The history of Venezuela

Venezuela stretches from the Andes and Lake Maracaibo across the plains of the llanos to the Orinoco delta and the highlands of Guayana. Before Spanish conquest it was home to perhaps a million people in many separate societies, from Andean terrace farmers to the canoe peoples of the delta. Spain colonised it slowly, and the Caracas elite produced Simón Bolívar, who led the wars that freed much of the continent. Oil transformed it after 1920 into one of the richest countries in Latin America. Four decades of two-party democracy after 1958 gave way to the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chávez, a deep economic collapse under Nicolás Maduro, and in January 2026 a United States military operation that removed Maduro from power.

People were living in Venezuela by the end of the last Ice Age. At Taima-Taima, near Coro in Falcón state, archaeologists found the pelvis of a mastodon pierced by a stone spear point, dated to about 13,000 years ago and strong evidence that people reached South America before the Clovis hunters of North America. The hunters who made these leaf-shaped El Jobo points lived alongside giant ground sloths, glyptodonts and other vanished megafauna. As those animals died out, people turned to fishing, gathering and smaller game, and slowly to farming.

Two farming traditions developed, broadly maize in the west and manioc, or cassava, in the east. On the lower Orinoco, villages near Saladero and Barrancas produced fine painted pottery, and from around 500 BCE their seafaring descendants, speaking Arawakan languages and known to archaeologists as the Saladoid culture, crossed by canoe to Trinidad, the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico. Large parts of the llanos, too, were farmed, by shifting cultivation and in permanent fields.

The most complex society arose in the Andes of Mérida and Trujillo. The Timoto-Cuica peoples, a group of chiefdoms rather than a single state, lived in planned permanent villages with stone and wooden houses, cultivated potatoes and other Andean crops on terraces watered by irrigation channels and storage tanks, and traded with the plains and the Maracaibo basin. They are often credited with inventing the arepa, still the national staple.

By 1500 the land was divided among many peoples speaking Arawakan, Cariban and other languages. The Arawakan Caquetío held the coast around Coro. Cariban speakers such as the Kalina and Cumanagoto lived in the east, and the Mariche and Teque peoples in the central valleys around Caracas. The Wayuu lived on the Guajira peninsula, the Warao in the Orinoco delta, and the Yanomami, Ye'kuana, Pemón and others in the southern forests and highlands. Most survive today; the Wayuu are much the largest Indigenous nation.

Christopher Columbus reached the Paria Peninsula on his third voyage in August 1498, the first European landing on the South American mainland, and took the vast outflow of the Orinoco as a sign of the earthly paradise. The next year Alonso de Ojeda, sailing with Amerigo Vespucci, saw stilt houses over Lake Maracaibo, and the land was named Venezuela, "little Venice", after the Republic of Venice.

The first riches the Spanish took were the pearl beds of Cubagua and Margarita islands, stripped between about 1508 and 1531 by enslaved Indigenous divers. Slaving raids moved inland to supply labour for the Caribbean islands and Panama, fuelling more than a century of warfare. Spain founded Cumaná as its first lasting settlement on the mainland in the early 1520s.

In 1528 Charles V, deeply in debt to the Welser bankers of Augsburg, granted them the right to govern and exploit western Venezuela. Their governors, beginning with Ambrosius Ehinger, who founded Maracaibo in 1529, led brutal expeditions in search of El Dorado, enslaving and killing Indigenous people. The venture collapsed after the Spanish governor executed Philipp von Hutten and Bartholomäus Welser in 1546, and the crown took back control.

Conquest was slow because Venezuela had no single empire to overthrow, as in Mexico or Peru, only many independent peoples who resisted one by one. In the central valleys the Teque chief Guaicaipuro led a coalition that fought the Spanish through the 1560s before he was killed, and the chief Tamanaco was put to death by the conqueror of the valley, Diego de Losada, who founded Caracas in 1567. Disease, war and enslavement caused the Indigenous population to fall sharply. Many survivors withdrew to the south, where Capuchin and Franciscan friars gathered them into missions and resistance continued, as in the Ye'kuana rising against Spanish advance on the upper Orinoco in 1775 and 1776.

For two centuries Venezuela was a neglected corner of the Spanish Empire. Its provinces were governed at various times from Santo Domingo and the distant viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. Cattle ranching spread across the llanos, worked by mixed-race horsemen, the llaneros. Cacao from coastal plantations became the chief export, worked by enslaved Africans brought through the Atlantic slave trade, and from the 1720s the Basque-run Guipuzcoan Company held a monopoly on trade with Spain.

The cacao fortunes created a proud white Creole elite in Caracas, the mantuanos, who guarded their privileges against the pardo majority of mixed African, Indigenous and European descent. In 1717 Venezuela was placed under the new Viceroyalty of New Granada, and in 1777 its provinces were united as the Captaincy General of Venezuela, roughly the territory of the modern country. Smuggling with the British, Dutch and French islands kept Caracas well connected to Europe, and its university, founded in 1721, educated thinkers shaped by the Enlightenment, among them Andrés Bello. In 1797 a conspiracy led by Manuel Gual and José María España, inspired by the French Revolution, called for equality and the end of slavery, but was crushed with the help of the mantuanos, who feared social revolution.

When Napoleon forced the Spanish king to abdicate in 1808, Spanish America was left without a legitimate ruler. On 19 April 1810 the city council of Caracas deposed the captain general and formed a junta, and on 5 July 1811 seven of the ten provinces declared independence, among the first in Spanish America. The veteran revolutionary Francisco de Miranda, a veteran of the American Revolution and the French revolutionary wars, led the First Republic, but an earthquake in March 1812 and a royalist offensive destroyed it, and Miranda died in a Spanish prison.

The young mantuano Simón Bolívar returned from New Granada in 1813 with an army, issued his decree of "war to the death" against Spaniards, and retook Caracas, where he was hailed as the Liberator. This Second Republic fell in 1814 to the royalist llanero armies of José Tomás Boves, which mobilised the pardos and slaves against the Creole elite with terrible ferocity. The fighting was among the most destructive of the Spanish American wars of independence. Bolívar regrouped in Haiti, where President Alexandre Pétion supplied him with arms in return for a promise to free the slaves, and from 1817 he fought from the Orinoco basin, allied with the llanero leader José Antonio Páez.

In 1819 the Congress of Angostura proclaimed the Republic of Colombia, known as Gran Colombia, uniting Venezuela with New Granada. Bolívar crossed the Andes to win at Boyacá that year, and on 24 June 1821 the victory at Carabobo, near Valencia, decided the war in Venezuela; the last Spanish forces left in 1823. Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre went on to liberate Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. Gran Colombia, governed from Bogotá, proved too divided to hold together, and Venezuela under Páez broke away in 1830, the year Bolívar died near Santa Marta. The wars had cost Venezuela between a quarter and a third of its people.

Independent Venezuela, with about 800,000 inhabitants, was dominated for the rest of the century by caudillos, regional strongmen with private armies. Páez, president three times, led a conservative oligarchy until the 1840s, and slavery was abolished in 1854. Rivalry between Conservatives and Liberals exploded into the Federal War of 1859 to 1863, which ended in victory for the Liberal federalists and created the modern system of states. Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who dominated politics from 1870 to 1887, built railways and monuments, introduced free primary education and curbed the church, while enriching himself.

A long-running dispute with Britain over the Essequibo region of British Guiana became an international crisis in 1895, when the United States intervened under the Monroe Doctrine; an arbitral tribunal in Paris awarded most of the territory to Britain in 1899, an award Venezuela later rejected and still contests. In 1899 the Andean caudillo Cipriano Castro seized Caracas, and his refusal to pay foreign debts led Britain, Germany and Italy to blockade the coast in 1902 and 1903.

In 1908 Castro's deputy, Juan Vicente Gómez, took power while Castro was abroad and ruled until his death in 1935, the longest and most absolute of the dictators. He built a professional army, crushed every rival and jailed opponents, and under him Venezuela became an oil state. After the Barroso well near Lake Maracaibo blew out in 1922, spouting oil for days, production soared. By 1929 Venezuela exported more oil than any other country, though Gómez kept refineries off Venezuelan soil, and they were built on the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curaçao, part of the Netherlands. Oil paid off the foreign debt, but most Venezuelans stayed poor, rural and illiterate.

Gómez's successors, Eleazar López Contreras and Isaías Medina Angarita, gradually opened politics. In 1945 a civil-military coup brought the mass party Acción Democrática to power under Rómulo Betancourt. This Trienio introduced universal suffrage, and in 1947 the novelist Rómulo Gallegos won what is considered the first free presidential election, only to be overthrown by the army within a year. Marcos Pérez Jiménez dominated the military regime that followed, made himself president after falsifying the 1952 election, and spent oil money on grand public works while his secret police hunted opponents. Strikes, protests and a military revolt drove him out on 23 January 1958.

Before the 1958 elections the three main parties, Acción Democrática, the Christian democratic COPEI and the Unión Republicana Democrática, signed the Punto Fijo Pact to share power, excluding the Communists. Betancourt, president from 1959 to 1964, survived an assassination attempt organised by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and a left-wing guerrilla insurgency backed by Fidel Castro's Cuba, and his oil minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso led the creation of OPEC in 1960. In 1968 the election of COPEI's Rafael Caldera brought the first peaceful transfer of power to an opposition party, and most guerrillas laid down their arms. In the Cold War Venezuela was a stable democracy and close partner of the United States.

The oil price shock of 1973 brought a flood of money under Carlos Andrés Pérez, who nationalised the iron industry and, in 1976, the oil industry, creating the state company PDVSA. Borrowing and corruption grew with the boom. When oil prices fell in the 1980s, debt turned into crisis and living standards dropped steeply. In February 1989, weeks into his second term, Pérez raised fuel prices and fares under an austerity programme, and riots spread from Guarenas to Caracas. The repression of the Caracazo left at least 277 dead by official count, and perhaps more than 2,000. On 4 February 1992 officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez tried to overthrow Pérez; the coup failed, but Chávez's televised surrender made him famous. Pérez was impeached for misuse of funds in 1993, and Caldera, re-elected as an independent, faced a banking collapse and pardoned Chávez in 1994.

With the old parties discredited, Chávez won the presidency in December 1998 promising to sweep away the old system. A constituent assembly wrote a new constitution in 1999 that renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, strengthened the presidency, and for the first time recognised the rights, lands and languages of Indigenous peoples. In April 2002 Chávez was briefly removed in a coup backed by business leaders and part of the military, but returned within two days after mass protests by his supporters and loyal troops. He then survived a two-month strike in the oil industry in 2002 and 2003, after which he purged PDVSA, and won a recall referendum in 2004.

High oil prices financed social programmes called missions, which expanded health care, literacy and subsidised food, and official poverty fell from about 49 per cent in 2002 to about 30 per cent in 2011. At the same time Chávez nationalised large parts of the economy, imposed price and currency controls, curbed independent media, extended control over the courts and built an alliance with Cuba, Russia, China and other critics of the United States. Voters rejected a constitutional reform in 2007 but abolished presidential term limits in 2009. Supporters saw a revolution for the poor, critics a slide into authoritarian rule and deeper dependence on oil. Re-elected in 2012, he died of cancer in March 2013.

Nicolás Maduro, Chávez's chosen successor, won the April 2013 election by a narrow margin. When the oil price fell in 2014, the weaknesses of the economy turned into catastrophe: production at PDVSA declined, shortages of food and medicine spread, hyperinflation destroyed the currency, and the economy shrank by around 80 per cent in less than a decade. Protests in 2014 and 2017 were met with lethal force. After the opposition won the National Assembly in 2015, the government-aligned Supreme Court stripped it of its powers, and in 2017 a Constituent Assembly of Maduro's supporters took over. From 2017 the United States imposed increasingly severe sanctions, including on oil, which critics argue deepened the humanitarian crisis.

Maduro's re-election in 2018 was rejected as fraudulent by much of the Americas and Europe, and in January 2019 the National Assembly leader, Juan Guaidó, declared himself interim president, recognised by about 60 countries but never in control of the state. UN investigators and rights groups documented torture, disappearances and thousands of killings by security forces. The emigration of around 7.9 million Venezuelans by 2025 was one of the largest displacements in the world. After the July 2024 presidential election, the electoral council declared Maduro the winner without publishing detailed results, while opposition tallies showed a clear win for Edmundo González, who went into exile in Spain. The opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025.

From August 2025 the United States built up warships in the Caribbean and began striking boats it said were carrying drugs, and in December it blockaded sanctioned oil tankers. On 3 January 2026 American forces bombed military targets across northern Venezuela while special forces seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Caracas and flew them to New York, where they pleaded not guilty to narco-terrorism and drug-trafficking charges. About 80 people, Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel and civilians, were reported killed. The Venezuelan government called it a kidnapping, UN officials and many legal experts said it violated the UN Charter, and many Venezuelans abroad celebrated.

The governing system survived. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president on 5 January. Under heavy American pressure her government released hundreds of political prisoners, passed an amnesty law, opened the oil industry to private and foreign companies and restored relations with the United States, which lifted many oil sanctions and took control of much of Venezuela's oil revenue. In August 2026 the United States announced a deal giving it a majority stake in a joint venture to develop major oil fields, which some opposition figures denounced as unconstitutional. By the autumn of 2026 no date had been set for new elections, Machado had not been able to return to the country, and Maduro was awaiting trial in New York, scheduled for 2027.