Two decades of warfare in Venezuela have cost the lives of between one-fourth and one-third of the country's population, which by 1830 is estimated at about eight hundred thousand.

Furthermore, the cocoa-based export economy lies in ruins, a victim of physical destruction, neglect, and the disruption of trade.

As a result, it is relatively simple for the young nation to shift its agricultural export activity to the production of coffee, a commodity whose price is booming in the North Atlantic nations with which Venezuela is now free to trade.

The production of coffee for export will, along with subsistence agriculture, dominate Venezuela's economic life until the initiation of the petroleum boom well into the twentieth century.

Venezuela's century-long post-independence era of caudillismo is perhaps best understood as a competition among various social and regional factions for the control of the Caracas-based bureaucracy that serves the trade with the North Atlantic nations.