Venezuela

Venezuela emerged as a separate republic from the break-up of Gran Colombia. The colonial Captaincy General of Venezuela, birthplace of Simón Bolívar, had been the first Spanish American territory to declare full independence, on 5 July 1811, but its first two republics were crushed by royalist forces, and independence was secured only within Gran Colombia after the Battle of Carabobo in 1821. Venezuelan elites resented government from Bogotá, and in 1826 José Antonio Páez, the llanero general who commanded in Venezuela, defied the central government in the revolt known as La Cosiata. In November 1829 assemblies in Caracas and other towns called for separation, and in 1830 a constituent congress at Valencia, convened under Páez, proclaimed Venezuela a sovereign state and in September adopted a constitution, with Caracas as the capital. The congress was openly hostile to Bolívar, who died in New Granada that December. Páez became the first constitutional president in 1831 and dominated the country for nearly two decades. The new state was poor and thinly populated, with perhaps 800,000 inhabitants, and its war-damaged economy depended on cacao, coffee and cattle. Slavery survived until 1854, and many independence leaders became a new landed elite.

For a century after independence Venezuela was an agrarian country exporting coffee, cacao and hides, with a society of large landowners, a majority of mixed-race pardos, smaller numbers of indigenous people and, until 1854, enslaved Africans. Coffee from the Andes and the central highlands became the leading export in the nineteenth century, and its prices dictated the fortunes of governments. Everything changed with oil. Commercial production began with the Zumaque I well at Mene Grande in 1914, and the blowout of the Barroso II well near Cabimas in 1922 revealed the vast reserves of the Lake Maracaibo basin. By 1928 Venezuela was the world’s largest oil exporter and second only to the United States as a producer. Oil revenue built roads, schools and modern Caracas, but agriculture declined and millions moved to the cities. Immigrants from Spain, Italy, Portugal and Colombia arrived in large numbers after the Second World War. Dependence on oil, which came to provide more than nine-tenths of export earnings, made the country highly vulnerable to swings in price. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, mostly the heavy crude of the Orinoco Belt. Its population, about 28 million in 2025 after mass emigration, is largely urban, Catholic and of mixed descent.

Nineteenth-century Venezuela was a land of caudillos whose private armies of llaneros and peasants decided who governed. The Revolution of the Reforms of 1835 briefly overthrew the civilian president José María Vargas, and the Federal War of 1859–1863, fought between Liberal federalists and Conservative centralists, was the bloodiest civil conflict of the century; the Liberal leader Ezequiel Zamora was killed at San Carlos in 1860, and the Treaty of Coche ended the war in 1863. Civil wars and revolts continued until Cipriano Castro and Juan Vicente Gómez, leaders from the Andean state of Táchira, seized Caracas in 1899. Castro’s refusal to pay foreign debts led to a naval blockade by Britain, Germany and Italy in 1902–1903. Gómez created a professional national army, financed by oil revenue, that ended the era of regional caudillos. The armed forces remained central to politics, taking part in the coups of 1945 and 1948 and ruling until 1958. Venezuela has fought no major foreign war since independence, but it maintains a long-standing claim to the Essequibo region administered by Guyana, which an arbitral award of 1899 had rejected. Hugo Chávez, an army officer who led a failed coup in 1992, expanded the military’s role in government, and under Nicolás Maduro officers came to control ministries, oil and food distribution.

Venezuela has had some twenty-six constitutions, among the most in Latin America. Páez and the Conservative oligarchy ruled from 1830 to 1847, followed by the brothers José Tadeo and José Gregorio Monagas, whose Liberal regime abolished slavery in 1854. The 1864 constitution created the United States of Venezuela, a federation of states. Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who dominated from 1870 to 1888, decreed free and compulsory primary education, introduced the bolívar as the currency, curbed the Church and rebuilt Caracas in a French style. Juan Vicente Gómez ruled as dictator from 1908 to 1935, centralising power and using oil wealth to pay off the foreign debt. After his death the governments of Eleazar López Contreras and Isaías Medina Angarita began a cautious opening, and the Hydrocarbons Law of 1943 raised the state’s share of oil profits. In the Trienio of 1945–1948 the Democratic Action party of Rómulo Betancourt introduced universal suffrage, and the novelist Rómulo Gallegos was elected president in 1947, only to be overthrown in 1948. After the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez fell in January 1958, the Punto Fijo pact between the main parties produced four decades of elected government under the 1961 constitution. The 1999 constitution of Hugo Chávez created the Bolivarian Republic with a single-chamber National Assembly.

Venezuela’s influence has rested on oil and on the legacy of Bolívar. As the world’s leading oil exporter for decades from the late 1920s, it supplied the Allies during the Second World War and pioneered the bargaining power of producers: its 1943 law and the fifty-fifty profit-sharing principle adopted in 1948 were copied across the oil world, and its minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo was a founder of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) at Baghdad in 1960. The nationalisation of 1976 created Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), for a time one of the world’s largest oil companies. From 1958 to the 1990s Venezuela was one of the most stable democracies in Latin America, and Betancourt’s doctrine of refusing recognition to governments that seized power by force influenced regional diplomacy. Under Chávez, Venezuela led a bloc of left-wing governments, founding the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) with Cuba in 2004 and supplying subsidised oil to Cuba and the Caribbean through Petrocaribe. Venezuelan culture has reached a wide audience through the novels of Rómulo Gallegos, the youth orchestra programme El Sistema, founded by José Antonio Abreu in 1975, which inspired similar projects worldwide, and its many players in American baseball. Since 2015 the exodus of nearly eight million Venezuelans has become one of the largest displacement crises in the world.

The Punto Fijo democracy, built on oil revenue, entered crisis in the 1980s. Falling prices and debt forced a devaluation on Black Friday in February 1983, and when Carlos Andrés Pérez introduced austerity measures in 1989, the riots known as the Caracazo were suppressed with hundreds killed. Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez led a failed coup in February 1992, and Pérez was impeached in 1993. Chávez won the presidency in December 1998, and the 1999 constitution renamed the state the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. He survived a brief coup in April 2002 and an oil strike in 2002–2003, took control of PDVSA, and used high oil prices to fund social programmes and nationalisations. After his death in 2013 his successor Nicolás Maduro faced collapsing oil prices and production, hyperinflation and severe shortages; the economy shrank by roughly three-quarters between 2013 and 2020, and millions emigrated. Maduro governed by increasingly authoritarian means, sidelining the opposition-controlled National Assembly elected in 2015 and claiming victory in the disputed elections of 2018 and 2024, results the opposition and many foreign governments rejected. In January 2026 United States forces captured Maduro in Caracas and took him to New York to face drug-trafficking charges, and Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez assumed the presidency. Venezuela remains a federal presidential republic with Caracas as its capital, its political future uncertain.