues, among others. Years of economic mismanagement left Venezuela ill-prepared to weather the global drop in oil prices in 2014, sparking an economic decline that has resulted in reduced government social spending, shortages of basic goods, and high inflation. Worsened living conditions have prompted over 7 million Venezuelans to migrate, mainly settling in nearby countries. Since 2017, the US has imposed financial and sectoral sanctions on the Maduro regime, and the regime’s mismanagement and lack of investment in infrastructure has debilitated the country’s oil sector. Caracas has more recently relaxed some economic controls to mitigate the impact of its sustained economic crisis, such as allowing increased currency and liberalizing import flexibility for private citizens and companies. Other concerns include human rights abuses, rampant violent crime, political manipulation of the judicial and electoral systems, and corruption.
Economy
South American economy; ongoing hyperinflation since the mid-2010s; chaotic economy due to political corruption, infrastructure cuts, and human rights abuses; in debt default; oil exporter; hydropower consumer; rising Chinese relations.
Population
The population is 30,518,260 (2023 est.) which consists of unspecified Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arab, German, African, Indigenous.
Afro-Venezuelans are Venezuelans of African descent. Afro-Venezuelans are mostly descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the Western Hemisphere during the Atlantic slave trade. This term also sometimes refers to the combining of African and other cultural elements found in Venezuelan society such as the arts, traditions, music, religion, race, and language.
Between 1576 and 1810, about 100,000 African slaves were transported across the Atlantic to Venezuela via the transatlantic slave trade. These slaves belonged to various ethnicities from present-day Angola, Senegal, Gambia, Benin, Nigeria and the Congo, such as: Kalabari, Igbo, Yoruba, Kongo, Wolof, and more. Slaves were treated as units of commerce, referred to as pieza de india which refers to their physique and potential for travel. Throughout the sixteenth century, slaves were brought to toil in the gold mines in Coro and Buría (Yaracuy) and to Isla Margarita and Cumaná for fishing and pearl diving. Small-scale agricultural plantations were also initiated in Venezuela, especially among the regions surrounding Caracas. In the 18th century, immense shipments of slaves were transported to Barlovento to aid the burgeoning cacao industry, indigo plantations in the Venezuelan Llanos and the sugar plantations in Lara, Aragua and Zulia, around Lake Maracaibo.
The history of slave revolts in Venezuela, both in the form of runaway communities and mutiny, began quite early. The first documented insurrection was in Coro in 1532. However, the most momentous revolt of the time took place on the Buría mines in 1552. The rebellion was led by El Negro Miguel (also known as Rey Miguel), who founded a Maroons, cimarrón, or cumbe (escaped slave) settlement and had himself proclaimed king. He developed an army of 1,500 slaves, Blacks, Mulattos, Zambos and Indigenous peoples to attack colonial establishments.
There were a number of rebellions of enslaved people throughout the history of the colony. “Cumbe” derives from the Manding term for “out-of-the-way place”. Typically located above river banks or in remote mountainous areas, cumbes were usually well hidden and housed an average of 120 residents. Such settlements were also called patucos and rochelos. Cimarrones were frequently aided by indigenous tribes living in the area (e.g., the Tomusa in Barlovento), and cumbe populations were composed not only of Blacks, but also of Indians and even of poor Whites. Cimarrón groups conducted raids on plantations, assisted in the escapes of other slaves, and participated in contraband trading. The only legally established town of free Blacks was that of Curiepe, established in Barlovento in 1721 under the leadership of Captain Juan del Rosario Blanco. The community was composed of former members of Caracas’s Company of Free Blacks as well as huangos from the Antilles. The latter were escaped slaves who, like all Blacks fleeing non-Spanish-speaking islands, were granted freedom upon arrival in Venezuela if they accepted baptism.
Numbers of runaway-slave communities continued to increase throughout the seventeenth century, and by 1720 there were between 20,000 and 30,000 cimarrones in Venezuela, as opposed to the 60,000 slaves still working on the plantations. Barlovento was the site of intense cimarrón activity throughout the eighteenth century, with several cumbe settlements being established around Caucagua and Curiepe. In 1732, there was an uprising of enslaved people led by Andresote in Puerto Cabello and Capaye. In 1747, Miguel Luengo led a rebellion of enslaved people in Yare.
There were many cumbes in the interior of what later became Venezuela. The most famous of these was that of Ocoyta, founded around 1770 by the legendary Guillermo Rivas. Guillermo ran away in 1768, and formed a cumbe which included runaways of African and Indian origin.
After he led raids on various plantations both to liberate slaves and to punish overseers, a special army was raised to destroy Ocoyta and execute Rivas. The cumbe of Ocoyta was eventually destroyed in 1771. A military expedition led by German de Aguilera destroyed the settlement, killing Guillermo, but only succeeded in capturing eight adults and two children. The rest of the runaways withdrew into the surrounding forests, where they remained at large.
One of Guillermo’s deputies, Ubaldo the Englishman, whose christened name was Jose Eduardo de la Luz Perera, was initially born a slave in London, was sold to a ship captain, and took a number of trips before eventually being granted his freedom. He was one of a number of free black people who joined the community of Ocoyta. In 1772, he was captured by the Spanish authorities.
In 1794, there were uprisings in the Caucagua and Capaya districts. In 1795, an uprising led by Jose Leonardo Chirinos in the Sierras de Coro. In 1799, Lieutenant Francisco Javier Pirela led an uprising of the enslaved black militias.
Afro-Venezuelans played a crucial role in the struggle for independence. Originally, slaves fought for the Crown, believing that the landowning creole Republicans were their enemies. In particular, the notorious royalist battalion of General José Tomás Boves attracted many slave soldiers. Bolívar, realizing the strategic importance of Black soldiers in the fight for independence, declared the abolition of slavery in 1812 and again in 1816, after promising Haitian president Alexandre Pétion that he would secure freedom for slaves in return for Haitian military aid. A major landowner himself, Bolívar freed 1,000 of his own slaves, and in 1819 recruited 5,000 slaves into his army. Many members of cumbes fought on the side of the rebels, and abandoned their villages.
José Antonio Paéz, a key figure in Venezuelan independence, led an army of Blacks from the llanos (plains). One of his most famous lieutenants, Pedro Camejo, has been immortalized in Venezuelan history as “El Negro Primero”, because he was always the first to ride into battle. In the final battle of Carabobo, Camejo was mortally wounded but returned to General Paéz to utter one of the most famous statements in Venezuelan history: “General, vengo decirle, adiós, porque estoy muerto” (General, I have come to say goodbye, because I am dead). A statue of El Negro Primero stands in the Plaza Carabobo in Caracas. Curiously, he is sometimes depicted wearing a turban, the same iconography used for the mythical Negro Felipe. With the declaration of independence in 1810, all trafficking in slaves was outlawed. The decline in slavery continued throughout the War of Independence when, at its conclusion in 1821, the “Ley de vientre” was passed, stating that all children born, whether of slave or free parents, were automatically free. By March 10, 1854, the date of slavery’s official abolition in Venezuela, less than 24,000 slaves remained.
Throughout the twentieth century, Blacks in Venezuela have faced subtle forms of racial discrimination despite a philosophy of racial democracy and an ideology of mestizaje that contends all groups have blended together to form a new, indistinguishable type, called the mestizo. Yet underlying this ideology is a policy of blanqueamiento, or “whitening”, that has encouraged both the physical and cultural assimilation of Afro-Venezuelans into a Euro-dominated mainstream. An important semantic counterpart to the process of blanqueamiento is that found in the term negrear, which denotes concepts of “marginalization” or “trivialization”. The emergence of Black intellectuals such as Juan Pablo Sojo and Manuel Rodrigues Cárdenas in the 1940s, and more recently of younger writers such as Jesús García, has helped counter the forces of blanqueamiento, or assimilation. A strong body of research in Afro-Venezuelan history and folklore has also been established by Venezuelan scholars, particularly Miguel Acosta Saignes (1967). Public festivals such as the Fiesta de San Juan have emerged as focal points in the reappropriation of Afro-Venezuelan culture, articulating current transformations in a living tradition of cimarronaje (resistance to the dominant culture, consciousness of being marginal).