Manuel Piar

Manuel María Francisco Piar Gómez was born on the twenty-eighth of April 1774 in Willemstad, capital of the Dutch colony of Curaçao. He was the son of María Isabel Gómez, a free woman of color of African descent, and Fernando Alonso Piar y Lottyn, a Spanish merchant seaman of Canarian origin. Raised in modest circumstances in the island's multiracial society, he carried the marks of the colonial caste system throughout his life, and would come to embody the aspirations of the pardos and mestizos who filled the armies of liberation.

Piar came to the Venezuelan mainland as a youth and gave himself to the cause of independence. A gifted and fearless commander, he rose through the ranks of the patriot forces during the long war against Spain, campaigning across the eastern provinces and the great basin of the Orinoco. His military judgment and courage made him one of the most capable generals the revolution produced.

His crowning achievement came on the eleventh of April 1817, when at the Battle of San Félix his forces shattered the royalist army of General Miguel de la Torre. The victory delivered the province of Guayana and the Orinoco to the patriots, securing the resources and river highway that would sustain Simón Bolívar's campaigns. For this triumph Piar was confirmed as General-in-Chief.

Yet Piar pressed for the rights and dignity of the pardos and mestizos, and this, amid the rivalries of the young republic, set him against Bolívar. Arrested and tried for desertion, insubordination, and conspiracy, he was condemned and, on the sixteenth of October 1817, shot by firing squad against the wall of the cathedral of Angostura. In 1876 his remains were honored, and in later years laid among the nation's heroes. Liberator of Guayana, voice of the disinherited, Manuel Piar is remembered with reverence — a son of the African diaspora whose valor helped birth a free people.