Historical Background of Venezuela's Independence

One early morning at the beginning of 1799, a group of gendarmes at the service of the Spanish crown brutally broke into the house of a citizen of La Guaira; after savagely beating him, they interned him in one of the dark dungeons that the Spanish colonization kept in that port city on the southern coast of America, in what today is Venezuela. Shortly thereafter, after a summary trial, the man was condemned to be dragged out of prison on the tail of a pack beast to be taken to the gallows. Subsequently, his head would be cut off to be taken in an iron cage to the port of La Guaira and exposed on top of a 30-foot beam; his body dismembered, and each of the quarters, exposed in similar conditions in the emblematic sites of his action. Why so much cruelty? What was this man's crime?