…. of Irish Volunteers Helped Topple Spain's American Empire
"BETWEEN 1817 AND 1820 thousands of Irish men, women and children embarked from ports in Britain and Ireland on a hazardous journey across the Atlantic Ocean. They were emigrants escaping unemployment, poverty and starvation like the millions who would follow in their wake during the 1840s and 1850s. But rather than sailing for the eastern sea ports of North America, these Irish emigrants were sailing south, towards Venezuela, to fight in the South American wars of independence. They were responding to a call for volunteers from Simón Bolívar, the great political and military leader of South American independence.
For 15 years, beginning in 1810, revolutionary armies led by the middle-class criollo (those born in Latin America of Spanish descent) fought the Spanish across South America. The cradle of the revolution in the north of the continent was Venezuela. But by 1817, having been forced to retreat to the banks of the River Orinoco in the south of Venezuela by the arrival of a 10,000-strong army from Spain, Bolívar and the Venezuelan government were desperate for skilled troops.
In Ireland, the end of the Napoleonic Wars had brought about an economic slump and high unemployment as thousands of demobbed soldiers began flooding home. And so Bolívar's agent, Luis López Méndez, began a recruitment campaign to enlist officers and troops to the cause of Venezuelan independence. Veterans of the Irish rebellion of 1798 and the wars in Europe offered their services. Officers who could raise units were offered loot, plantations and glory by the Venezuelan government. For the ordinary soldiers, the promise of a parcel of fertile land with which to begin a new life in the New World was enough…."
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