Spain–Venezuela relations
News of Spanish losses in the 1808 Napoleonic Wars soon reached Latin America, but only on 19 April 1810 did the "cabildo" (city council) of Caracas decide to follow the example set by the Spanish provinces two years earlier. On 5 July 1811, seven of the ten provinces of the Captaincy General of Venezuela declared their independence in the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence. The First Republic of Venezuela was lost in 1812 following the 1812 Caracas earthquake and the Battle of La Victoria (1812). Simón Bolívar led an "Admirable Campaign" to retake Venezuela, establishing the Second Republic of Venezuela in 1813, but this did not last long either, falling to a combination of a local uprising and Spanish royalist reconquest.
American Confederation of Venezuela
Beginning in February 1814, royalist commander José Tomás Boves began a campaign to retake Venezuelan territory captured by revolutionaries, beginning the decline of the Second Republic of Venezuela. Following the Second Battle of La Puerta on 15 June 1814 which resulted in a royalist victory for Boves, Bolívar, his revolutionaries and more than twenty-thousand civilians fled Caracas during the Emigration to the East beginning on 7 July 1814. Following the royalist victory in the Fifth Battle of Maturín on 11 December 1814, the republic came to an end and Bolívar left to Jamaica.