On the afternoon of April 20, 1749, a force of between 400 and 600 armed men amassed on Caracas's central plaza. Entering the city under blue and white flags emblazoned with red crosses, to the sound of beating drums, the deployment comprised a cross section of Venezuela's socio-racial groups, social estates, and occupations.Footnote 1 The men followed Juan Francisco de León, a cacao planter and small-town sheriff (teniente), and had shouldered their weapons as a popular protest “in the name of the city [of Caracas], the nobility, and the masses.” Disregarding the potentially ominous specter of so many armed insurgents, Caraqueños instead welcomed León's troops with open arms. As one observer remarked, all in the city from shopkeepers “to the nuns give thanks to León, wishing him success and commending him to God.”Footnote 2
Royal officials and Caracas Company employees living in the city, however, felt none of this gratitude. The rebels, with León as their mouthpiece, declared that the central aims of their uprising were the extermination of this joint stock company and the expulsion of its hated Basque agents from the province. The Spanish crown had given the Basque Caracas Company (Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas) broad powers over commerce in the Province of Venezuela and a monopoly over the region's cacao trade with Spain, in return for the company's aid in suppressing inter-imperial smuggling and the provision of European goods to the province. Established in 1728, the Caracas Company had grown into the region's dominant commercial, economic, and political entity by the mid eighteenth century. Now, approximately 400 of its Basque employees fled the city as León's forces entered the capital. The rebels put the governor of Venezuela under de facto house arrest while they presented their demands.Footnote 3 Several days after they entered Caracas, the hapless governor, Luis Francisco Castellanos, acceded to their terms, suspending the company and formally expelling the outsiders.
On April 23, a slave named Florenzio, the property of Simón Bolívar's father Juan Vicente Bolívar, read the news to a large crowd in the plaza central. When he rhetorically asked three times who had demanded the expulsion of the Caracas Company, the crowd enthusiastically cheered: “The whole province!”Footnote 4 By August of that year, rumors were circulating that León's forces in the province numbered between 4,000 and 7,000 men.Footnote 5 This figure was particularly striking in a province where the coastal population (excluding Caracas) consisted of merely 65,000 people and where the population of the capital city itself was somewhere between 18,000 to 24,000 inhabitants (by estimates made in the second half of the eighteenth century).Footnote 6 Florenzio was heralding what would be the largest, and arguably the most important, revolt witnessed in Venezuela up to the time of the independence wars.Footnote 7
How did the colonial relationship between subjects and imperial authority reach this fever pitch of near-insurrection? What passions and convictions brought subjects from throughout the province into the streets of Caracas to upend and drive out the Caracas Company? The answers to these questions are entwined deeply with Venezuela's coastal history of smuggling and marginality. The historiographies of both Venezuela and Spanish America have largely neglected the León Rebellion and its connections to illicit trade. Scholarship on the major late eighteenth-century rebellions in Spanish America typically ignores León's revolt, or references it only obliquely.Footnote 8 To my knowledge, only two English-language works devote more than a couple of sentences to the uprising.Footnote 9 Many Venezuelan scholars have investigated the León Rebellion as part of their broader projects, but only a handful have made it the central theme of their studies.Footnote 10 Among those, the traditional interpretations of the rebellion's causes have painted it as, variously, a proto-nationalist struggle, a battle between Basques and Canary Islanders for control of the province, a result of economic hardship, or a fight strictly over the fate of the Caracas Company.Footnote 11 None of these treatments has emphasized sufficiently the role of smuggling in the rebellion's development.
The León Rebellion brings into sharp focus the interplay between community standards of economic fair play and contraband trade. The uprising followed many patterns consistent with the eighteenth-century English food riots described by E. P. Thompson.Footnote 12 Like those disturbances upon which Thompson built his concept of the moral economy, protesters in the León Rebellion acted out against a disruption in their common consensus of legitimate and illegitimate economic practices. Similarly, León's supporters took up arms because they lacked other means to rectify their grievances and showed restraint in their public attempts to legitimize their cause.
Two major divergences from Thompson's analysis of riots in the rebellion's ideology help expand the concept of the moral economy. First, although the León rebels protested the state's intervention in the marketplace, their demands differed from those of Thompson's bread rioters in that León's supporters implicitly championed greater freedom and more diverse markets through inter-imperial contraband trade. This behavior addresses critiques of Thompson's model that claim it is overly concerned with local markets and incompatible with unregulated commerce. Second, the underlying illegality of what the rebels desired leads us to rethink how protesters legitimize their uprisings in the schema of the moral economy. The León partisans framed their conflict with the Caracas Company as a defense of traditional rights of commerce. The fact that the basis for these customs was an economic practice outlawed by the state (that is, smuggling) put the insurgents in an awkward position.Footnote 13 The protesters' attempts to rationalize or play down the true motives for their uprising offer a window into the ideological potency of early modern contraband trade.
Too often, historians have viewed transimperial illicit exchange mainly as an act of naked self-interest.Footnote 14 This interpretation overlooks the way that smuggling fits into the worldviews and politics of merchants and consumers.Footnote 15 Otherwise loyal Spanish subjects, such as the León insurgents, benefited from everyday illegal trade and used popular protest to defend it against commercial concessions that encroached upon contraband's central position in their economy of makeshifts. Smuggling and its suppression represented commonplace modes of conflict along the coast. In the case of the León Rebellion, these struggles were, in the words of Sergio Serulnikov, “the forms whereby routine dissension at the local level shaped the nature of mass rebellion.”Footnote 16 That is, whereas illicit trade may have been a form of resistance to the more intrusive parts of imperial control, serious attempts to thwart it boiled over into active revolt.
Contraband commerce also influenced colonial politics. Though illegal traders were not a formal political faction themselves, they heavily swayed how provincial subjects reacted to metropolitan orders. Those who smuggled or benefited from smuggled goods were equal parts political reactionaries (in their wish to reinstitute a Hapsburg period of salutary neglect) and forward thinkers (in their desire to create free trade from the bottom up). Illicit commerce and the response to the company's threat to it also united, at least for a moment, a broad coalition of social groups that normally navigated tense relationships with one another.
Finally, clandestine trade was an indicator of a strong sense of colonial autonomy and association.Footnote 17 Venezuelan contrabandists and their accomplices were notoriously hostile to outsiders' attempts to enforce anti-smuggling ordinances. They identified strongly with their Venezuelan homeland, although in the mid eighteenth century very few harbored any desire to be politically independent of Spain. Though Venezuelan traders, producers, and consumers looked to Spain for many of their cultural and political allegiances, they formed close partnerships with foreign merchants to fill their shopping baskets and bring their produce to market. The tension in this dichotomy of colonial character manifested itself in the actions and words of León and his insurgents.
The uprising's causes, course, and consequences are complex and demand multifaceted coverage. The first part of this article places the León Rebellion in the context of the eighteenth-century history of Venezuela's central coast.Footnote 18 In this period, a common undercurrent of frustration with Caracas Company privilege, commercial enforcement, and economic and political monopolization lurked just beneath the surface of colonial politics. Following this treatment, a second section reconstructs the events of the León uprising from accounts and correspondence of both colonial officials and rebels. This trade rebellion allowed Venezuelan subjects, via popular protest, to participate informally in the colonial political arena. The third and final part of this essay analyzes petitions and correspondence of the insurgents to reveal elements of their sense of justice, commercial thought, and communal identities.
Like the better-known Quito, Comunero, and Túpac Amaru rebellions, the León uprising of 1749–51 was not just a spontaneous outbreak of violence bred from desperation. Rather, it expressed basic political beliefs grounded in the defense of consumption patterns and community rights. The uprising shed light on characteristics of a Venezuelan society shaped by illicit trade. The León Rebellion and the popular protests that preceded it transcended the simple definition of smuggling as an illegal economic exchange and became pivotal building blocks for informal political expression and local identity formation.
The Caracas Company and Its Malcontents
From its founding in 1522, the province of Venezuela's peripheral status within the Spanish Empire had made it uniquely situated to flourish in the illicit international economy. Its long coastline was full of secluded coves and rivers running to the sea. By the second half of the seventeenth century, coastal cacao production was thriving in the colony and subjects of nearby non-Spanish colonies regularly sent ships to trade for the cash crop. Traders based in Dutch Curaçao, only 40 miles away, were especially close trading partners. Legal trade from Spain had been particularly anemic in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote 19 Years of neglect and the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14) had defanged any threat posed to smugglers by Spanish ships guarding the coast. In the early eighteenth century, as much as half the province's trade came illegally from sources outside of the Spanish Empire.Footnote 20 In the words of Pedro José de Olavarriaga, a special envoy of the king to Venezuela and one of the Caracas Company's founding fathers, the province's ports proved so friendly to inter-imperial illicit commerce “not only because they were undefended,” but also because non-Spanish merchants found “the inhabitants of this province inclined to this vice so contrary to the Real Hacienda and the interests of his Majesty.”Footnote 21 Given its involvement in such trade, bringing Venezuela's potentially profitable cacao into the Spanish state's revenue stream would require drastic action.
Basing their ideas on an economic platform that was very much in vogue at the time, the crown and Council of the Indies approved a proposal for a royal trading company to run Venezuela's cacao commerce.Footnote 22 This plan represented the advantageous partnership of maritime-oriented Basque merchants who wished to circumvent the Andalusian trading monopoly, a cash-strapped crown that desired to better integrate peripheral overseas territories into the empire, and the tireless efforts of the Caracas Company's principal booster, Olavarriaga.Footnote 23 In 1728, the crown gave a monopoly over the Venezuelan cacao trade with Spain to the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas. Among other privileges, this group of Basque investors and merchants received royal protection, privileged rights to the shipping of cacao between Venezuela and Spain, reductions in port duties, and exemption from the requirement to stop at the House of Trade (Casa de Contratación) in Cádiz before departing for the Americas. Some 14 years later, the company secured a new concession: the rights to ship cacao to New Spain, Venezuela's other major legal trading partner. In return for these grants, the crown expected the company to supply the province with European goods, provide coastal patrols to deter foreign interlopers to Venezuelan trade, and ship a fixed amount of cacao on Venezuelan planters' private accounts (usually around one-third of a ship's cargo).Footnote 24
The company's carte blanche in Venezuelan ports ushered in the province's first substantial legal trading system, dramatically increased the royal revenues coming from the colony, and generally brought Venezuela back to the economic attention of Madrid.Footnote 25 Annual Venezuelan cacao exports to Spain between 1700 and 1730 averaged approximately 21,000 fanegas (about 2.3 million pounds in today's measurements). From 1730 until 1748, the first 18 years of the Caracas Company, annual Venezuelan cacao exports to Spain more than doubled, to around 50,000 fanegas (5.5 million pounds).Footnote 26 To ferry this cargo and patrol for interlopers, the company used its own private fleet for all commercial traffic and coast patrol activities. The company's initial tenure in Venezuela witnessed the most stringent anti-contraband measures in the colony's history. A paramilitary fleet of between ten and 20 ships and several hundred men a year patrolled coastal waters, harassing foreign and domestic shipping suspected of smuggling.Footnote 27
That individuals from many parts of the complex socio-racial and socioeconomic strata of eighteenth-century coastal Venezuela temporarily put aside their structural animosities to join together to defend their common interests in commercial autonomy demonstrates the extent and impact of company intrusion into legal and illegal commerce. Though an in-depth analysis of social divisions within the province is behind the scope of this study, several characteristics deserve mention here.Footnote 28 As with other colonies in Spanish America, socio-racial and social estate categories could be murky and multivariate. Venezuela's population was notable for being majority pardo (free people of mixed white and African ancestry).Footnote 29 Enslaved Africans never made up more than 10 percent of the population of the province.Footnote 30 Indigenous groups in coastal regions of the province were much smaller than those in other colonies in Spanish America.
Venezuela's white population included a tiny contingent of peninsular Spaniards, an extremely tight-knit group of urban creole elites known as the mantuanos, and two groups of Spanish immigrants whose ethnicities sometimes brought their Spanishness into question: Canary Islanders (Isleños) and Basques.Footnote 31 Most Isleños arrived in state-sponsored waves over the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth. Basque immigration had been individual and irregular before the arrival of the Caracas Company, but ballooned thereafter. As this article will go on to discuss, Basques and Isleños competed for the same economic and social niches that were not already occupied by peninsular Spaniards and mantuanos and thought of one another as inferior whites.Footnote 32
While it would be a mistake to say that socio-racial categories were clearly defined or immutable, they did influence the status, occupations, and privileges that Venezuelans could hope to attain. Mantuanos occupied positions as large-scale merchants and planters; they were also known as the grandes cacaos due to their extensive cacao holdings. Smuggling appealed to them, as it provided an alternate set of traders and markets for their produce. The mantuanos felt an ongoing need to reassert their position at the top of the hierarchy. Their anxiety stemmed from the province of Venezuela's high concentration of mixed-race free people who were upwardly mobile. Likewise, mantuanos viewed the Isleño presence as an unwelcome encroachment on their exclusive position as whites. Both pardos and Isleños inhabited the colonial middle as urban artisans, petty traders, and minor agricultural producers. For them, contraband trade was a potential occupation as well as a crucial means of attaining European goods and selling cacao.
Colonial law and custom codified distinctions between Venezuelan social groups into a dizzying array of categories, from which stemmed discrimination affecting occupations, office-holding, militia service, sumptuary choices, and even parish access.Footnote 33 Given the fissured dynamics of this society, the broad dissatisfaction with the company is telling. It highlights just how pervasive the Caracas Company's influence had become and how important smuggling was to Venezuelan subjects. Even though, as this article will point out, León's uprising started as a local and Isleño-centric event, many social groups eventually joined it. Each had a stake in contraband trade or the degree of economic autonomy it engendered for them as colonials, and each had their reasons to wish for the Caracas Company's demise.
Despite the company directors' promises of greater prosperity for Venezuela as a whole, colonial subjects of various social groups rapidly coalesced around their resentment of these outsiders. The mantuanos saw the company's meddling in local government as a threat to the political control they maintained over the province through the Caracas cabildo.Footnote 34 Moreover, both elite and petty merchants perceived the danger to their interests posed by the company's ascendancy in the cacao trade. With their dominant share of the province's legal commerce, Caracas Company merchants depressed the prices producers received for their cacao. From a pre-Company going rate of around 22 pesos per fanega of cacao (a fanega equaling 110 pounds), the price paid for cacao during the company's initial 20 years plummeted to an average of eight pesos per fanega and, in some cases, as low as four or five pesos.Footnote 35
Locals were also dismayed by how company merchants shirked their responsibility to provision the colony. Complaints of inadequate, substandard, and prohibitively expensive goods and foodstuffs were common. On several occasions during the company's first 20 years, delays and lapses in its shipments forced Venezuelan residents to petition to buy flour from neighboring colonies.Footnote 36 Just five years before León's uprising, King Felipe V wrote to Caracas Company directors regarding Caraqueño officials' complaints of a dearth of wheat flour, liquor, and clothing.Footnote 37 Clothes became so scarce in 1749 that the rector of the university in Caracas chastised the company, noting that “since its establishment [it] has allowed for a continual dearth of the most common and usual goods, of foodstuffs and supplies. . . subjecting [the province's] inhabitants to an intolerable nudity and compelling them by necessity to look for a remedy wherever the possibility presents itself.”Footnote 38 When company merchandise did reach Venezuela, price gouging frequently put it out of the populace's reach. One complaint noted that the company bought barrels of flour at ten pesos each and then sold them to the public at 23 pesos per barrel.Footnote 39
At the same time that Venezuelans went without basic supplies, the company was hauling in tidy profits. Shareholders earned dividends between 20 and 30 percent for the 1730s and 1740s. A 20-peso per fanega difference between company merchants' buying and selling prices on cacao easily covered overhead.Footnote 40 These developments fueled a shared anxiety among Venezuelan coastal inhabitants that the company had come to monopolize the province's economic and political resources for its own extractive gain. Whether through neglect or commercial restrictions, Venezuelan consumers were used to sparse legal trade opportunities, but the company's patrols gradually tightened even the provincial safety valve of smuggling. Most scholarly estimates of Venezuelan illicit trade say it dropped during the first 20 years of company rule.Footnote 41 Coastguard ships rounded up contrabandists in record numbers: their prize court cases fill 42 volumes in Venezuela's Archivo General de la Nación.
Tighter enforcement of illicit trade did nothing to quiet Venezuelans' unease in the face of persistent whispers that company officials themselves were deeply involved in smuggling. Tax fraud resulting from company ships transporting undeclared cacao to Spain and untaxed luxury items to Venezuela was common. In 1738, customs officials in Spain seized one company ship that had failed to declare 40,000 pesos of Mexican silver.Footnote 42 Juan Francisco de León himself would later accuse one company employee of working at a store full of Dutch goods known as the “warehouse of Curaҫao,” and another of illegally importing slaves into Venezuela under the pretext that they were captured goods. Footnote 43
Venezuelan subjects thus viewed company employees not only as hypocrites, but also as pernicious monopolizers of the vital black market. Aline Helg and John Elliott have observed that subjects on the Spanish American periphery engaged in illicit trade as an indirect means of commercial protest. Their actions defused grievances that might otherwise have led to colonial rebellion.Footnote 44 The Caracas Company's intrusion into the underground economy snuffed out these modes of tacit resistance to Spanish commercial regulations. Though subjects would cloak their complaints about the company in the appropriate language of lost legal trade opportunities, it was the company's anti-smuggling operations that animated their claims for redress and eventual revolt.Footnote 45
To protect its image in Spain, the Caracas Company parried colonial subjects' criticism with its own narrative of its 20 years in the colony. Numerous letters to royal officials offered a full-throated defense of company patrols as “the brake on illicit trade” and the only real military measure against foreign invasion.Footnote 46 More importantly, at the height of the León Rebellion several senior company officials, led by its director Joseph de Yturriaga, published a manifesto defending the company's continued presence in Province of Venezuela. It minimized the rebellion's importance, claiming that a few bad apples (mostly elite Caraqueño merchants and foreigners) had led an otherwise loyal populace astray. In the view of these company men, the minority who hated the Basque merchant venture did so because it enforced anti-smuggling prohibitions. The manifesto rejected the idea of the company as a malevolent monopoly, reasoning that colonists could legally trade with Mexico, the Canary Islands, and the interior provinces outside of the company's control. Moreover, the company had benefited the region. The authors pointed to increased cacao production, the construction of deep harbors and forts, and defensive outlays of 15,000 pesos annually as proof that the company had Venezuela's best interests in mind. These gains were not, as petitioners had misconstrued them, the result of “tyranny, oppression, mistreatment, or poverty, but rather advantages that gave help, assistance, opportune aid, and fecundity to the province.”Footnote 47
León's revolt did not constitute the first armed protest against the company. Its own inflated portrayal of itself to Madrid notwithstanding, coastal Venezuela was the scene of frequent unrest prior to the 1749 uprising. Coastal inhabitants had voiced their dismay through two previous smaller and unsuccessful tumults, the Andresote (1730) and San Felipe Rebellions (1741). Earlier uprisings indicated the consistent current of unrest that Juan Francisco de León would later channel into a substantial movement.Footnote 48
Like León and his followers, Spain's competitors recognized and sought to capitalize on local frustration with the Caracas Company. Smugglers based in Dutch territories helped supply pre-León uprisings. English subjects also sympathized with anti-company protests. One Boston newspaper cheerily recognized the bravery of “Andrew Scoso [Andresote], a Mulatto agitated by a generous Passion of relieving his distress'd Countrymen.”Footnote 49 In addition to continuing its illicit trade with Spanish subjects and thus undermining the Caracas Company's cacao monopoly, the English made several overtures to Venezuelan coastal inhabitants to encourage them in rebellion against the company and the Spanish crown. During the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739-48), the English admiral Charles Knowles sought to create a fifth column of coastal inhabitants disaffected by the company to aid his 1743 invasions of the port towns of La Guaira and Puerto Cabellos. He sent leaflets in Spanish ahead of himself to both ports, explaining that the war between the English and Spanish had begun only out of a present need: “to reprimand the insolence of these pirates commonly called coast guards (guarda costas) of which the Viscayans are particularly noteworthy. They practice acts of cruelty and barbarism not just against the English, but against their own countrymen, the Spanish, treating them worse than Turks, jailing them, violating their ancient right to trade with other nations, and daily throwing them into the galleys.”
Knowles proposed establishing a British colony at Puerto Cabello and promised protection from marauding company forces.Footnote 50 One British officer involved in the campaign against both ports recalled Knowles's orders to his subordinates: “To let the Inhabitants of the Country know, that the English did not come there to take from them their Rights, Religion, or Liberties, but that they would from us enjoy them with great Certainty, and more Happiness, than when under the Tyranny and Cruelty of the Guiapesco Company, which we were now come to rid them of.”Footnote 51
Six years later, during Juan Francisco de León's rebellion, the rebel chief received a letter from a British captain named Ian Burr offering the military aid of his convoy of three ships if León's forces would swear allegiance to the British sovereign.Footnote 52 That neither of these plots succeeded in swaying imperial loyalties confirmed the strength of Venezuelan fidelity to the Spanish crown. Nonetheless, the very proposal demonstrated that locals' exasperation over the Caracas Company's control of the commercial, political, and military resources of the province had intensified to the point where it was known across imperial boundaries.
Marching on Caracas: The Rebellion of Juan Francisco de León
Nowhere was anger over the Basque monopolization of Venezuela more palpable than in Panaquire. This town, formed early in the eighteenth century from the boom in cacao production, was the seat of Juan Francisco de León's rebellion. Located in the fertile, inland Tuy River Valley, Panaquire became a haven for Canary Islanders to settle and grow cacao. They found fellowship with Isleños who lived in the Candelaria district of Caracas.Footnote 53 Though royal permissions initially encouraged the efforts of these small cacao planters to settle, the Caracas Company and governors beholden to it connected Isleños to illicit trade and portrayed them as shifty, lazy, and rebellious. For example, the interim governor of Venezuela, Fray Julian de Arriaga y Rivera, in 1750 conflated “zambos, mulatoes, negroes, Ysleños, deserters, and other elements of vagrants (gente vaga) that only obey the alcalde if they like and if not, they laugh at him and the priest. Most of them make a living combining the bounty of the haciendas and throwing themselves into [illegal] commerce on the coast.”Footnote 54
Such characterizations sprung from the weak royal presence in the Tuy River Valley and the ease with which cacao could be shipped downriver and out to coastlines frequented by smugglers based in the Dutch Caribbean. Orders designed to slow contraband commerce, via restrictions on how Tuy Valley residents and other coastal dwellers could conduct legal trade, instead caused poverty and pushed subjects into the black market in increasing numbers.Footnote 55 Other subjects felt a similar squeeze on their commercial freedoms. A petition from the citizens of Caracas attributed their plight to living in a dysfunctional province where “there are many sellers and abundant produce, but few or only one buyer.”Footnote 56 Clergy complained that tithes and contributions from cacao-producing parishes were insufficient to support their churches.Footnote 57 One priest summed up the unintended consequences of increased policing of trade by arguing that closing ports to prevent contraband would “prohibit residents from exporting cacao by way of legal commerce and, as a consequence, open the danger of illicit trade because only criminals (vasallos de mala ley) and foreign ships would come to these less-traversed ports.”Footnote 58
In the case of the Tuy Valley and other primarily Isleño areas, officials from Caracas wishing to limit independent commerce met stubborn resistance. Teniente Juan Francisco de León, the titular leader of the coming revolt, ruled local government in the region. A cacao planter who had been instrumental in Panaquire's founding, León was incredibly pro-Isleño and reviled the Basques.Footnote 59 An uneasy standoff developed as successive governors' desires to rein in contraband suffered from Isleño disobedience and local governmental autonomy. By the end of the 1740s, Panaquire's simmering frustration would boil over into a province-wide rebellion, following on new company attempts to assert governmental control over the Tuy River Valley. On April 3, 1749, Martín de Echeverría arrived in Panaquire to assume the position of prize court judge of the town. As an outside official handpicked by the Caracas Company to adjudicate cases of illegal trade in the area, confiscate contraband goods, and judge captured contrabandists, Echeverría's appointment drove the townspeople to revolt. Believing erroneously that Echeverría intended to replace him as teniente, Juan Francisco de León met the official and informed him that the town would not allow him to accept Echeverría in any official capacity.Footnote 60 When Echeverría pressed the issue, León's forces fired on him and Echeverría withdrew. The Rebellion of Juan Francisco de León had begun.
The uprising, which lasted from 1749 to the beginning of 1752, comprised roughly four phases. In the first phase, León marched for Caracas with an army of between 600 and 800 armed men. Three quarters of León's forces were Isleños or white Spaniards by ancestry, and the rest were blacks, mulattos, zambos, and a few Indians. The protestors' social estates ran the gamut from wealthy planters, to middling tradespeople, to slaves.Footnote 61 Although the movement did not spring from a multiracial and socioeconomically diverse coalition, León's forces gained a broad base. Producers in the cacao sector of the provincial economy hardly needed convincing that a monopoly company hurt their livelihoods. The rebels sought to persuade Venezuelans not involved in cacao production that the expulsion of the Caracas Company would serve their interests as well. One of León's subordinates told a group of “tailors, barbers, cobblers, and other tradesmen” that “though they did not own a cacao hacienda or plant tobacco, by expelling the company they would enjoy benefits in the purchase of their goods and in the compensation for their work.” To illustrate, he pointed to the barber saying that “normally given a half real for each haircut [he] would now receive two because there would be more money [in the province].”Footnote 62 On the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, León received anonymous letters of support from elite Caraqueños who would later feed and shelter his men when they got to Caracas.Footnote 63 As he marched toward the capital, León sent letters of protest ahead of him to air common grievances He accused the Caracas Company of impoverishing the province by lowering cacao prices to levels that forced producers to abandon their haciendas. He also charged individual company officials with setting obscenely high prices on food and goods, smuggling for their own enrichment, and generally abusing Venezuelan subjects. León demanded the immediate extinction of the company and the expulsion of all Basques from the province.Footnote 64
Although the invaders conveyed the appearance of an armed revolt, the initial stages of the León uprising in Caracas were peaceful and orderly. By April 19, 1749, León's forces were on the outskirts of the city of Caracas in the Isleño-dominated neighborhood of La Candelaria. As Governor Luis Francisco Castellanos had no standing army, León held him as a de facto hostage. Yet, despite the rebels' control over the city, no looting or violence took place.Footnote 65 All correspondence and public proclamations from León's men asserted their loyalty to the king and agreed that the uprising's only mission was the destruction of the company. León and the governor declared an emergency open town council meeting (cabildo abierto) to voice complaints about the company. In all, 97 attendees showed up for a meeting that normally produced no more than a dozen people.Footnote 66 The cabildo's show of solidarity and Governor Castellanos's own captivity persuaded him to declare the expulsion of the company and all Basques. After 15 days of captivity, Castellanos disguised himself as a friar and fled to La Guaira on the night of May 3. He immediately joined company employees, many of whom had already retreated from Caracas. Governor Castellanos quickly declared all proclamations he had made in Caracas null and void and set himself up to wait for reinforcements.
Castellanos's flight changed the dynamics of the uprising. No longer could it simply be classified as a protest, for León's men had run a crown-appointed official out of the capital and into hiding. From this point onward, the correspondence of León and his men evinced a more anxious and defensive tone. They shifted blame onto the governor for running away and thus leaving the province vulnerable to slave revolts and other tumults. They also attempted to legitimize their protests and petitions with the help of notaries public and asked colonial officials to bring them legal counsel.Footnote 67 Though they continued to petition for an end to the company and its abuses, the insurgents sensed the strategic urgency of the moment. They blockaded the road to La Guaira to starve company partisans of supplies from inland and fought several skirmishes between the two cities with company troops in July 1749.
León's supporters now held Caracas with a force estimated at its upper limits to be between 4,000 and 7,000 men.Footnote 68 The arrival of a new interim governor, Julián de Arriaga, 300,000 pesos of Mexican silver, and reinforcements in November of 1749 altered negotiations.Footnote 69 Arriaga was more conciliatory than Castellanos. He conceded to the rebels that the king would re-evaluate the Caracas Company and correct the worst of its abuses. Shortly after assuming command, Arriaga marched to Caracas and met with León. By this juncture, the rebel leader's forces had become fearful of the consequences of being labeled traitors. By December 1749, they were more than willing to take the pardon extended to them by Arriaga, so long as the company's demise seemed assured.Footnote 70
In the second phase of the rebellion, a year and five months of tense peace settled over Caracas. León's army disbanded and went home, but Governor Arriaga still worried about their potential return. His term ended in May 1751 with the appointment of his successor Phelipe Ricardos. Ricardos was an ally of the company and its choice to replace Arriaga.Footnote 71 On taking command, the new governor began immediately to execute his orders to capture Juan Francisco de León and his accomplices and re-establish the company under new terms.
The third phase of the rebellion saw the destruction of the peace. León, incensed by the re-establishment of the company, began his second uprising by marching toward Caracas in August 1751.Footnote 72 The province was abuzz with rumors of thousands of León partisans rising up in various separate cacao-producing districts. However, this new revolt lacked the crucial support of the elite, who had come dangerously close to being branded traitors by León's first rebellion. With much more grave potential consequences for insurgents this time around, many elites refused to back an uprising that did not seem like a sure thing and was led by Isleños rather than mantuanos. The diverse coalition that had bolstered the rebellion in its early days vanished.Footnote 73 This event, combined with the troops assembled by Arriaga and Ricardos, frustrated León's plans for a second trip to Caracas. His men ran into forces sent by the governor to apprehend him and fought a skirmish in the small inland town of Caucagua on the way to the capital. In the process, they wounded a royal officer. The incident represented the turning point in the second uprising. The insurgents now had drawn blood and could no longer sustain their claim to be peaceful protest movement. After retreating, León's men, who feared the governor's substantial forces, began to desert in large numbers. León himself escaped capture by catching passage on a Dutch ship that transported him eastward down the Venezuelan coast.
Retreat marked the fourth stage of the León Rebellion. The Leonistas began to resemble a group of hunted men more than an army. The governor's forces pursued the fugitives for more than four months. Finally, in January of 1752, León, hungry, beaten down, and tired of running, turned himself in along with several of his supporters and sons. Authorities apprehended other rebels later. The weary leader wrote in a final letter to Governor Ricardos that a government run by Basques had “declared me culpable and. . . pursued me. They have dishonored me and taken my livelihood as well as that of my sons, my wife, and the rest of the poor in this Valley of Panaquire.”Footnote 74
The aftermath of León's rebellion produced tremendous upheaval for both its participants and the province as a whole. Company ships carried León and his sons in chains to Spain. León died of disease in prison shortly after his arrival in Cádiz, and his sons served lengthy terms in the presidios of Spanish North Africa. Spanish judges exiled and condemned to forced labor 28 other close confidants of León. That these ardent followers were sentenced and sent to presidios and fortifications in Spain, North Africa, Havana, Vera Cruz, and the Canary Islands) confirmed the need to separate and isolate them as dangerous instigators of unrest. Authorities also executed more than ten Leónistas.Footnote 75
In addition to dispensing justice, colonial officials also sought to make an example of León by way of several heavily symbolic gestures. The governor's forces left the head of one rebel executed for his part in the revolt on the doorstep of León's Panaquire home during the last days of the rebellion. Foreshadowing the punitive ritual later performed on the memory of the Andean rebel Túpac Amaru, royal officials tore down León's city house in La Candelaria, salted the earth so that nothing would grow on the land, forbade the utterance of his name, and placed a plaque on the site declaring his infamy as a traitor to the king.Footnote 76 In effect, the colonial government attempted simultaneously to emphasize León's villainy and to blot out his existence. The inherent contradiction in this approach revealed profound anxieties concerning the pernicious influence of smuggling in peripheral unrest.
Following the arrest and sentencing of rebel instigators, colonial bureaucrats increased the royal military presence in the province. Robert Ferry has pointed out, correctly, that the Bourbon push for standing armies in Spanish America may have had its origins in the events of 1749–51 in Caracas, rather than in the siege of Havana that took place a decade later. After the dust settled from the uprising, Governor Phelipe Ricardos installed a permanent garrison of troops in Caracas at a cost of 100,000 pesos annually.Footnote 77 No doubt prompted by memories of the chaos of the uprising, successive governors continued to maintain this standing army.Footnote 78
Further, the León uprising spurred important administrative and commercial reforms. The king and council, now mindful of the explosive possibilities of provincial hatred for the Caracas Company, mandated that the company submit to increased imperial oversight to prevent future rebellions. To afford greater access to the company's books and practices, the crown ordered its headquarters transferred from the Basque city of Pasajes to Madrid. The king also stipulated that a commission consisting of the governor, a company factor, and a representative (regidor) from the Caracas cabildo would set new price lists annually on European goods and cacao.Footnote 79 As a result, the price paid to Venezuelan producers for their cacao increased. Mandatory changes also put elite Caraqueños on the company's board of directors and allowed them to be stockholders. Finally, the crown abrogated the company's rights to trade cacao with New Spain, thereby quieting the fears of Venezuelan producers and merchants that the company sought to monopolize Venezuelan cacao shipping to Mexico and cut Venezuelan producers out of a cost-effective means to transport chocolate to this crucial market.Footnote 80
Regardless of these newly granted privileges, most Venezuelans continued to resent the Caracas Company. Some elite Venezuelan families did drop their opposition to the company after their sons and daughters married into the families of Basque company men. These partnerships were meant to expand Venezuelan patricians' influence in the province and the Spanish court.Footnote 81 Notwithstanding these relationships, most Venezuelans involved in commerce viewed the company as an intruder that continued its attempts to monopolize all trade. These sentiments remained strong decades after the León Rebellion. As late as 1778, one Spanish bureaucrat wrote to José de Gálvez, the minister of the Indies, informing him that “the residents of Caracas complain bitterly of the monopoly and extortions of the company whose unsatisfactory prices would have discouraged the Caraqueños entirely were it not for the recourse of contraband trade, which they find absolutely necessary.”Footnote 82 Although estimates are problematic, it appears that despite the post-León legal trade opportunities presented to wealthier Venezuelans by the reformed Caracas Company, contraband trade continued and even increased in frequency, given the company's weakened enforcement position.Footnote 83 With its authority to dictate the terms of trade and harry contraband commerce substantially restrained, the company faced no further revolts.
It was not rebellion but trade liberalization that broke the Caracas Company's back. The comercio libre (free trade) decrees, put forth in 1765 and greatly expanded in 1778, signified a monumental shift in imperial commercial thought. For the first time, a range of Spanish American ports as well as peninsular ones outside of Cádiz and Seville could trade legally with one another without needing to obtain special permission. Comercio libre would not come to the province until 1789 due to the lingering presence of the Caracas Company. Indeed, key Bourbon reformers involved in the creation of these laws, such as Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes and José de Gálvez, would single out the Caracas Company as a symbol of commercial backwardness. From the time of his appointment in 1777, José de Ábalos, the first intendant of Venezuela, argued that demolishing the company would unleash Venezuela's economic potential.Footnote 84 On the heels of the 1778 comercio libre decrees, the crown retracted the company's monopoly over Venezuela's cacao trade in 1781; the company dissolved in 1784.
Ideologies of the Insurgents
The petitions and correspondence of the León rebels demonstrated cohesive moral, commercial, and communal belief structures. In his study of peasant unrest in colonial Mexican villages, William Taylor noted, “In unstable circumstances many social elements that are taken for granted in everyday life, such as ideologies and social values, rise to the surface of consciousness and are documented in written records.”Footnote 85 Unlike many insurgents, León and his forces had the time and space to express, in many cases through their own words, what their protest meant to them. The petitions of sympathetic Caracas cabildo members and elite Caraqueño supporters added a wider dimension of provincial resistance to these primarily Isleño voices. Their combined writings and actions reflected at least four political ideologies and revealed the transformative impact that contraband trade had on Venezuela.
First, the volume and constant presence of smuggling in Venezuela produced a distinctive brand of economic thought that was both reactionary and forward-thinking. On one hand, subject petitions both before and during the rebellion called for a return to the days of limited metropolitan commercial involvement in the region, before the “despotism and absolute dominance” of the company took hold. Under the Habsburgs, smuggling in the Province of Venezuela had represented almost an informal fuero (legal dispensation). Despite an appalling lack of legal trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, few subjects complained of the way things had been before the rise of the Basque venture. Rather, a 1750 Caracas cabildo petition called for the return of register ships as the only trade from Spain.Footnote 86 It was the unstated assumption of the cabildo's request that the reappearance of register ship system of procurement without a dramatic increase in the quantity of register ships would lead to an economy dependent on smuggling.
At the same time that illicit trade's hold on the province produced a certain intransigence toward change, it also, paradoxically, prefigured the liberalization of trade to come in most of the Atlantic. Juan Francisco de León's own designs for an ideal trade system harbored many of the principles of free trade. He believed that Venezuelan-produced cacao should find its way to market by the most expedient means. In return, goods should come to Venezuela from many separate places but with no obligation for colonial subjects to buy any of them.Footnote 87 Others colonists decried the company monopoly by reminding royal officials that “commerce does not consist in the singularity of just one merchant. . . but rather in the plurality of many.”Footnote 88 These tendencies toward unrestricted commerce were not lost on Governor Arriaga, who noted, “Untold numbers of Canary Islanders are vendors and petty merchants. They are, in my eyes, the contrabandists of the coast and it is liberty that they love. As the majority of them are not married, nor in possession of haciendas, they foment revolt with little risk.”Footnote 89
It is worth noting that though Venezuelans' commercial modus operandi involved trade with foreigners, they maintained fidelity to the monarchy and the conventions of the Spanish legal system. The rebels did not see their protest as treasonous. Like the Quito, Tupac Amaru, and Comunero rebels to come, the León insurgents appealed to an earlier principle that legitimized limited self-government and the right to rise up when entities outside the monarchy challenged community rights.Footnote 90 The Caracas Company's burdensome presence in the province was all the more onerous because the organization existed outside of the legitimacy of the monarchical pact. Cutting out this cancer would reaffirm Venezuelans' proper role in the Hispanic world and demonstrate their affinity for it. Hence, León, in the very act of surrounding the governor's palace, pledged that for the king “we sacrifice and will continue to sacrifice our throats.” Footnote 91
The insurgents obsessed over the notarization and legal representation of a nearly bloodless uprising. They called together committees (juntas) of Caracas's most elite subjects to confirm the legitimacy of their protests. Juan Francisco de León even sent one of his lieutenants, Miguel de Fuentes y Abreu, on a voyage to Spain to deliver petitions directly to the king. Ironically, the governor of Cuba captured Fuentes y Abreu's papers, which proclaimed the loyalty of the supposed insurrectionists to the crown, en route across the Caribbean and prevented them from reaching Madrid.Footnote 92 Though they shouldered weapons, the insurgents clearly believed that the nature of their actions differed little from sending a complaint letter to the king. As scholarship on late eighteenth-century South American rebellions has articulated, juridical maneuvers and popular uprisings were not mutually exclusive.Footnote 93
Second, the León rebels justified the decision to take up arms by claiming that they were bound by conscience to protect the province's material well-being by any means necessary. E. P. Thompson notes, “It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some legitimizing notion.”Footnote 94 What made justifying the León Rebellion so difficult was that the basis of its legitimization was a customary act that was also illegitimate. Petitions to royal officials or the king could not directly advocate unrestricted commerce with foreigners—this kind of appeal would brand the petitioners as lawbreakers. Yet León's insurgents, both before and during the rebellion, spoke of smuggling as a necessary means of sustenance for the impoverished. Descriptions of the province painted its residents as desperate. The Caracas cabildo pleaded for the delivery of “the most moderate and limited clothing and necessary and indispensable foodstuffs like bread, wine, and olive oil.”Footnote 95 León noted that prices for cacao had dropped so far before the uprising that some Isleños were selling off their devalued haciendas to the company at fire-sale prices.Footnote 96
Such accounts displayed a powerful sentiment that the stranglehold on licit and illicit trade had transgressed commonly agreed-upon thresholds of economic justice. Though he viewed the uprising with horror, interim Governor Julián de Arriaga seconded León's views on the detrimental consequences of low cacao prices. The magistrate asked company merchants whether ruined hacendados could now afford even “a hat for themselves or a shirt for their sons.”Footnote 97 One parish priest explained the rebellion through scripture: the Israelites asked for relief from oppressive taxes imposed by Solomon's son Rehoboam and rebelled when their demands were not met. “The people ask for justice,” wrote the priest. “Allowing oppression to breathe will incline them to rebellion.”Footnote 98 Abrogation of a commercial sense of fairness justified smuggling and popular protest and thus challenged the perceived immorality of both offenses.
The study of smuggling points to a more capacious definition of the moral economy. Critics of the concept emphasize that it is too focused on local markets and the idea that the informal agreements of economic fairness necessarily conflicted with freer markets.Footnote 99 Yet, in the case of eighteenth-century coastal Venezuela, protestors advocated for deregulated exchange to maintain themselves. Certainly, they wished to end the mutually profitable relationship between the Spanish crown and the Caracas Company. But they also wanted to preserve a status quo of imperial neglect that would allow them access to efficient commercial relationships with a range of foreigners. The León partisans were not hidebound to local exchange. Rather, they resorted to the moral economy in order to conduct transimperial trade.
Evidence of rebel dependence on foreigners demonstrates a third ideological strain: that of commercial autonomy. Anxieties about the participation of forces from Curaҫao peppered royal correspondence on the León Rebellion. Illicit commerce in the province relied on multi-imperial groups of sailors and traders crewing nominally “Dutch” ships from this port.Footnote 100 With this fact in mind, it would be a stretch to describe the merchant crews aiding the insurgents as a Dutch imperial project, but Spanish officials did not observe the distinction. Smugglers out of the Dutch islands ferried arms, supplies, and food to the rebels via the Tuy River in exchange for cacao.Footnote 101 They assaulted Caracas Company ships and broke up blockades at the mouth of the river.Footnote 102 In 1751 during the height of the manhunt for Juan Francisco de León, Dutch smugglers joined with their English counterparts to rout and capture several Spanish coast-guard patrols closing in on León. The rebel chief even escaped to safety aboard one of the Dutch-owned vessels.Footnote 103
Venezuelan governors and company officials alike blamed the Dutch for agitating the rebellion and sent spies to Bonaire and Curaҫao to gather intelligence.Footnote 104 Even if Spanish authorities could not verify these claims, their worries were not misplaced. The insurgents' reliance on their non-Spanish Caribbean neighbors as arms dealers and naval muscle demonstrates the symbiotic relationship that Venezuelan coastal inhabitants shared with foreign traders and their independence from legally sanctioned modes of trade. By the time of the León Rebellion, the Curaçao trade had supplanted Spanish mercantile orientation in the lives of many Venezuelan traders and producers. Spanish attempts to rein in this commercial self-rule risked betraying coastal subjects' faith in Spanish political legitimacy.
Fourth, the León Rebellion highlights smuggling's importance in the gradual evolution of a place-bound provincial identity. As Venezuelan subjects began openly to protest the Caracas Company's involvement, the accompanying unrest forced them to define more clearly who they were and what they stood for. They identified the company, and Basques as a whole, as outsiders to their community. Isleños countered characterizations of themselves as petty criminals by demonizing the Basques. Public pronouncements and correspondence of the León rebels spoke of the Basques as a generally immoral, arrogant and violent lot. Accounts outlined moral crimes committed by Basques and their dependents against ordinary colonial subjects, including rape, the poisoning of Venezuelan sailors working aboard company ships with rotten food, and the torture of prisoners. León went so far as to place blame for the 1730 rebellion of Andresote squarely on the shoulders of the Basques. According to him, the uprising was in part revenge for an incident in which a group of Viscayans broke into Andresote's house, beat him, tied him up, and then raped his wife and daughter.Footnote 105 “Long live the king and death to the Viscainos” became a frequent refrain of the León insurgents.Footnote 106 What started as Isleño rhetoric morphed into a province-wide critique of imperial economic imposition.
The inter-ethnic pejoratives of Isleño protests were a part of defining a state of belonging in Venezuela. Furthermore, they exposed the fault lines in white ethnogenesis in the province. James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra postulate that European ethnogenesis in the Americas involved the exclusion of Africans and indigenous peoples, but also that durable ethnic associations from the Old World complicated the formation of creolized whiteness.Footnote 107 Basque-Isleño rivalry in coastal Venezuela challenged the coherence of a white, pan-Spanish consciousness. Both Basques and Canary Islanders engaged in stereotyping and ethnocentrism designed to define their rivals as morally deficient, unworthy subjects. According to the discourse of contemporary documents, Basques were duplicitous and self-serving mercantile enforcers while Canary Islanders were disloyal smugglers. Ethnicity in this context evolved from a shorthand for geographic origins into a descriptor of occupational identity, lawfulness, and legitimacy. The León rebels, whose bedrock constituency was Isleños, used all of these categories to paint the company and its Basque retinue as interlopers. The insurgents blamed their commercial improprieties on the poverty produced by Basque greed. In doing so, they simultaneously reiterated their connection to Venezuelan soil and to rightful subjecthood.
By attempting to expel the outsiders and reaffirming Isleño identity, the revolt's core participants gained a clearer sense of communal self that would spread to other non-Canarian groups.Footnote 108 Nicolás León, Juan Francisco's son, wrote, “We are obliged to defend our homeland (nuestra patria) because if we do not, we will be made the slaves of all others.” Rhetorically, the rebels freely employed the term “patria” to denote shared rights and privileges (among them commercial liberties) that had to be defended.Footnote 109
We must resist the teleological urge to equate their use of this word with the proto-nationalism that it would come to represent during the independence period. Many separate developments over the next 60 years would influence Venezuelan identity irrespective of smuggling or the León Rebellion. Imperial loyalty was not a totalizing consciousness—it could be a buffet from which some elements of an imperial platform were chosen and others rejected. León's rebellion, the largest popular protest in Venezuela before the independence period, nurtured a colonial identity that upheld commercial liberty from the metropole even as it held fast to Hispanic political and cultural traditions.Footnote 110
Conclusion
The uprising of Juan Francisco de León, though short in duration and largely nonviolent, cast a long shadow over Venezuelan commercial and political affairs. While labeling the event itself a failed independence movement or even a precursor to the independence struggle overstates its place in Venezuelan history, the rebellion did represent the distillation of major tensions within the province. Smuggling informed homegrown constructions of moral economy, independent trade, and autonomous local identity that in turn inspired Venezuelan subjects to rise up against the Caracas Company and the royal government.
Although most Venezuelans would identify themselves as Spanish in the grand scheme of empires, the León Rebellion and its aftermath affirmed a corporate identification bound more to province and ethnicity than to the mother country. Nicolás León, one of Juan Francisco de León's surviving sons, demonstrated this local orientation years after the rebellion. In 1773, Nicolás reappeared in Spanish imperial documents. After 19 years of forced service in the presidio of Oran in Spanish North Africa for his role in his father's revolt, Nicolás requested his freedom to return to Venezuela. He asked for clemency, but never directly apologized for his father's actions and lionized Juan Francisco's role in the foundation of Panaquire. Nícolás continued to emphasize the respectability of the family line, bragging that relatives held prestigious positions as priests and army captains. He most likely mentioned such honorable occupations in an effort to erase any perceived stain to the family legacy caused by the punishments visited upon his father. Nicolás received permission to leave and to regain his family's lost land. In spite of the time that had passed, the connections he had lost, and the opportunity to make a fresh start in Spain, Nicolás de León chose to return to his boyhood home in 1773.Footnote 111
While the Caracas Company that had jailed Nicolás and his father faced no more challenges to its rule from armed masses after the 1749 revolt, grievances over the monopoly lurked just beneath the surface of political discussion. In 1780, José de Ábalos, the first intendant of Venezuela, summarized the anxiety produced by the company's continued disturbance of provincial economic aims and subsistence practices:
The name of the King, of his ministers and of all Spaniards is heard by the leaders of this country with the greatest disgust, aversion and dislike simply on account of the Company, which seems to them to be the original sin which gives rise to their wrongs. And truly this error seems at times excusable; in a sense it is true that they suffer a kind of slavery, enjoying no benefit from the operations of the Company, and oppressed by the necessity to put through its miserly hands those few products which they are able to cultivate, after seeing lifeless and buried the multitude of other products which ought to flourish in the province of the great gain of the Royal Treasury, the outstanding good of the State and the immense profit of both continents. The woeful and rancorous tone of their laments increases daily, and unless his Majesty grants them the open trade for which they sigh he can no longer count on the fidelity of these vassals, since they will lend their ears and hearts to any hint and help offered them by the Crown's enemies, and it will be impossible or very difficult to cure this ill. This is not an empty prophecy, but the forecast of one who knows the country well.Footnote 112
Ábalos argued for the destruction of the Caracas Company up to its demise in 1784. The intendant understood that unrestricted trade and autonomous commercial connections had become central to the moral economy of coastal dwellers. Attempts to restrict these features of community life in the province would serve to irritate the populace more than to correct its behavior.
One final anecdote about the León Rebellion underscores the interconnectedness of Venezuelan society, smuggling, and political protest in the Bourbon period of Spanish rule. As mentioned earlier in this article, one of the punitive rituals of crushing León's uprising involved tearing down the leader's house and erecting a plaque on the site to mark his treachery. Almost 60 years later, on September 20, 1811, two articles in the Gaceta de Caracas detailed a request from the director of public works for the province to remove the plaque. One of these articles, written only two months after Venezuela's congress had declared independence from Spain, noted that the plaque had been erected many years before with a purpose: “To unjustly stain the memory of Juan Francisco de León. He led those valiant men that tried to throw off the heavy mercantile yoke from which the avarice and despotism of the Spanish kings monopolized the commerce of these provinces. This they did by way of the unscrupulous Compañía Guipuzcoana, under whose exclusive privileges Venezuelans groaned for more than 40 years.”Footnote 113 More than a half century later, León's rebellion and its significance remained fresh in Venezuelan popular memory.
