Venezuela

Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, holds the northern shore of South America between Colombia, Brazil and Guyana with islands scattered in the Caribbean, twenty-three states round the Capital District of Caracas, the most urbanised country of Latin America. Spain planted its towns from 1522 against stubborn Indigenous resistance, ruling through cacao plantations worked by enslaved Africans. On 5 July 1811 the Caracas junta declared independence among the first in Spanish America, and after a decade of war the land entered Bolívar's Gran Colombia, leaving it again as a sovereign republic in 1830 under Páez. The nineteenth century belonged to regional caudillos and their private armies, coffee and cacao paying for little but war. Oil changed everything: struck in force in the 1910s, it made Venezuela rich within a generation and drew millions to the cities of the north. Dictators spent the windfall until the democratic governments that began in 1958 steadied the republic, an exception while its neighbours stayed under arms. Venezuela broke with the Axis in 1945.