The three Latin American countries most identified with Simon Bolivar are Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. In the 40’s and 50’s, some used to say: Colombia is the University, Ecuador is the seminary, and Venezuela is the barracks.

Having visited but never having lived in either Colombia or Ecuador, I am reluctant to comment on their monikers above. As to Venezuela, I am reluctant to press its characterization too far. However, at times, a generalization might have a grain of truth. 

I recall getting ready to accompany my cousin to see a movie in San Felix, in the state of Bolivar, a little under 500 miles southeast of Caracas. My aunt cautioned us as we walked out the door, “Be careful! This is the season for recruiting!” My cousin, assured her we’d be all right but I had no idea what she was talking about and just let it go over my head. 

As we approached the theater area, we saw a commotion in front of the theater doors. Soldiers were grabbing young men and boys and tossing them into patrol trucks with cage-like structures on top. My cousin grabbed my shoulder and pulled me behind a corner from where we watched as boys scattered as fast as they could run but many did not make it because soldiers were strategically placed at random points and were pretty successful in apprehending them and dragging them to the trucks which would transport them to boot camp and years in the army. 

I watched in a bit of horror soldiers kicking the boys to the trucks and pushing their posteriors as they scrambled into the cages. Years later, reading about colonial era British shanghai methods and about the American, Shanghai Kelly, I’d recall this scene, which has remained with me since.

Venezuela lost a third of its population during the South American revolutionary wars of the early 19th century. The bloodletting in Venezuela was unmatched by any other South American country or region. To help understand the magnitude of the carnage, with 600,000 to 800,000 deaths (depending on which source you trust), the United States lost about 2 or 3% of its population during the Civil War. That’s more deaths than all her major wars combined.

Venezuela lost 33%.

The military campaigns were heroic, atrocious, incredible, treacherous, and pitiless. They featured unimaginable tortures which paralleled those documented in Wilbarger’s Indian Depredations in Texas. 

In the words of the British Legion’s Captain Mahoney, recorded in Recollections of a Service of Three Years in Venezuela and Colombia: “The best and dearest blood of the inhabitants flowed profusely; their fairest towns and cities were laid waste; and one of the finest portions of the globe became a grievous theatre of rapine, devastation, and murder. It is scarcely hazardous to assert, that there was never a period, in any age or country, in relation to which history has recorded more premeditated slaughter or greater cruelty in the application of tortures more dreadful than death itself.”

That helps explain why Venezuela was known as the barracks.