I. The Forgotten Context
The historical background of the relationship between Venezuela and the USA easily gets ignored or forgotten in a complex equation of economic, political and strategic interest of the big powers in the 21st century.While a lot of what is happening today may seem new, the strategic interests do not necessarily change, but rather their political pretext and not the substance behind it.
South America is a continent with a history full of uncertainty, political upheaval and revolution. Stability is something local political leadership cannot guarantee to their population — in some cases due to personal interests and high level corruption of the political class, foreign interference and/or external pressure.
To understand Venezuela-US relations, we need to look at Venezuela in local historical context and then the history of US political and military expansion across the Americas and their interests in Venezuela in particular.
II. Spanish Colonial Rule: Aims, Governance and the Viceroyalty System
Spain’s colonisation of the Americas was driven by three interconnected objectives: the extraction of material wealth, the expansion of Crown sovereignty, and the conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity. To govern its vast new territories, the Spanish Crown established the Council of the Indies in 1524, the body responsible for overseeing all colonial legislation and administration. The colonies themselves were governed through a Viceroyalty system, with a Crown-appointed Viceroy acting as the king’s direct representative. The economic backbone of these territories rested on the encomienda system, under which conquistadors and settlers were granted rights to indigenous labour in exchange for nominal obligations of protection and religious instruction — a system which in practice amounted to forced servitude. Spain initially divided its American possessions into two vast Viceroyalties: the Viceroyalty of New Spain, established in 1535 and covering Mexico and Central America, and the Viceroyalty of Peru, established in 1542, which governed most of Spanish South America from its capital in Lima. Venezuela, however, occupied an ambiguous position in this structure. Lacking the mineral wealth of Peru or Mexico, the Venezuelan territories attracted comparatively little colonial investment and were governed at different points through the distant Audiencia of Santo Domingo, tied to New Spain, rather than from Lima. This relative neglect, and the distinct creole society that developed as a result, would later prove fertile ground for the independence movement that reshaped the continent in the early nineteenth century.
III. The Bourbon Reforms and the Viceroyalty of New Granada
In the early 1700s, the death of the childless King Charles II of Spain (Habsburg dynasty) and the coronation of Philip, Duke of Anjou, grandson of King Louis XIV of France (Bourbon dynasty) as King of Spain led to the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The conflict arose from a multitude of factors — fears of a Franco-Spanish union, competing dynastic claims by other European monarchies among others. Following the peace agreements at Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714), King Philip moved ahead with wide-ranging administrative reforms within Spain and its Viceroyalties overseas. As part of those reforms, the Viceroyalty of New Granada was formed, encompassing territories from present-day Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela, with Santa Fe — present-day Bogotá — appointed as its capital city. The reorganisation of these territories reflected the growing strategic and commercial importance of the region, in particular the need for stronger defence against British expansion in the Caribbean.
IV. The First Stirrings of Independence
In 1810, most of the jurisdictions within New Granada had ejected their Spanish officials. The independence movement started with the deposition of the Spanish Captain-General in Caracas, Venezuela on 19 April 1810 — widely recognised as the first major independence declaration within the Viceroyalty of New Granada. This led to further independence uprisings across the region, with New Granada (Colombia) following Venezuela in July of the same year, Ecuador between 1810 and 1812, and Panama in 1821.
V. Venezuelan Independence and the Role of Miranda
The municipal council of Caracas deposed the Spanish Captain-General and formed an autonomous junta. The Venezuelan uprising influenced neighbouring provinces, part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Francisco de Miranda was appointed in charge of the junta, and independence was formally declared on 5 July 1811, making Venezuela the first Spanish-American colony to do so. In early 1813, Simón Bolívar was appointed as commander of the Venezuelan forces.
VI. The Three Republics: Venezuela’s Struggle for Statehood (1810–1819)
To understand how Venezuelan historians frame the country’s political development, it is important to note that the period between the first independence declaration in 1810 and the formation of Gran Colombia in 1819 is divided into three distinct republican periods. The First Republic (1810–1812) began with the formal declaration of independence on 5 July 1811, under the leadership of Francisco de Miranda, who assumed dictatorial powers to govern the young state. The republic proved fragile from the outset: three provinces refused to recognise the Caracas junta, royalist forces regrouped, and a devastating earthquake in March 1812 struck predominantly republican territory, undermining public confidence in the new government. Miranda capitulated to Spanish royalist forces on 25 July 1812, ending the First Republic. Simón Bolívar then launched the Admirable Campaign from neighbouring New Granada, retaking Caracas by August 1813 and proclaiming the Second Republic (1813–1814). This too collapsed within a year, as royalist forces under José Tomás Boves — who rallied the mixed-race llanero plainsmen against the criollo-led republic — inflicted a series of decisive military defeats, forcing Bolívar into exile. The Third Republic (1817–1819) emerged when Bolívar returned with Haitian support, establishing a republican base in the Llanos and the city of Angostura, and consolidating the military and political structures that ultimately enabled the creation of Gran Colombia in December 1819.
VII. Gran Colombia: Unity, Division and Collapse (1819–1830)
The formation of Gran Colombia in December 1819 thus represented not a clean break from Spanish rule, but the hard-won culmination of nearly a decade of failed republics, military reversals and persistent armed struggle.
The Republic of Gran Colombia (1819–1830), comprising the same regions that had formed part of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada, was established in December 1819, with Simón Bolívar appointed as its first president. The newly formed republic faced multiple existential dangers. Gran Colombia united modern Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama, but these regions had different identities, elites and interests, making central governance extremely unstable. A deep ideological divide emerged between President Bolívar and his Vice President Francisco de Paula Santander. While Bolívar wanted a strong, centralised executive to hold the vast republic together, Santander and many New Granada elites favoured federalism, local autonomy and legalistic republicanism. Bolívar faced repeated uprisings from regional military strongmen who commanded local loyalty, a weakened economy resulting from the wars, and Spanish attempts at reclaiming Gran Colombia for the crown. By 1830, both Venezuela and Ecuador had broken away from the republic and become independent.
VIII. The Fourth Republic: Caudillos, Oil and the Punto Fijo Era (1830–1999)
This period of Venezuelan history known as the Fourth Republic is beginning with the secession from Gran Colombia in 1830 and ending in 1999 with the adoption of the new Constitution under Hugo Chávez.It covers nearly two centuries of Venezuelan political history and contains within it sharply contrasting periods. For much of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, Venezuela was governed by a succession of caudillos — autocratic leaders who ruled by force and personal loyalty rather than constitutional authority. The most significant of these was Juan Vicente Gómez, who held power from 1908 until his death in 1935 and effectively modernised the Venezuelan state while maintaining an iron grip on political life. It was under Gómez that Venezuela’s oil industry emerged as the dominant force in the national economy, transforming the country from an agrarian backwater into one of the world’s leading petroleum exporters — a transformation that would define Venezuela’s fortunes, both good and bad, for the remainder of the twentieth century.
Following Gómez’s death, Venezuela passed through a transitional period of military-influenced governments before arriving at its first genuine experiment with democracy. The Punto Fijo Pact, signed on 31 October 1958 by Venezuela’s three main political parties — Acción Democrática (AD), the Social Christian Party (COPEI) and the Democratic Republican Union (URD) — established a formal power-sharing arrangement in the aftermath of the military dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. The signatories committed to respecting election results, preventing single-party dominance and collaborating to protect the new democratic system. For several decades this arrangement delivered an initially prosperous period of stability, with oil revenues funding social programmes and successive civilian governments completing their terms. However, the system carried the seeds of its own collapse. Power gradually consolidated between AD and COPEI, with oil wealth used to sustain patronage networks and political clientelism rather than build lasting institutions. When global oil prices fell sharply in the 1980s, the economic foundations of the Punto Fijo system crumbled. The Caracazo of February 1989 — a wave of violent protests triggered by fuel price increases and austerity measures, suppressed by the military at a cost of hundreds of civilian lives — exposed the depth of public disillusionment. By the late 1990s, the system had ended in widespread poverty and economic collapse, opening the political space for a radical alternative.
IX. The Fifth Republic: Chávez, the Bolivarian Revolution and Maduro (1999–Present)
The rise of Hugo Chávez to power and the Venezuelan constitutional reform defined the period of the Fifth Republic. The country was in a state of near economic collapse and widespread poverty. Chávez — a former army lieutenant colonel who had led a failed coup attempt in 1992 and been pardoned in 1994 — ran on a platform of radical constitutional reform, promising to dismantle what he described as a corrupt and exclusionary political establishment. Upon taking office in February 1999, his first act was to call a referendum on convening a new constituent assembly. The 1999 Constitution, approved by popular referendum in December of that year and the first Venezuelan constitution ever submitted to a public vote, formally renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela — a deliberate invocation of Simón Bolívar — and significantly restructured the organs of state, expanding executive powers and enshrining extensive social rights including free healthcare and education.
Chávez’s governing programme, which he termed the Bolivarian Revolution, combined state nationalisation of key industries, extensive social welfare programmes funded by oil revenues — known as the Bolivarian Missions — and a deliberately confrontational posture toward the United States and Western economic institutions. During the peak oil revenue years of the mid-2000s, measurable gains in poverty reduction and literacy were recorded. However, the model’s structural dependence on oil revenues left it acutely vulnerable. Chávez dissolved his original political vehicle in 2007 to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela — PSUV), which consolidated Chavista political dominance under a single party structure and remains the ruling party to this day.
Following Chávez’s death from cancer in March 2013, his designated successor and former vice president Nicolás Maduro narrowly won the subsequent presidential election and has held power since. Under Maduro, the authoritarian character of the Fifth Republic deepened considerably: independent institutions were systematically undermined, the opposition suppressed and elections widely condemned as neither free nor fair. Venezuela experienced one of the most severe economic collapses in modern Latin American history, with millions of citizens fleeing the country. To sustain the regime, Maduro deepened Venezuela’s strategic alignments with Russia and China — and to a lesser extent Cuba and Iran — each providing distinct support: China as a major creditor and diplomatic shield at the United Nations, Russia as a military supplier and geopolitical guarantor. This alignment positioned Venezuela firmly in opposition to US interests in the region, setting the stage for the deterioration of relations examined in the remainder of this article.
The story of how Venezuela arrived at this point — a country sitting atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, estimated at approximately 303 billion barrels* (self-reported, and exceeding Saudi Arabia’s reserves by roughly 13%) — yet experiencing hyperinflation and severe economic deterioration, primarily the result of decades of economic mismanagement, structural dependence on a single commodity sector, and the compounding effect of US sanctions — ultimately leaving Venezuela economically dependent on patronage and strategic partnership with powers challenging the US geopolitical dominance in the 21 century — cannot be understood without examining the other side of the equation: the long history of American ambition in the Western Hemisphere, which is the subject of a companion article examining the historical background of US interests in South America — and the strategic logic behind American intervention (from a US perspective) — in more detail.
* Venezuela’s reserve figures are self-reported and published but not independently verified by OPEC, and independent audits have never been conducted.
Sources:
Venezuelan History — Colonial Period and Independence
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Viceroyalty of Peru
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Viceroyalty of New Granada
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Francisco de Miranda
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Simón Bolívar
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Gran Colombia
- World History Encyclopedia — Spanish Colonial Government in the Americas
Fourth and Fifth Republic
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Venezuela: History
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Punto Fijo Pact
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Hugo Chávez
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Nicolás Maduro
Monroe Doctrine and US Foreign Policy
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Monroe Doctrine
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Roosevelt Corollary
- Brookings Institution — US-Venezuela relations
- UK House of Commons Library — Venezuela country profile
Oil Reserves
- Visual Capitalist — Venezuela oil reserves comparison (January 2026)
- Newsweek — Venezuela proven oil reserves (January 2026)
- Al Jazeera — Venezuela oil exports and reserves (September 2025)
- OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin 2025
January 2026 Events
- CBS News — Operation Absolute Resolve reporting
- Brookings Institution — Venezuela 2026 analysis
