Caquetio

The Caquetío were an Arawak-speaking people of the arid coast of northwestern Venezuela, around Coro, and of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire across the water. Mainland hunter-gatherers, they kept close ties with island kinsmen, perhaps six hundred of them on Aruba when the Spaniards arrived in 1499.

In 1513 the crown declared the islands useless, and in 1515 some two thousand Caquetío were shipped to Hispaniola's mines. Some were returned in 1526 to cut brazilwood, and their language died out by the mid-sixteenth century.

When the Dutch seized Aruba in 1636 they expelled the natives, then reemployed them as hunters and herders. By the later 1600s they spoke Spanish and were Catholic, and in 1723 about two hundred crossed to the mainland to found El Carrizal near Coro. They were gradually absorbed into the colonial populations of Venezuela and the Dutch islands.