Manuel Piar

Manuel María Francisco Piar Gómez was born on the twenty-eighth of April 1774 at Willemstad in the Dutch colony of Curaçao, the natural son of María Isabel Gómez — a free woman of African and Canary Islander descent — and a Spanish merchant of uncertain identity. The family moved to La Guaira on the Venezuelan coast around 1784. He was apprenticed to the maritime trade, was multilingual in Spanish, Papiamento, Dutch and English by his twenties, and entered the first wave of South American independence operations as a privateer in the Caribbean.

He joined Francisco de Miranda's invasion of Venezuela in 1806 and rose through the ranks of the patriot army across the next decade — fighting at La Mata de la Miel, at Maturín, and at the relief of Cumaná. By 1816 he had been promoted general-in-chief and was the senior patriot commander in eastern Venezuela. His decisive military achievement was the campaign of 1817: from a base at the mouth of the Caroní he conquered the entire province of Guayana — the gold and cattle country that became the operational base from which Bolívar would launch the final liberation of New Granada and Peru.

The victory at San Félix on the eleventh of April 1817 was his — and it secured for the independence movement the territory, livestock and arsenal it had until then lacked. It also placed him at the head of the army that had won the war so far. Bolívar, recently arrived from Haiti and outranked in seniority, perceived Piar as a political rival appealing to the pardo and Black soldiery of the eastern army. Piar was arrested in July 1817, tried by court-martial under charges of insubordination, sedition and conspiracy, and executed by firing squad against the wall of the cathedral of Angostura on the sixteenth of October 1817, at forty-three.

He is honored here as the liberator of Guayana whose victory made Bolívar's republic possible.