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José Leonardo Chirino
He came back from Saint-Domingue knowing the enslaved could win, and four years later tried it at home.
The rise
Born free on 25 April 1754 at Curimagua, in the Coro highlands of what is now Falcón, son of an enslaved African father and a free Indigenous mother, and free because status followed the mother. He worked for the merchant José Tellería and sailed with him to Saint-Domingue while the revolt of the enslaved was under way there.
What they did
On 10 May 1795 he and José Caridad González raised several hundred enslaved and free men at the Macanillas estate and marched on Coro, demanding what they called the law of the French: abolition of slavery, a republic, an end to the alcabala and the Indigenous tribute, and to white privilege. Taken in August and tried in Caracas, he was hanged and quartered on 10 December 1796.
The full picture
The rising killed planters and members of their households, and its opponents used that for two centuries to read it as a race riot rather than a political programme. Venezuela later made him an official founding hero, with a municipality, army units and decrees in his name, a use of his memory historians have questioned.
Why it matters
He put abolition on the Venezuelan agenda a generation before the independence leaders did, and showed how fast the Haitian Revolution crossed the Caribbean as a political programme rather than as news.