Indigenous civilizations that predate European colonization used to live in Venezuela; early colonial documents show that at the time of European colonization that the Arawak and Carib Indigenous civilizations, who were nomadic hunting and fishing groups that fished in Lake Maracaibo. They were some of the most technologically advanced civilizations in South America. In 1522, Spain began to colonize Venezuela with the first settlement being the present-day city of Cumaná. In 1811, after a series of uprisings that were previously unsuccessful, Venezuela declared independence from Spain. Between the two decades of warfare needed to become independent, Venezuela lost between one fourth and one third of its population. Beginning in 1859 and ending in 1863, the Federal War was a civil war in Venezuela in which hundreds of thousands of people died, meaning by the end of the war, Venezuela had no more than a million people left. In 1989, multiple economic crises led to a political crisis and sparked the Caracazo riots, killing hundreds. In 2014, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan citizens protested against high levels of criminal violence, corruption and scarcity of basic goods due to the Federal Government’s policies. In Venezuela, there are five main groups of people: mestizo, of European descent, local white, black and Indigenous. Mestizos are people of mixed race, typically of Spanish and Indigenous descent. 63.7% of the population are mestizos, 3.3% of people are of European descent, 20.0% of people are local white, 10.0% of people are black, 1.3% of people are Indigenous and 1.7% of people do not fit into any of these groups (other). The modern ethnic composition of Venezuela relates to its history because of its colonization by Spain, which spread Spanish people to the country. Indigenous civilizations still remain, however they are much smaller and most of the population is white or mestizo.