José María España: Example of courage and courage in defense of the Fatherland (+Christmas)

On February 28, 1761, José María España was born in La Guaira, who together with Manuel Gual heads the important pre-independence movement known as the Conspiracy of Gual and Spain.

Spain was a cultured man, he was a regular reader of philosophy, he was fluent in English and French. In addition, in his house he had a large library, with works in French, English and Spanish.

When his father died, he and his brothers started to run a cacao farm called El Carmen, which the Spanish family owned near Naiguatá. He also practiced commerce.

In 1793, the governor and captain general of Venezuela, Pedro Carbonell, appointed him Lieutenant Chief Justice of Macuto.

Since the end of 1796, Juan Bautista Picornell, Manuel Cortés Campomanes, Sebastián Andrés and José Lax were in the vaults of La Guaira, who had been sent to prison from the peninsula for having tried to establish a republic like the French republic there. Gual, Spain and the group of conspirators that followed them, contacted the prisoners, who reaffirmed their revolutionary ideas.

Spain, in its position as lieutenant justice, favoured the escape of the Spanish revolutionaries, on the night of June 4, 1797, hid them in Macuto and made it easier for them to flee to the Antilles on the 26th.

Once the conspiracy was discovered by the Spanish authorities in Caracas, on July 13 of that same year, Spain and Gual went ahead with meetings at a place called Quita Calzón, upstream from La Guaira.

On July 14, authorities arrested many of those involved. Gual and Spain escape to the Antilles. Spain went to the island of Curaçao, from where it then passed to those of Guadalupe, Saint Bartholomew, Saint Thomas, Sainte Croix, Martinique and finally to the island of Trinidad.

In 1799 he returned to La Guaira, but his hiding place was exposed; after being tried, he was sentenced to death as a seditionist and a conspirator.

On May 8, 1799, he was executed in the Plaza Mayor in Caracas. Before his death, Spain uttered the prophetic words: “It won't be long before my ashes are honored.”

In that same place is the statue of the Liberator Simon Bolivar, so that his prophecy that his ashes would be honored was fulfilled.

Mazo News Team