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.
Military career of Simón Bolívar
The idea of independence for Spanish America had existed for several years among a minority of the residents of northern South America. In 1797 the Venezuelans Manuel Gual and José María España, inspired by exiled Spaniard Juan Bautista Picornell, unsuccessfully attempted to establish a republic in Venezuela with greater social equality for Venezuelans of all racial and social backgrounds. Nine years later, in 1806 long-time Venezuelan expatriate Francisco de Miranda led a small group of mostly British and American foreign volunteers in an attempt to take over Venezuela and set up an independent republic. Like Gual and España's conspiracy, Miranda's putsch failed to attract Venezuelans of any social and economic class, in fact local Venezuelans organized the resistance to Miranda's invasion and quickly dispersed it. The lack of interest on the part of the Venezuelan Criollos is often explained by their fear that the loss of the removal of Spanish control might bring about a revolution that would destroy their own power in Venezuela. Nevertheless, in the decades leading up to 1806, Criollos had often been at odds with the Spanish Crown: they wanted an expansion of the free trade that was benefiting their plantation economy and objected to the Crown's new policy of granting social privileges that had been traditionally been reserved for whites ("españoles") to Pardos through the purchase of certificates of whiteness ("gracias al sacar"). So the Criollos' failure to support Gual, España and Miranda, which would have created a state under their control, needs to also be understood by the fact that a national identity separate from the Spanish had not yet emerged among them.