I recently learned Simon Bolivar owned slaves and that he only really "emancipated" the slaves of Venezuela to serve in his army (and even that after he cut a deal with Haiti after they harbored him.)
That said, apparently most Blacks in the nation a the time were Free People of Color who a revolt of which Simon feared.
This made me wonder what Venezuelan slavery was like. Did they ban writing and reading as in the US? Were chattel slaves children automatically slaves?
This article is what I have been studying.
I know it’s been 5 days since you asked this question but I saw no one answered.
To understand how slavery was in Colonial Venezuela you first have to understand the four main social classes from back then:
-Los Blancos (The Whites): This group was divided into three subgroups. Those where the Creole Whites who were whites born in the colony (Venezuela), normally the children of Spanish; the second one was Peninsular Whites who were those who came directly from Spain (their children would be Creole Whites), these people would normally work in important jobs like in the government and considered themselves above anyone else; And then you have the Whites from the shore, these people where also born in Spain but lacked privileges like the ones a Peninsular White would have.
-Los Pardos (The Browns): These where descendants of African slaves that mixed with Europeans. The majority lived in lands where the Spanish imported slaves.
-Los Negros (The Blacks): These were mainly slaves brought from Africa. They worked mostly in cocoa plantations.
-Los Indios (The Indians): These were the indigenous people from Venezuela. They could be from one of many tribes.
With that being said we can now talk specifically about the slaves in Venezuela. Like I said above, they formed part of “The Blacks” social group and mainly worked on cocoa plantations. They were transported from Africa (most of them from Guinea and Cape Verde) starting in the eighteenth century and slavery was legal until the Law of Abolition of Slavery of 1854. The slaves were owned mostly by Peninsular Whites.
I hope this answer helps 👍