Venezuela's Civil War of Independence

From Venezuela's Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 21-23:

Venezuelan children of the Concorde generation were taught a particular story of Venezuelan independence. It all started, according to the narrative, in a sleepy colonial outpost known as the Royal Captaincy General of Venezuela that was peacefully plodding along at the end of the 1700s. By 1808 Napoleon had invaded Spain, imprisoned the King, and imposed a puppet government over the empire in the Americas. Venezuelan Creoles, using the Cabildo de Caracas, seized the opportunity in 1810 to break away from a now-illegitimate monarchy, proclaimed sovereignty, wrote brilliant declarations, and led the first independence armies.

Yet, the Creole independent forces were, to their surprise, systematically defeated between 1810 and 1817. They seized Caracas twice, and declared and established independent Republics both times, only to be crushed. Their most famous representative and eventual leader, Simón Bolívar, commanded the country’s most important garrison during the first uprising, only to end up in exile in Cartagena. Years later he led the failed Second Republic before fleeing again.

What the elementary school stories never mention is that with the Spanish King imprisoned, and nearly every Spanish soldier on the planet fighting the French on Iberian soil, the so-called “royal” soldiers defeating the First and the Second Republics were mostly locals. The conflict was never one between newly self-conscious Venezuelans and royal Spaniards, but rather one between castes. The war of the First Republic was one of Pardos against Creole-led armies. Those of mixed-race felt no allegiance to the King, had no interest in the monarchy, and did not feel Spanish in any way. They flew the King’s standards, but they were fighting against Creole rule.

...

Pardos, free Africans, mutinous slaves, and many others of indigenous descent, destroyed Creole-led pro-independence governments twice in four long years. They battled Creole-led armies that sought to preserve the caste system and slavery in a newly independent republic. As the third chapter of this book chronicles in detail, the social and military dynamics had changed by 1816. Still, the first half of the independence wars remains critical to understanding what happened by the 1820s.