A Brief History of Venezuela: Cocoa, Caudillos, Oil, and a Revolution Contested

Companion piece: Si Hubiera Nacido en Venezuela (in this library's Spanish collection: what daily life feels like; this is how the country got here).

In the early hours of 3 January 2026, United States special forces struck targets in and around Caracas and flew Nicolás Maduro, who had ruled Venezuela since 2013, and his wife Cilia Flores to New York to face drug-trafficking charges. The UN Secretary-General said he was "deeply alarmed" and called it a dangerous precedent. Many Venezuelans at home and in the diaspora celebrated in the streets. Within days, Maduro's own vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, was running the country as acting president, and the government she led was releasing political prisoners, negotiating oil deals with Washington and promising elections.

How did a country that once had the highest income in Latin America, the oldest unbroken democracy in South America and the largest proven oil reserves on Earth end up there? Why did millions of Venezuelans love Hugo Chávez, and why did millions of others leave the country under his successor? Why do Venezuelans of every political stripe invoke the same man, Simón Bolívar?

The answers run back five centuries: through a colony that grew cocoa rather than silver, a war of independence that killed perhaps a third of the population, a hundred years of strongmen on horseback, and an oil boom that turned a poor farming country into a petro-state almost overnight. Venezuela's politics have always been, in one way or another, a fight over who controls the central state and the wealth that flows through it. This is that story, told at length and, on the most contested chapters, told so that each side can recognise its own account.

In this history

1. The first peoples and the conquest (to 1600)
2. The cocoa colony and the war of independence (1600–1830)
3. Caudillos and the coming of oil (1830–1935)
4. From dictatorship to the oil democracy (1935–1989)
5. The Caracazo, Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (1989–2013)
6. Maduro: collapse, hyperinflation and exodus (2013–2023)
7. The disputed election, the fall of Maduro and Venezuela in 2026 (2024–2026)
8. How to understand Venezuela today

Part 1 — The first peoples and the conquest (to 1600)

People have lived in what is now Venezuela for a very long time. Stone spear points found at El Jobo, in the north-western state of Falcón, have been radiocarbon-dated to between about 13,000 and 7,000 BCE, and nearby sites in Falcón such as Taima-Taima have yielded archaeological material from the same remote era. These were Ice Age hunters, among the earliest known inhabitants of South America.

Over the following millennia, farming took hold along two broad axes. In the west, people grew maize; in the east, manioc (cassava), still eaten today as the flat casabe bread. On parts of the great plains, the llanos, they combined slash-and-burn fields with permanent settlements.

Unlike Mexico or Peru, the land had no single empire. The Library of Congress country study describes what the Spaniards found as a large number of small, unrelated peoples "of widely varying degrees of cultural sophistication": some nomadic hunters and gatherers, others town-dwellers who irrigated and terraced their fields. On the coasts and along the Orinoco lived Carib- and Arawak-speaking peoples, fishers, farmers and traders who moved by canoe between the mainland and the islands. In the Andes of the west, the Timoto-Cuica, a series of chiefdoms rather than one state, built terraces and roads and traded with the plains and the Maracaibo basin.

How many people lived there before 1498 is not known. Estimates of around a million are sometimes given, but they are guesses from fragmentary evidence; what is certain is that the number fell drastically after contact, mainly through epidemics of Old World diseases, as well as slave raids and war.

The peoples who remain

Venezuela's Indigenous peoples were never wiped out, though they became a small minority. At least thirty Indigenous peoples live in the country today. The largest by far are the Wayuu of the Guajira peninsula on the Colombian border, followed by the Warao of the Orinoco delta, the Kari'ña, the Pemón of the Gran Sabana in the south-east, the Yanomami of the Amazonian south, and others. In the state of Amazonas they make up close to half the population.

Venezuela had no Aztec or Inca empire for the Spaniards to decapitate. That single fact shaped the next three centuries: conquest was slow, piecemeal and fought village by village.

Pearls, slaves and German bankers: the conquest, 1498–1600

On his third voyage, in 1498, Christopher Columbus sighted the Paria peninsula from off the coast of Trinidad. On 1 August 1498 he went ashore, the first European known to set foot on the South American mainland. He spent two weeks exploring the mouths of the Orinoco and was so struck by the flood of fresh water pouring into the sea that he believed he had found the approaches to the Garden of Eden.

A year later, Alonso de Ojeda and the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci sailed west along the coast as far as Lake Maracaibo. There they saw Indigenous houses built on stilts over the water, and the sight reminded them of Venice. The name Venezuela, "little Venice", stuck.

Pearls, then people

What first drew the Spaniards was pearls. The oyster beds between Cumaná and the island of Margarita were stripped within a generation; by the 1520s they had been played out. Then, in the Library of Congress study's blunt phrase, the next native riches to be extracted were the people themselves. Spanish slavers raided the coast and then the interior, shipping captives to work in Panama and the Caribbean islands. The raids bred a hatred that fuelled more than a century of low-level war.

The Welsers

In 1528 the indebted Spanish crown handed western Venezuela to an unlikely conqueror: the Welser banking house of Augsburg in Germany, as security for its loans. For nearly three decades, German governors ran the territory, not to settle it but to extract as much wealth as possible as fast as they could, and they marched expedition after expedition into the interior in search of El Dorado, the legendary golden kingdom. They found none. Their conduct was brutal even by the standards of the conquest, and in 1556 the contract was ended.

Resistance and the founding of Caracas

Spaniards meanwhile pushed east from El Tocuyo, founding Valencia in 1555. The valley of Caracas was held by peoples who fought back hard. The most famous of their leaders, Guaicaipuro (c. 1530–1568), united several groups and resisted the Spaniards for years before he was killed; another leader, Tamanaco, was killed in 1573. After more than a decade of fighting, Diego de Losada founded Santiago de León de Caracas in 1567, in a fertile valley close to the harbour that became La Guaira.

Today Guaicaipuro is a national symbol, whose name has been given even to a military fort. That captures a modern Venezuelan way of remembering the conquest: not only as Spain's arrival but as a resistance that the nation now claims.

For centuries, much of the country remained outside Spanish control. Franciscan and Capuchin missionaries, rather than soldiers, carried Spanish rule into the Orinoco basin and much of the Maracaibo region during the 17th and 18th centuries, and large parts of the western plains and the lands south of the Orinoco were still unknown to Spain at the end of colonial rule.

Part 2 — The cocoa colony and the war of independence (1600–1830)

Venezuela had no great silver mines, and for most of the colonial period Spain treated it as a backwater. Its main value was its long Caribbean coastline, which helped guard the treasure fleets sailing between Panama and Cuba. Oil seeping from the ground was noticed as early as 1500 and then ignored for almost four centuries.

Until 1777 there was no "Venezuela" as a single unit, only a scattering of provinces governed from Santo Domingo and later from Bogotá, which in 1718 became the seat of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Distance gave Venezuela's town councils, the cabildos, unusual freedom to run their own affairs.

Cocoa and chocolate

From the 1620s onward, cocoa became Venezuela's principal export, and stayed so for two centuries. The beans grown in the coastal valleys were prized across the Spanish empire, above all in Mexico, where chocolate was a daily drink. Cocoa made a planter class rich. It also drew new settlers from the Canary Islands and created heavy demand for enslaved Africans, who worked the plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Much of the cocoa was sold, illegally, to Dutch, British and French traders, who offered better prices than Spanish merchants. To stamp out the smuggling and capture the profits, the crown in 1728 granted a monopoly over Venezuelan trade to a Basque company, the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas, the Caracas Company. It succeeded in curbing contraband, but paid growers less, and resentment boiled over in 1749 in a revolt led by a Canary Islander cocoa farmer, Juan Francisco de León. It was crushed. In 1777 Caracas became the seat of the Captaincy General of Venezuela, the first time the territory was treated as one political unit.

A ranked society

Cocoa produced a social pyramid that the Library of Congress study calls "virtually a caste system":

The pardos are the key to Venezuelan history. By the end of the colony they were the majority, many of them free artisans, smallholders, soldiers and plains cattlemen, but law and custom barred them from the honours, offices and schools reserved for whites. When independence came, their choice of side would decide wars.

Daily life

For most people life was rural. Enslaved workers and free labourers tended cocoa under the shade trees of the coastal valleys; on the vast plains, the llaneros, mixed-race horsemen, herded half-wild cattle and lived largely beyond the reach of the law. Caracas was a modest city of churches, merchant houses and the mansions of the cocoa aristocracy, the so-called mantuanos.

The colony bequeathed a society in which the majority were neither white nor enslaved, but mixed and excluded. Every Venezuelan conflict from 1810 to the Bolivarian Revolution has, in part, been about that majority's place.

Independence: Miranda, Bolívar and the war to the death, 1810–1830

Venezuela produced both the best-known precursor of Spanish American independence and its greatest hero. Francisco de Miranda, born in Caracas in 1750, had a chequered career in the Spanish army, then spent most of his life in countries at odds with Spain, lobbying for support for Spanish American independence. In 1806 he landed at Coro with an expedition from New York, expecting a popular uprising; he met hostility instead and sailed away.

The First Republic

Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, and his capture of the Spanish royal family, gave the criollo elite of Caracas its chance. On 19 April 1810, the city council deposed the Spanish governor and set up a junta governing in the name of the captive King Ferdinand VII. On 5 July 1811, a congress declared Venezuela independent from Spain; 5 July is still Independence Day. A constitution followed on 21 December 1811.

The First Republic, known to Venezuelan historians as La Patria Boba, the Silly Republic, lasted barely a year. Three major cities, Coro, Maracaibo and Guayana, refused to join. Above all, the criollo leaders failed to win over the pardo majority, who had no wish to be ruled by the white elite of Caracas and largely stayed loyal to the crown. Then, in March 1812, a great earthquake devastated the patriot strongholds while sparing almost every royalist town; it seemed that nature itself had joined the crown. On 25 July 1812 Miranda surrendered to the Spanish commander. His young officers, including Simón Bolívar, felt betrayed. Miranda died in a Spanish prison in 1816.

Bolívar

Bolívar was born in 1783 into one of the richest criollo families of Caracas, orphaned at nine, educated in Europe and inflamed by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In 1813 he proclaimed a "war to the death" against Spanish rule, swept through the Andes and took Caracas, where he was hailed as El Libertador.

Again the patriots overlooked the people who did the fighting. The llaneros of the plains rode for the royalist caudillo José Tomás Boves, fighting, as they saw it, for social equality against an army of the white criollo elite, in a ferocious war of race and class. By September 1814 Boves had driven Bolívar out of Caracas and ended the Second Republic. Boves was killed in battle at the end of 1814, but Spain, its king restored, sent an army that crushed most resistance. Bolívar fled to Jamaica, where he wrote his famous Jamaica Letter on the future of Spanish America.

The turn

The war turned when the patriots finally won over the plainsmen. José Antonio Páez, a llanero of humble birth, persuaded the horsemen of the Apure that Spain, not the criollos, was the true enemy of their equality, and his cavalry became the patriots' hammer. Bolívar was also ruthless with rivals: when another caudillo, Manuel Piar, openly urged his Black and pardo troops to press their claims for social change, Bolívar had him captured, tried and executed.

From a base on the Orinoco, and with several thousand European veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, Bolívar convened the Congress of Angostura in 1819, which made him president of a Third Republic. Then he did something astonishing: he marched his army across the plains and into the Andes to surprise the Spanish garrison at Boyacá, near Bogotá, liberating New Granada. In June 1821, at Carabobo, Páez's lancers and Bolívar's army won the decisive battle for Venezuela. That August, delegates at Cúcuta adopted the constitution of Gran Colombia, a union of today's Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador, with its capital at Bogotá. Bolívar marched on to free Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, the country named after him.

The dream that failed

Venezuelans resented rule from distant Bogotá, and Páez embodied that resentment. In 1829 he led Venezuela out of Gran Colombia. Bolívar, sick and friendless, was ordered into exile by Páez and died at Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast of today's Colombia, on 17 December 1830, aged 47. Shortly before his death, as the Library of Congress study records, he compared his efforts for Latin American unity to having "plowed the sea". The library's Spanish piece La Independencia: Cómo Nació un Continente follows the wider continental story.

The cost was terrible. Two decades of war killed between a quarter and a third of Venezuela's people, according to the Library of Congress study; by 1830 the population was estimated at about 800,000. The cocoa economy lay in ruins.

Every Venezuelan government since 1830 has wrapped itself in Bolívar. Conservatives honour the Liberator who feared anarchy; Chávez renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic for the Bolívar who fought empire. Both are quoting a real man who said contradictory things.

Part 3 — Caudillos and the coming of oil (1830–1935)

Independent Venezuela was ruled for most of the next century by caudillos: regional strongmen with private armies of followers, who fought each other for control of Caracas and of the customs houses whose revenue paid for everything. The Library of Congress study describes the era as a competition among social and regional factions for the Caracas bureaucracy that ran the export trade.

Coffee and Páez

The economy shifted from cocoa to coffee, whose price was booming in Europe and North America; by the 1830s Venezuela was the world's third-largest exporter. Páez, twice elected president under the 1830 constitution, gave the country sixteen fairly peaceful years, putting down regional revolts while generally respecting legitimate opponents. When coffee prices plunged in the 1840s, the elite split into Conservatives, around Páez, and Liberals.

Slavery, the Monagas brothers and the Federal War

In 1846 Páez chose General José Tadeo Monagas as his successor; Monagas turned on him, sent him into exile and ruled with his brother José Gregorio for a decade. Their one lasting act was the abolition of slavery in 1854. Their attempt to found a family dynasty provoked a revolt in 1858, and the country collapsed into the Federal War (1858–63), a chaotic civil war fought in the name of federalism between Liberals and Conservatives and among dozens of local chiefs. The Liberals won, but "federalism" in practice meant local caudillos ruling their fiefdoms as they pleased.

Guzmán Blanco, the "Illustrious American"

Central authority came back in 1870 with Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who dominated the country for eighteen years. He replaced disloyal regional chiefs with loyal ones and paid them with revenue from coffee exports and foreign loans. The result was peace and progress: schooling expanded, and roads, railways, ports and telegraph lines were built. Caracas acquired boulevards and public buildings in the Parisian style. Guzmán also dedicated as many monuments as possible to himself, made a fortune, and governed partly from Paris, where he finally stayed after anti-Guzmán riots in 1888.

Castro and the gunboats

After years of instability, in 1899 Cipriano Castro, the first of four military rulers from the Andean state of Táchira, marched on Caracas and took power. He refused to pay foreign debts, and in 1902–03 British, German and Italian warships blockaded and bombarded the Venezuelan coast to force him. The arrival of US warships in 1902 persuaded Castro to accept a financial settlement. He provoked another intervention, by the Dutch, a few years later. In 1908 he went to Europe for medical treatment, and his right-hand man seized power behind his back.

For seventy years after Bolívar, the way to become president of Venezuela was usually to ride into Caracas at the head of an army.

Gómez and the coming of oil, 1908–1935

Juan Vicente Gómez, a cattle rancher from Táchira, ruled Venezuela from 1908 until his death in 1935, alternating between the presidency and the post of minister of war, and having puppet congresses write six constitutions to suit him. He built a genuinely national army, well paid and well armed, and a secret police that filled prisons with opponents, many of whom died of hunger or torture. His regime's ideologue, the writer Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, justified it in a book called Democratic Caesarism, which argued that a mixed-race people needed a strong man. Venezuelans called Gómez the "Tyrant of the Andes".

Oil

Under Gómez, Venezuela changed for ever. The first commercial oil drilling came in 1917, and foreign exploitation of the country's petroleum began in earnest in 1918. In 1922 the Barroso No. 2 well at Cabimas, on Lake Maracaibo, blew out in a gusher that announced the scale of the reserves to the world, and foreign oil companies poured in. By 1928, according to the Library of Congress study, Venezuela was the world's leading oil exporter and second only to the United States in production, and it remained the largest exporter until 1970.

The money transformed the state. Gómez paid off the entire foreign debt and built roads. A new urban middle class grew around the oil industry. But the Library of Congress study is clear about who gained most: Gómez, the army and the dictator's associates from Táchira. For most Venezuelans oil meant few jobs (it is a capital-intensive industry), high food prices as farming declined and imports rose, inflation, and falling real wages. Little was spent on schools or hospitals.

This is the beginning of what economists call the resource curse, and of a slogan Venezuelan governments would repeat for a century, the need to "sow the oil": to use petroleum income to build a productive economy before the oil ran out or its price fell. Whether any Venezuelan government managed it is the question that hangs over the next century.

The Generation of 1928

The most important opposition came from students. In February 1928, student leaders at the Central University in Caracas made speeches against the regime and were arrested; when their classmates demanded to be jailed too, Gómez obliged, arresting about 200. A popular demonstration was dispersed with gunfire; a group of students and young officers briefly stormed the presidential palace. Many were sent to labour gangs or died in prison. Those who escaped into exile, among them Rómulo Betancourt, Jóvito Villalba and Raúl Leoni, would become the founders of Venezuelan democracy. Historians call them the Generation of 1928.

Gómez died of natural causes in December 1935, after twenty-seven years in power. Mobs in Caracas and Maracaibo looted the property of his family and associates. Many historians date modern Venezuela from that moment.

Part 4 — From dictatorship to the oil democracy (1935–1989)

Gómez's minister of war, General Eleazar López Contreras, succeeded him. He freed political prisoners and allowed exiles to return, and the first mass political organisations in the country's history appeared. When a general strike in 1936 frightened him, he cracked down, but he also created a central bank and adopted the slogan sembrar el petróleo. His successor, General Isaías Medina Angarita (1941–45), went further: a 1943 oil law substantially raised the state's revenue from the foreign companies, Venezuela got its first income tax and social security laws, and Betancourt's party, Acción Democrática (AD), was legalised.

The trienio (1945–1948)

On 18 October 1945, AD joined a lodge of young army officers in overthrowing Medina. A junta headed by Betancourt governed for three years, the trienio. In March 1946 it decreed universal suffrage for all citizens over eighteen, women included, and legalised all parties, among them the Christian Democratic COPEI, founded by Rafael Caldera. AD won overwhelmingly: 79% of the vote in the 1946 Constituent Assembly election and 73% in the general election of December 1947, which made the novelist Rómulo Gallegos, author of the classic plains novel Doña Bárbara, the first president elected by universal vote.

AD pushed hard: a law ensuring the state 50% of oil-company profits, a land reform, a vast expansion of public schools. It alienated the oil companies, landowners, the Church and the officers all at once. On 24 November 1948, after barely ten months in office, Gallegos was overthrown in a nearly bloodless coup.

Pérez Jiménez

The military junta voided the 1947 constitution and outlawed AD. Its leader, Colonel Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, was assassinated in November 1950, and his colleague Marcos Pérez Jiménez took control. When early returns in the 1952 election showed an opposition party far ahead, he halted the count and declared himself president.

What followed was a brutal dictatorship and a construction boom. The secret police, the Seguridad Nacional, hunted down opponents; hundreds, perhaps thousands, were tortured or killed, many at a prison camp on Guasina Island in the Orinoco. At the same time rising oil income paid for showpiece construction: a replica of New York's Rockefeller Center, a luxurious mountaintop hotel and what the Library of Congress study calls the world's most expensive officers' club. One estimate cited by the Library of Congress study holds that half the state's revenue was squandered or stolen; Pérez Jiménez left with a personal fortune estimated at US$250 million. His anticommunism won him American support; President Eisenhower awarded him the Legion of Merit in 1954.

In December 1957 a plebiscite announced, two hours after the polls closed, that 85% had voted for him to continue. Outrage was universal. Air-force planes bombed Caracas on 1 January 1958; civilian opposition groups, united in a clandestine Patriotic Junta, called mass demonstrations and a general strike. When the navy rebelled, army officers forced the dictator out. On 23 January 1958 he fled the country. About 300 people had been killed in the uprising.

The date became a political creed: the "spirit of 23 January", the idea that rival parties, unions, business and the Church could cooperate to keep the soldiers out of power.

Punto Fijo: the oil democracy, 1958–1989

In October 1958, before the December election, the leaders of the three main democratic parties, AD, COPEI and the Democratic Republican Union (URD), signed the Pact of Punto Fijo: whoever won, they would respect the result, share government posts and follow a common programme. A companion agreement guaranteed business that private property would be respected and expropriated land compensated. The pacts excluded one group, the extreme left, including the Communist Party.

Betancourt won with 49% of the vote and took office on 13 February 1959. According to the Library of Congress study, historians "invariably" treat his inauguration as the turning point of four centuries of Venezuelan history: for the next forty years, civilians governed without interruption.

Defending the new democracy

The first years were dangerous. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, part of AD's youth broke away to form the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), and with the Communists it launched a guerrilla war in 1961–62 under the banner of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN). From the right, the Dominican dictator Trujillo's agents bombed Betancourt's car in June 1960, badly burning him. Betancourt held firm, pursuing the "Betancourt Doctrine" of refusing recognition to any government, left or right, that took power by force.

The guerrillas never won over the poor, and the most honest elections in the country's history so far, on 1 December 1963, drew nearly 90% of voters despite threats. On 11 March 1964, for the first time in Venezuelan history, one elected president handed the sash to another, Raúl Leoni. In 1969 power passed peacefully to the opposition when Caldera of COPEI won by just 31,000 votes; his government offered guerrillas an amnesty and legalised their parties, and most laid down their arms.

OPEC and the oil state

Venezuela's oil minister, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, was the main architect of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), founded in 1960 by Venezuela with Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The Punto Fijo governments steadily raised the state's share of oil profits, to 60% in 1958 and to 70% by 1971.

Then came the windfall. The Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 and the oil embargo that followed quadrupled the price of crude in two months. Carlos Andrés Pérez (AD), elected in 1973 with 48.8% of the vote on a turnout of 97%, took office in 1974 with an extra US$6 billion a year to spend. He had promised to "manage abundance with the mentality of scarcity"; instead, as the Library of Congress study puts it, he embarked on a spending spree. Price controls, subsidies and cheap imported goods fed a consumer boom; Venezuelans became among the world's biggest per-head consumers of Scotch whisky. Public employment doubled to 750,000 in five years. The state built steel mills, aluminium smelters and hydroelectric dams in the Guayana region.

In August 1975, Congress approved the nationalisation of the oil industry. Fourteen foreign companies received about US$1 billion in compensation, a fraction of the assets' replacement cost, and were merged under a new state holding company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), headed at first by a respected technocrat, General Rafael Alfonso Ravard, and run for years with considerable independence from party politics.

The bill

By 1978 the public foreign debt had grown fivefold in four years, to nearly US$12 billion; the Pérez government, the Library of Congress study notes, spent more in five years than all previous governments in 143 years combined, and much was lost to mismanagement and kickbacks. Despite the boom, income distribution was less equal in 1976 than in 1960, and one study found 40% of the population ill-fed.

His successor, Luis Herrera Campins (COPEI), warned in 1979 that Venezuela could not go on as a nation that consumed "rivers of whiskey and oil", then abandoned austerity when oil prices jumped again. When prices softened in the early 1980s, the debt reached about US$32 billion and capital fled. In February 1983, remembered as Viernes Negro (Black Friday), the bolívar was devalued and exchange controls imposed. Growth, which had averaged 6.1% a year between 1974 and 1978, fell to an average of minus 1.2% between 1979 and 1983.

Punto Fijo democracy was real: forty years of free elections and peaceful handovers in a region of coups. It was also a club. Two parties, AD and COPEI, shared the state and its oil rents, and when the rents shrank, so did the club's legitimacy.

Part 5 — The Caracazo, Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (1989–2013)

By the end of the 1980s, the oil decline had eaten away at the middle class, and poverty had risen sharply. Carlos Andrés Pérez won a second term in December 1988 by campaigning against the International Monetary Fund and promising a return to the boom years. On taking office in February 1989 he did the opposite: facing nearly empty reserves and a large debt, he announced an IMF-backed shock programme, El Gran Viraje ("the Great Turn"), which included raising the price of petrol.

The Caracazo

On 27 February 1989, when bus fares rose overnight, commuters in Guarenas, outside Caracas, rebelled. Protest and looting spread to Caracas and other cities. The government sent in the army, and troops fired into poor neighbourhoods. The violence lasted about a week. The official count was 277 dead; independent estimates run into the thousands, and the true number is still unknown. The Caracazo shattered the image of Venezuela as a stable, prosperous democracy and became, for the left, the founding wound of the era that followed.

"Por ahora"

Within the army, a group of young officers had been organising for years in a secret lodge, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement. One was a lieutenant-colonel, Hugo Chávez Frías. On 4 February 1992, they attempted a coup against Pérez. It failed, and Chávez was allowed to appear on television to ask his comrades to lay down their arms. He took responsibility and said they had failed only por ahora, "for now". Many poor Venezuelans, in particular, saw a man who had stood up to a discredited government. A second coup attempt, by higher-ranking officers, failed on 27 November 1992.

In May 1993 Pérez became the first Venezuelan president to be impeached, on charges of embezzling 250 million bolívars; he was later imprisoned and then held under house arrest. In December 1993 voters returned Rafael Caldera, the 77-year-old founder of COPEI, who ran against his own old party. He faced a severe banking crisis in 1994 and re-imposed exchange controls; the same year, Chávez was released from prison.

1998

By 1998 many Venezuelans had given up on AD and COPEI altogether. Chávez founded the Fifth Republic Movement and ran for president promising to sweep away the old party system and rewrite the constitution. In December 1998 he won with 56.2% of the vote, on a 63% turnout. The two parties that had dominated Venezuelan politics for forty years collapsed.

The Caracazo of 1989 and the coup of 1992 are remembered very differently. For chavistas they were the people's awakening; for many others they were the moment violence re-entered Venezuelan politics. Both memories are sincerely held.

Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution, 1999–2013

No figure in modern Latin America divides opinion like Hugo Chávez. He won election after election, he gave millions of poor Venezuelans a sense of dignity and political voice they had never had, and he presided over a period in which poverty fell sharply. He also concentrated power, weakened the institutions that might have checked it, and left an economy dangerously dependent on oil and on the state. This part sets out both accounts, as their own advocates would state them, with the figures each side relies on.

A new republic

Chávez moved fast. A referendum approved a constituent assembly; the assembly, dominated by his supporters, wrote a new constitution, approved by 72% of voters in December 1999. It renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and enshrined a long list of social rights, including, after Indigenous organisations marched on Congress in September 1999, extensive rights for Indigenous peoples to their lands, languages and cultures. Chávez was re-elected under the new constitution in 2000 with 59.8%.

Coup and strike

In 2001 a new hydrocarbons law and a package of decree-laws alarmed business, the Church and much of the middle class. Opposition swelled. On 11 April 2002, a huge opposition march in Caracas ended in shootings that killed and wounded people, and military commanders removed Chávez. The business leader Pedro Carmona was installed as interim president; during his brief rule the National Assembly and the Supreme Court were dissolved and the 1999 constitution declared void. The overreach turned much of the army; crowds of chavistas gathered outside the presidential palace; and on 13–14 April loyal troops brought Chávez back.

From December 2002 to February 2003, the opposition, PDVSA's managers and the main labour federation staged a national strike and oil lockout that lasted more than two months and almost stopped oil production. When it collapsed, Chávez dismissed nearly 19,000 PDVSA employees, most of them experienced professionals, and brought the company under direct political control. In August 2004 the opposition forced a recall referendum; 59% voted to keep Chávez, on a 70% turnout, and international observers, including the Carter Center, endorsed the result.

The missions: the case for Chávez

With the opposition defeated and oil prices rising through the 2000s, Chávez poured oil revenue into social programmes called misiones:

The results, in the years of high oil prices, were striking. World Bank figures based on Venezuela's national poverty line show the share of people in poverty falling from 54.0% in 2003, in the wake of the strike, to 27.5% in 2007. Income inequality fell too: the Gini index, a standard measure, dropped from 48.0 in 1998 to 44.7 in 2006. Even ENCOVI, the independent survey run by Venezuelan universities that later documented the collapse, describes poverty as declining between 2005 and 2013 as oil prices rose. For supporters, the missions, the community councils and the constant elections amounted to a "participatory democracy" that put the poor majority, the descendants of the excluded pardos, at the centre of national life for the first time.

Abroad, Chávez used oil to build alliances. Through Petrocaribe and other schemes, Caribbean and Central American countries received Venezuelan oil on favourable terms, and Cuba sent doctors, teachers and other professionals. He became the leading voice of a resurgent Latin American left and of opposition to US policy in the region.

The case against

Critics, including many former allies, describe the same years differently. Their account rests on the following points.

Institutions. After the 2002–03 crisis, critics say, the government packed the Supreme Tribunal and brought the electoral council, the prosecutor's office and the armed forces under loyalist control, and used state money and media in elections. In 2007 it declined to renew the broadcast licence of RCTV, the most popular opposition-leaning television channel, which went off the air on 27 May 2007.

Term limits. In December 2007 voters narrowly rejected, by 51%, a constitutional reform that would have allowed indefinite re-election, Chávez's first defeat at the polls. In February 2009 a revised referendum abolishing term limits for all offices passed with 54%.

Expropriations. Using record oil revenues, the government nationalised key industries and expropriated numerous farms and businesses, from oil-service companies to, in 2011, the gold-mining industry. Price and currency controls were meant to protect the poor but bred shortages, a black market for dollars and vast opportunities for corruption.

Oil. PDVSA's payroll roughly tripled while, by most estimates, its oil production fell by hundreds of thousands of barrels a day. Instead of saving the windfall, the government spent it and borrowed, leaving the economy more dependent on oil than ever.

Poverty, revisited. The gains in poverty were real but rested on oil prices. The same World Bank series shows poverty rising again to 29.4% by 2013 and 33.1% by 2015, and ENCOVI's later surveys show it soaring once prices fell.

Chávez won re-election in 2006 with 62.8% and again in October 2012 with 55.1%, already ill with cancer. He was unable to be sworn in for his new term and died in Caracas on 5 March 2013, aged 58. Before he died he had named his vice-president and former foreign minister, a one-time union leader, Nicolás Maduro, as his chosen successor.

Chávez was both the most democratic and the least liberal president Venezuela had known: elected repeatedly by large majorities, and determined that no institution would stand between him and the people he claimed to embody.

Part 6 — Maduro: collapse, hyperinflation and exodus (2013–2023)

Maduro won the special election of April 2013 by the narrowest of margins, 50.61% to 49.12% for the opposition's Henrique Capriles, who disputed the result. A year later, in the second half of 2014, world oil prices collapsed. For a country whose exports were overwhelmingly oil, with no savings and an economy riddled with controls, it was a catastrophe.

The economic collapse

What followed was one of the deepest peacetime economic collapses anywhere in modern times. The World Bank's figures show the economy shrinking every year from 2014 to 2020; compounded, those annual declines mean that by 2020 Venezuela's output was roughly three-quarters smaller than in 2013. GDP per person fell from about US$13,650 in 2010 to about US$1,500 in 2020.

The Central Bank's figure for 2018, published only in May 2019, was 130,060%; the IMF estimated nearly a million percent for the same year. Prices doubled within weeks. In August 2018 the government introduced a new "sovereign bolívar", knocking five zeros off the currency, and inflation simply carried on. People carried stacks of banknotes to buy basic goods, and much of the economy shifted informally to US dollars.

The human cost was measured in hunger. Shortages of food and medicine became chronic. The ENCOVI survey run by Venezuelan universities found that by 2021, 94.5% of Venezuelans lived in income poverty and 76.6% in extreme poverty.

Why?

Here, too, the explanations divide. The government blamed an "economic war" waged by business and the United States, and above all US sanctions: financial sanctions in August 2017, which barred Venezuela from refinancing its debt in US markets, and oil sanctions on PDVSA from January 2019. Some economists agree that the sanctions did great damage; a 2019 report by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs estimated they had cost the country some US$38 billion between 2016 and 2019 and prevented a recovery. Most economists, and the World Bank figures, point out that the collapse began years before the oil sanctions: output and imports were already falling steeply in 2014–18, after years of price controls, expropriations, mismanagement of PDVSA and the absence of any savings from the boom. A fair summary is that the crisis was home-made, and that sanctions made it worse.

Politics: the road to authoritarianism

In December 2015 the opposition won a large majority in the National Assembly. The outgoing assembly packed the Supreme Tribunal with government allies, and the tribunal then stripped opposition deputies of their seats and, in effect, the assembly of its powers. In 2017, months of street protests followed; Maduro called the election of a National Constituent Assembly, boycotted by the opposition, which was installed in August 2017 and declared itself supreme over all other branches of government. Independent estimates put turnout far below the official figure.

In May 2018 Maduro was declared re-elected with 67.85% on a turnout of 45.73%, in an election that most of the opposition boycotted and many governments rejected. On 23 January 2019, citing the constitution, the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, swore himself in as interim president. The United States and many other governments recognised him. But the army stayed loyal to Maduro, and Guaidó's challenge slowly faded.

What the UN found

UN human-rights bodies documented a pattern of abuses. A report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, in July 2019 said that the government had itself registered 5,287 killings in 2018 for "resistance to authority" during security operations, and described arbitrary detentions, torture and "excessive use of force" against protesters. The UN Human Rights Council created an independent Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, which in September 2021 concluded that the justice system had become so "deeply eroded" that it played an important role in state repression. In November 2021 the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court opened a formal investigation into possible crimes against humanity.

The exodus

The result was the largest exodus in the modern history of the Americas. By mid-2019 the UN refugee agency estimated that about four million people had left in four years. By December 2025, according to UNHCR, there were nearly 7.9 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants worldwide, more than 6.9 million of them in Latin America and the Caribbean, most of them in neighbouring countries. Venezuela's population, which the World Bank puts at a peak of 30.8 million in 2016, fell to about 28.2 million by 2022.

A partial recovery

From around 2019 the government quietly relaxed many of its controls and tolerated the de facto use of the US dollar. Venezuela left hyperinflation in early 2022. The economy grew 8.1% in 2022, 4.0% in 2023 and 5.5% in 2024, according to the World Bank, though from a very low base, and inflation was still 190% in 2023. Since March 2022 the legal minimum wage has been 130 bolívars a month, about one US dollar, according to Human Rights Watch; most income now comes as bonuses and dollars.

Venezuela lost about three-quarters of its economy and about a quarter of its people in less than a decade, without a war.

Part 7 — The disputed election, the fall of Maduro and Venezuela in 2026 (2024–2026)

In 2023 María Corina Machado, a liberal engineer who had long been one of the government's fiercest critics, won the opposition's primary election. The government-aligned courts confirmed her disqualification from office in January 2024. The opposition united behind a little-known retired diplomat, Edmundo González Urrutia, as her stand-in.

28 July 2024

The presidential election was held on 28 July 2024. The National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Maduro the winner with 51.95% against 43.18% for González, without publishing results broken down by polling station. The opposition, which had had witnesses at most polling stations, collected and published copies of the official tally sheets (actas) printed by the voting machines from a majority of polling centres; by its count, González had won about 67% and Maduro about 30%.

Independent observers sided with the critics. The Carter Center, which had observed the vote, said on 30 July 2024 that the election had not met international standards of electoral integrity "and cannot be considered democratic", and that the CNE's failure to announce disaggregated results was a serious breach of electoral principles. A UN panel of electoral experts made similar criticisms in a report made public in August 2024. On 22 August 2024, the Supreme Tribunal, at Maduro's request, declared the CNE's result "validated". Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Cuba recognised Maduro; most Western and many Latin American governments did not.

Protests broke out, above all in poor neighbourhoods that had once been chavista strongholds. The government responded with what it called "Operación Tun Tun" ("Operation Knock Knock"), a nationwide campaign of arrests. According to Human Rights Watch, 24 protesters and bystanders died, many at the hands of security forces and armed pro-government groups (colectivos), and thousands were detained. González left for asylum in Spain on 7 September 2024. Maduro was sworn in for a third term on 10 January 2025. In September 2025, the UN Fact-Finding Mission reiterated that acts of "extreme cruelty" before and after the election amounted to crimes against humanity.

The government's account was that its institutions had lawfully certified the result and that the opposition, with foreign backing, was attempting a coup. No independent observer endorsed the official result.

2025: the pressure builds

In July 2025 Venezuela released 10 US citizens and residents and 80 Venezuelan nationals in exchange for 252 Venezuelan migrants whom the United States had deported to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador, according to Human Rights Watch. In October 2025 the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Machado "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy". Through the autumn the United States built up a large naval force in the Caribbean, carried out a series of deadly strikes on boats it said were carrying drugs, and seized sanctioned oil tankers. As of 3 November 2025, the human-rights group Foro Penal counted 884 political prisoners in Venezuela.

3 January 2026

Then, in the early hours of 3 January 2026, US forces struck targets in and around Caracas and captured Maduro and Flores, who were flown to New York to face a 2020 narco-terrorism indictment. Venezuela's government called it an "extremely serious military aggression". Cuba said 32 of its military and security personnel, part of Maduro's protection, had been killed. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he was "deeply alarmed" and that the action set a "dangerous precedent"; the Security Council split, with Russia and China among the strongest critics, and some Latin American governments, such as Paraguay's, welcoming Maduro's removal while calling for a democratic transition.

Two truths sit uncomfortably together. Most Venezuelans, by every independent measure, wanted Maduro gone and had voted him out. And his removal came not through their votes but through a foreign military raid, which many governments and international lawyers saw as a breach of international law.

Venezuela in 2026

What followed Maduro's capture was not a revolution but a negotiated continuity. Delcy Rodríguez, his vice-president, became acting president, with the security forces and the ruling party's structures largely intact. Under heavy US pressure, her government moved quickly on several fronts.

Prisoners and amnesty

More than 100 political prisoners were released within ten days of the raid; UN investigators noted on 12 January that, of an estimated 800 political prisoners, only about 50 appeared to have been freed at that point. In February 2026 Rodríguez signed an amnesty law, which excluded people convicted of murder, drug trafficking, corruption or human-rights violations. Hundreds of prisoners were eventually released.

But on 16 September 2026, the UN Fact-Finding Mission reported that the institutions responsible for repression and crimes against humanity "remain fundamentally intact": laws used to criminalise opponents were still in force, the intelligence services and security forces kept the same structures and practices, the colectivos had not been disarmed, and at least 19 officials the mission had previously identified for gross violations remained in, or had been moved to, key posts. It also recorded improvements: a significant decline in long-term detentions and enforced disappearances. "The reduction in some of the harshest forms of repression is notable," said its chair, Sofía Macher, but it was not yet a transformation of the system.

Oil and Washington

The United States reopened its embassy in Caracas on 14 March 2026. On 30 August 2026, President Trump hailed a "historic" deal giving the United States control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven reserves, the world's largest; Venezuela said it covered the development of 17 strategic oil fields. Rodríguez said the deal would run for 25 years, target an increase in output to 1.5 million barrels a day and preserve Venezuela's sovereignty over its resources; opposition figures including Henrique Capriles criticised it.

The earthquakes

On 24 June 2026, two powerful earthquakes, of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 according to the US Geological Survey, struck northern Venezuela. A month later the BBC reported more than 5,300 confirmed deaths and more than 16,500 injured, with tens of thousands still missing; the official toll had been disputed from the start. Families searching for the dead in La Guaira and elsewhere became the defining images of the year.

Elections?

Addressing the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2026, Rodríguez said Venezuela was "being reborn", thanked the Trump administration for restoring relations, and promised: "There will be elections." She said political talks were under way so that all sides could compete on an equal footing. On 25 October 2026 María Corina Machado returned to Venezuela after more than ten months abroad.

Maduro and Flores, meanwhile, remain in custody in New York awaiting trial.

The country in numbers

Part 8 — How to understand Venezuela today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. Oil made the state, and the state made politics. Since the 1920s, Venezuela's government has received most of the country's foreign earnings directly, from oil, rather than taxing its citizens. That made the state rich and the presidency the ultimate prize, and turned politics into a fight over the distribution of oil rent. Gómez, Pérez Jiménez, Punto Fijo, Chávez and Maduro all ran versions of the same petro-state, and when the oil price fell, each in turn ran into trouble. "Sowing the oil", turning that rent into a productive economy, remains the unfinished task of the century.

2. Bolívar is everyone's. The Liberator is the country's civic religion. Every government uses his image, his sword and his words; Chávez went furthest, renaming the republic after him. To understand any Venezuelan political speech, listen for which Bolívar is being quoted: the democrat, the soldier, the anti-imperialist or the man who feared anarchy.

3. The excluded majority. From the colonial pardos to the residents of the hillside barrios who rose in 1989 and voted for Chávez in 1998, a large part of Venezuela's history is the story of a mixed-race, poor majority demanding a place in a state run by others. Chavismo's enduring strength came from speaking to that demand; its collapse came when it could no longer feed the people it spoke for. Any lasting settlement will have to answer the same demand.

4. Soldiers never left politics for long. Caudillos on horseback ruled for a century; Gómez and Pérez Jiménez were generals; the 1945 and 1948 coups and the 1992 attempts came from the barracks; Chávez was a paratrooper; and under Maduro officers ran ministries and, from 2018, even the state oil company. The forty years of Punto Fijo, when civilians ruled, are the exception, and the question of what the army will accept is still central in 2026.

5. A divided memory. For chavistas, the Punto Fijo years were a corrupt pact of elites, the Caracazo a massacre of the poor, and the revolution the moment the people took power, later strangled by US sanctions and now ended by US troops. For their opponents, Punto Fijo was the best democracy Latin America had, Chávez the man who destroyed it, and the collapse the inevitable result of his policies. Most Venezuelans hold some of both views. Any history, this one included, must be read knowing that.

Venezuela is not a poor country that became rich, or a rich country that became poor. It is a country that has been very rich and very poor at the same time, and has spent a century arguing about why.

The takeaway

Venezuela was a land of many small Indigenous peoples, conquered slowly and violently by Spanish slavers, German bankers and missionaries, and turned into a cocoa colony whose majority were mixed-race pardos excluded from power. It produced Spanish America's greatest liberator, Simón Bolívar, at the cost of a war that killed perhaps a third of the population, followed by a century of caudillos. Oil, from 1917 on, made it a petro-state: Gómez's dictatorship, then, after 1958, the forty-year Punto Fijo democracy, the 1976 nationalisation and a boom that ended in debt and the Caracazo of 1989. Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution, elected in 1998, cut poverty sharply during an oil boom while concentrating power; under Nicolás Maduro, the oil crash, mismanagement and later sanctions shrank the economy by about three-quarters, unleashed hyperinflation and drove nearly 7.9 million people abroad. After an election in 2024 that independent observers said Maduro did not win, US forces seized him in January 2026. As of October 2026, an acting government drawn from his own camp promises elections that have not yet been scheduled, while the repressive structures the UN documented largely remain.

Try this: pick one Venezuelan you know of, a neighbour, a colleague, a footballer, a musician in exile, and ask yourself which of the eight parts of this story their family lived through. Then read the Spanish companion piece Si Hubiera Nacido en Venezuela and compare its picture of daily life with the numbers in Part 7. The gap between them is where most Venezuelans have lived for the last decade.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Richard A. Haggerty (ed.), Venezuela: A Country Study (Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, 1990), historical, economic and energy chapters, via countrystudies.us: conquest, Welsers, colonial society (pardos, enslaved and Indigenous shares), cocoa and the Caracas Company, independence and its human cost, caudillos, Gómez and oil, the trienio, Pérez Jiménez, Punto Fijo, OPEC, the 1973–83 boom and debt, election results to 1983.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated 8 October 2026): GDP growth, GDP per person, population, life expectancy, Gini index, national poverty headcount, homicide rate (UNODC).
- Banco Central de Venezuela inflation series, as published (2016–2019 figures released May 2019; 2022–23).
- ENCOVI (Encuesta Nacional de Condiciones de Vida, Universidad Católica Andrés Bello and partners): 2021 results (income poverty 94.5%, extreme 76.6%) and 2025 results, published 7 May 2026.
- UNHCR, Venezuela situation (December 2025 figures).
- UN News: Bachelet report (5 July 2019); Fact-Finding Mission on the justice system (16 September 2021); Guterres on the US operation and Security Council debate (3–5 January 2026); prisoner releases (12 January 2026); Fact-Finding Mission report (16 September 2026); Rodríguez at the General Assembly (23 September 2026).
- The Carter Center, statement on the Venezuelan election, 30 July 2024.
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, Venezuela chapter (post-election repression, CECOT exchange, political prisoners, wages, undernourishment).
- Nobel Prize Outreach, Nobel Peace Prize 2025 summary.
- 2026 events: Al Jazeera (Cuban deaths, 5 January; US embassy reopening, 14 March); BBC News (one month after the earthquakes, 24 July; US–Venezuela oil deal, 30 August); US Geological Survey event pages for the 24 June earthquakes; CNN (Machado's return, 25 October 2026).
- Leads and cross-checks (not cited as authorities): English Wikipedia articles on the Caracazo, Hugo Chávez, the Bolivarian missions, PDVSA, the 2002 coup, the 2024 election and the crisis in Venezuela, each followed back to the sources above where possible.

Go deeper
- 📘 Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela — Rory Carroll (a Guardian correspondent's vivid, critical portrait of the Chávez court)
- 📘 Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse — William Neuman (a New York Times bureau chief on the collapse under Maduro)
- 📘 The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela — Fernando Coronil (the classic anthropology of the petro-state, sympathetic to the left)
- 📘 Bolívar: American Liberator — Marie Arana (an absorbing, prize-winning life of the Liberator)
- 📘 Doña Bárbara — Rómulo Gallegos (the 1929 novel of the plains, by the president who was overthrown in 1948)
- 🌐 The Carter Center: Venezuela election statement, July 2024 (the observers' verdict in their own words)
- 🌐 UNHCR: Venezuela situation (the latest figures on the exodus)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: in Spanish, Si Hubiera Nacido en Venezuela: Calor, Ingenio y la Fuerza de la Familia, La Independencia: Cómo Nació un Continente and Las Dictaduras del Siglo XX y el Regreso de la Democracia en América Latina; in English, A Brief History of Mexico in this series.