Anita Arnon

And weirdly, the royalist strongholds are pretty unscathed in a disaster that kills thousands of people.

I mean, there are some estimates that suggest up to 20,000 people may have been killed by these earthquakes.

Buildings are destroyed.

Infrastructure is destroyed.

What comes from the pulpit, unsurprisingly, is God hates a revolutionary.

God hates all these people who are trying to break away from the Spanish king.

Who the hell are they?

They are not on the side of the angels.

And Bolivar hears this from one particular people, although it's being said from church to church to church.

And he responds to a priest's fire and brimstone sermon about how they're all damned and go to hell.

And he says, this is attributed to him, if nature opposes us, we shall fight against it and force it to obey us.

Yeah, isn't it, though?

Isn't it?

Exactly that.

Tito Salles, who's the father of modern art in South America, a lot later, he paints this terrible tragedy, something that breaks the soul of Venezuela and these terrible earthquakes.

So it's certainly a thing that if you are from Venezuela, you know when God didn't feel like he was on your side.

Yeah.

I don't think that's what the artist intended, but okay.

Well, so the Republican forces are already depleted because as I said, it was actually jolly bad luck that the earthquake hits their centres particularly hard.

So, they're struggling to mount any kind of effective resistance and you've got regional militias and local leaders and no centralised control.