Bolivar, having separated his small corps into two divisions, entrusted the command of the second to the active General Rivas.  Bolivar himself penetrated the Llanos, after having beaten the Spaniards at Niquitao, Carache, Varinas, Tahuana, and Torcones.  He then advanced to Vitoria, within twenty leagues of Caracas, where he was met by Spanish commissioners, who sued for, and obtained, a capitulation.  The conqueror entered his native city in triumph.  But this did not put an end to the war.  The Spaniards were faithless in the observance of the capitulation, and Monteverde, from within the walls of Puerto Cabello, fomented the discord which prevailed in the interior provinces.  About this time a strong reinforcement arrived from Spain.  Bolivar was obliged to evacuate Caracas; but the royalists were beaten at Viguirima, Barbula, and Las Trincheras.  However, the Spanish general Cevallos had time to raise four thousand recruits in the province of Coro, which had always shown itself inimical to the cause of independence.  Bolivar next gained the important battle of Araure, and repossessed himself of Caracas.  On the 2nd of January, 1814, he assembled the public authorities of the city, and resigned to them the supreme authority he had exercised, and with which his triumphs had invested him.  They, however, refused to admit his resignation; conferred upon him the title of LIBERATOR OF VENEZUELA; and named him dictator.

About this period a Spaniard, Don Jose Tomas Boves, succeeded in bringing about a counter-revolution in the Llanos, an immense tract of level country, which traverses the centre of Venezuela, and extends to the confines of New Granada.  Boves organized a force, which consisted of men mostly chosen for their desperate character, whom he led on by promises of indiscriminate plunder, and by lavishing the greatest rewards upon the perpetrators of the most revolting atrocities.  The track of these ruffians, to Calabozo, was every where marked with the blood of the aged and the defenceless.  Bolivar, who had detached a part of his force in pursuit of Cevallos, had not above two thousand men left to make head against Boves, who, with nearly five times that number, had possessed himself of the fertile valleys of Aragua, and destroyed some patriot divisions sent to check his progress.  Bolivar took up a position at San Mateo, in order to cover Caracas.  A series of attacks, in the space of forty days, reduced the number of Bolivar’s force to four hundred.  Cevallos had repaired the effects of his defeat at Araure, and, reinforced by General Cagigal, had penetrated to Valencia.  The patriot division of the east having defeated Boves at Bocachica, and compelled him to retire to the Llanos, and having subsequently united with the remains of Bolivar’s force, marched against Cagigal and Cevallos, whose well-organized troops amounted to six thousand.  These were attacked and defeated by Bolivar, who then detached the greater part of his force to reduce the province of Coro to