Who were the leaders of the South American wars for independence

Independence movements in the northern regions of Spanish South America had an inauspicious beginning in 1806. The small group of foreign volunteers that the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda brought to his homeland failed to incite the populace to rise against Spanish rule. Creoles in the region wanted an expansion of the free trade that was benefiting their plantation economy. At the same time, however, they feared that the removal of Spanish control might bring about a revolution that would destroy their own power. Creole elites in Venezuela had good reason to fear such a possibility, for one such revolution had recently exploded in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Dominque. Beginning in 1791, a massive slave revolt sparked a general insurrection against the plantation system and French colonial power. By the first years of the 19th century, the rebels had shattered what had been a model colony and forged the independent nation of Haiti.[3] Partly inspired by those Caribbean events, free blacks and slaves in Venezuela carried out their own uprisings in 1795 led by José Leonardo Chirino and José Caridad González. Just as it served as a beacon of hope for the enslaved, Haiti was a warning of everything that might go wrong for elites in the cacao-growing areas of Venezuela and throughout slave societies in the Americas.

Creole anxieties also contributed to the persistence of a strong loyalist faction in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, but they did not prevent the rise of an independence struggle there. Creoles organized revolutionary governments that proclaimed social and economic reforms in 1810 and openly declared a break with Spain the following year.