evidence: The former Captaincy General of Venezuela, created in 1777, had about 1,500,000 square kilometers (the current Republic of Venezuela has 912,000), which included the island of Trinidad, one of the provinces of that entity, seized by the English from Spain in 1802. With the advent of independence, the country also lost control of the Guajira peninsula, part of the current Colombian eastern plains and large sectors of the Amazon, to the benefit of Colombia and Brazil. [...] "There are two ruling that have left a deep mark on Venezuela’s territorial identity," says Lauren Caballero, internationalist and analyst at the Central University of Venezuela. "The 1891 ruling, which defined the definitive border between Venezuela and Colombia and the almost total loss of the La Guajira peninsula, and the Paris Arbitral Award of 1899, which resulted in the loss of the Essequibo. These two events have somehow generated a kind of trauma in the conscience of generations of Venezuelans, to the point that diplomacy in Caracas avoided during almost the entire 20th century to commit itself to any international treaty that would oblige it to settle its territorial delimitation with third parties". The famous "landmark of Castilletes", after the delimitation that resulted in the loss of almost the entire La Guajira peninsula, is the starting point of the famous dispute over the Gulf of Venezuela - controlled by Venezuela, but claimed in part by Colombia - which for years was the one that monopolized all the news headlines in those years, with some peaks of diplomatic and military binational tension included.