Venezuela

• 1. Introduction

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  Venezuela sits on the northern edge of South America, officially known as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and it holds something that much of the world wants: the largest known oil reserves on the planet. Yet more than 7.9 million of its citizens have fled the country. Almost 82 percent of those who remain live in poverty. A nation swimming in oil wealth has somehow arrived at a place where, in the mid-2010s, a study found that 15 percent of Venezuelans were eating food waste discarded by commercial establishments.

  How does a country with so much end up with so little? The answer runs through colonizers and liberators, through democratic promises made and broken, through a political revolution named after a 19th-century hero, and through the peculiar curse that oil can sometimes inflict on a nation's soul. Venezuela's story is also one of extraordinary natural beauty, a land that contains Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall, and harbors enough biological diversity to rank among the ten most biodiverse countries on Earth.

  In January 2026, the United States captured President Nicolas Maduro and flew him out of the country, an act legal experts believe likely violated the United Nations Charter. Vice President Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in as acting president. What brought Venezuela to that moment, and what comes next, is what this documentary will explore.

• 2. Before Columbus

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  Human beings have lived in what is now Venezuela for roughly 15,000 years. On the high riverine terraces of the Rio Pedregal in western Venezuela, stone tools have been found that mark their ancient presence. Hunting artifacts, including spear tips, recovered from sites in the northwest have been dated by radiocarbon analysis to between 13,000 and 7,000 BC.

  Before Spanish ships arrived, an estimated one million people lived across the territory. Among the many groups, the Timoto-Cuica culture stood apart as the most complex. They built planned permanent villages surrounded by irrigated, terraced fields. Their houses were made of stone and wood with thatched roofs. They grew crops including potatoes and ullucos, wove textiles from vegetable fibers, and left behind anthropomorphic ceramics. They are credited with inventing the arepa, still a staple of Venezuelan cuisine today.

  Other groups, including the Kalina, the Auake, the Caquetio, and the Mariche, populated the region. Two broad corridors of population ran north to south, with communities in the west cultivating maize and those in the east working with manioc. The great plains of the llanos were farmed through a combination of slash and burn and more permanent agriculture. When the Spanish arrived, all of this would be upended. Infectious diseases from Europe drove the population down sharply after conquest.

• 3. Colony, Name, and Gold

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  In 1498, Christopher Columbus sailed near the Orinoco Delta during his third voyage to the Americas and landed in the Gulf of Paria. The enormous rush of fresh water flowing offshore astonished him. He wrote to the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand describing it as evidence of the terrestrial paradise, quoting in a letter: "Great signs are these of the Terrestrial Paradise... for I have never read or heard of such a large quantity of fresh water being inside and in such close proximity to salt water."

  The name Venezuela has a notably human origin. In 1499, an expedition led by Alonso de Ojeda visited the Venezuelan coast. The Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci noticed that the stilt houses near Lake Maracaibo reminded him of Venice, Italy, and he named the region Veneziola, or Little Venice. A member of that same crew, Martin Fernandez de Enciso, offered a different account in his work Summa de geografia, claiming the local Indigenous people called themselves the Veneciuela. Whether European analogy or native word, the name stuck.

  Spain formally began colonizing mainland Venezuela in 1522, establishing its first permanent South American settlement at Cumana. In the 16th century, the Spanish crown handed the Welser family of Germany a remarkable concession: the right to explore, rule, and colonize the territory, and to search for the mythical golden city of El Dorado. The Welsers were bankers to the Habsburgs and had financed Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Ambrosius Ehinger led the first expedition and established Maracaibo in 1529. The German initiative, known as Klein-Venedig, ran from 1528 to 1546 and involved transporting German miners to the colony, along with 4,000 enslaved Africans to work sugar cane plantations. The venture ended violently: after the deaths of Ehinger in 1533, Nikolaus Federmann, and Georg von Speyer in 1540, the last leader Philipp von Hutten returned to the capital Santa Ana de Coro in 1546 only to be executed by the Spanish governor Juan de Carvajal. Charles V then revoked the Welser family concession entirely.

  Among the Indigenous leaders who resisted Spanish incursions, Guaicaipuro and Tamanaco became notable enough in the 16th century that place names including Caracas, Chacao, and Los Teques are today linked to their memory.

• 4. Wars of Independence

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  Francisco de Miranda had fought in both the American and French Revolutions before returning to lead Venezuela toward independence. On the 11th of July 1811, Venezuela declared independence as the First Republic. The republic was short-lived. A devastating earthquake struck Caracas in 1812, and the rebellion of the Venezuelan llaneros, the plainsmen, helped bring the republic down.

  Simon Bolivar took up the cause. Launching what became known as the Admirable Campaign in 1813 from New Granada, he retook most of the territory and was proclaimed El Libertador. A Second Republic was proclaimed on the 7th of August 1813, but royalist caudillo Jose Tomas Boves and his personal army of llaneros crushed it within months. The end of the French invasion of Spain in 1814 freed a large expeditionary force under General Pablo Morillo to retake Venezuela and New Granada.

  By 1817 the war had reached a stalemate. Bolivar reestablished a Third Republic on territory still held by patriot forces, mainly in the Guayana and Llanos regions. Two years later, at the Congress of Angostura in 1819, Venezuela was joined with New Granada to form the Republic of Colombia. The war finally ended with full victory at the Battle of Carabobo on the 24th of June 1821. On the 24th of July 1823, Jose Prudencio Padilla and Rafael Urdaneta sealed Venezuelan independence with their victory at the Battle of Lake Maracaibo.

  Venezuela remained part of Gran Colombia until 1830, when a rebellion led by Jose Antonio Paez allowed the proclamation of a newly independent Venezuela on the 22nd of September. The cost of those two decades of war was staggering. Between one-quarter and one-third of the population perished, including roughly half of all Venezuelans of European descent. By 1830 the country's total population was estimated at 800,000. Slavery in Venezuela was abolished in 1854.

• 5. Oil and the 20th Century

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  The discovery of massive oil deposits in Lake Maracaibo during World War I transformed everything. Venezuela's economy, previously dominated by coffee and cocoa exports, pivoted sharply. By 1935, Venezuela's per capita gross domestic product was the highest in Latin America. Juan Vicente Gomez, who had seized power in 1908 with the help of Cipriano Castro, ruled until his death in 1935, benefiting from oil revenues while corruption thrived.

  By the late 1970s, a phrase attributed to Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso had become a common expression in Venezuela: he called oil "the Devil's excrement." That phrase captured something real. Corruption had deepened alongside oil wealth, and the Corruption Perceptions Index has ranked Venezuela as one of the most corrupt countries every year since the survey began in 1995.

  In 1958, dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was forced out on the 23rd of January. The three major political parties, Accion Democratica, COPEI, and Union Republicana Democratica, signed the Puntofijo Pact, a power-sharing agreement that excluded the Communist Party. AD and COPEI dominated Venezuelan politics for four decades. During that period, Carlos Andres Perez's 1973 presidential election coincided with an oil crisis that caused Venezuela's income to explode, and oil industries were nationalized in 1976. The boom funded massive public spending but also drove up external debt. When oil prices collapsed in the 1980s, the economy buckled.

  The Caracazo riots of 1989 left hundreds dead, killed by security forces and the military after the government implemented economic austerity measures. Hugo Chavez, who had promised as early as 1982 to depose the bipartisanship governments, used that public anger to justify a coup attempt in February 1992. A second coup attempt followed in November. President Perez was impeached on embezzlement charges in 1993. Coup leader Chavez was pardoned in March 1994 by President Rafael Caldera, with his political rights fully reinstated.

• 6. The Bolivarian Revolution

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  Chavez won the 1998 presidential election amid a collapse of confidence in the existing parties. The Bolivarian Revolution he launched drew its name from Simon Bolivar and sought, according to Chavez and his supporters, to build popular democracy, economic independence, equitable distribution of revenues, and an end to political corruption. In 1999 a new Constitution was written and ratified through a constituent assembly.

  The early years showed genuine social gains. From 2002 to 2011, the poverty rate declined from 48.6 percent to 29.5 percent. The economy grew by 95 percent from 2003 to 2010. Social spending per person tripled. During Mission Robinson, nearly 1.5 million adults learned to read. From 2006 to 2013, Venezuela moved up seven spots on the Human Development Index, reaching 73 out of 187 countries. Income inequality fell and the quality of life improved at the third fastest rate worldwide during the Chavez administration.

  But the foundation was fragile. Crude oil accounted for 86 percent of Venezuela's exports. PDVSA's external debt grew from $3 billion to $35 billion between 2006 and 2013. The currency was overvalued, making diversification away from oil more challenging. Chavez was briefly ousted in a coup attempt in 2002 and returned after two days when military support for the coup collapsed and his supporters mobilized. He won elections in 1998, 2000, 2006, and 2012 and survived a recall referendum in 2004. The first US sanctions against Venezuelan officials were imposed in 2008. Chavez won a third term in October 2012 but never took the oath due to medical complications. His death was officially announced on the 5th of March 2013. He had designated Nicolas Maduro as his successor, appointing him vice president in 2013.

• 7. Crisis, Sanctions, and Capture

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  Maduro became president on the 14th of April 2013 after winning the election with 51 percent of the vote against Henrique Capriles at 49 percent. Poverty began to increase rapidly in mid- to late 2014. Since February 2014, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have protested over crime, corruption, hyperinflation, and chronic scarcity of basic goods. Human Rights Watch documented that between 2016 and 2019, Venezuelan security forces killed over 19,000 people for alleged resistance to authority, with evidence pointing to many of those deaths being extrajudicial executions.

  US sanctions escalated sharply under the Trump administration beginning in 2017, targeting PDVSA and Venezuelan officials. Sanctions in 2017 blocked US citizens from buying Venezuelan debt and cut off dividend payments to US nationals. Further rounds in 2018 and 2019 amounted to an embargo on gold, oil, finance, defense and other entities. Some $22 billion worth of Venezuelan assets held overseas were frozen. Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez concluded that sanctions were responsible for 59 percent of the decline in Venezuelan oil production after August 2017. By 2021, American and European financial institutions had even blocked Venezuela's payments to the Covax vaccine program, preventing it from acquiring COVID-19 vaccines.

  Between 2014 and 2020, Venezuela lost 99 percent of its foreign currency income. More than 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled the country. A person is murdered every 21 minutes. In 2013 the homicide rate was approximately 79 per 100,000 people, and Caracas holds one of the highest homicide rates of any large city in the world at 122 per 100,000 residents.

  In January 2026, the United States launched airstrikes along the Venezuelan coastline as part of Operation Southern Spear. President Trump announced on social media that Maduro had been captured and removed from the country. Legal experts have stated the action likely violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of military force without UN authorization except in self-defense. On the 23rd of January 2026, Venezuelan lawmakers gave their initial backing to open the oil sector to private investors, paving the way for US energy companies to return. In May 2026, Trump twice expressed interest in making Venezuela the 51st state of the United States, citing the country's oil reserves. Acting president Delcy Rodriguez replied that Venezuela is "not a colony, but a free country."