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History of Venezuela |
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| Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
República Bolivariana de Venezuela
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| Capital (and largest city) |
Caracas |
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| Official languages | Spanish | |||||
| Demonym | Venezuelan | |||||
| Government | Presidential republic | |||||
| - | President | Hugo Chávez Frías | ||||
| Independence | ||||||
| - | from Spain | July 5, 1811 | ||||
| - | from Gran Colombia | January 13, 1830 | ||||
| - | Recognized | March 30, 1845 | ||||
| Area | ||||||
| - | Total | 916,445 km2 (33rd) 353,841 sq mi |
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| - | Water (%) | 0.32 | ||||
| Population | ||||||
| - | February 2008 estimate | 28,199,822 (40th) | ||||
| - | 2001 census | 23,054,210 | ||||
| Currency | Bolívar fuerte | |||||
This article discusses the history of Venezuela. See also the history of South America and the history of present-day nations and states.
As evidence of the earliest known inhabitants archeologists have discovered leaf-shaped flake tools, together with chopping and plano-convex scraping implements exposed on the high riverine terraces of the Pedregal River in western Venezuela.1 Late Pleistocene hunting artifacts, including spear tips, come from a similar site in northwestern Venezuela known as El Jobo. According to radiocarbon dating, these date from 13,000 to 7,000 BC.2 In the 16th century when Spanish colonization began in Venezuelan territory the population of several indigenous peoples such as the Mariches, descendants of the Caribes, declined. Historianswho? have proposed many reasons for this decline, including exposure to European diseases and the systematic elimination of indigenous tribes for control of resources valued in Europe. Indian caciques ( leaders) such as Guaicaipuro and Tamanaco attempted to resist Spanish incursions, but the newcomers ultimately subdued them. Historians agree that the founder of Caracas, Diego de Losada, ultimately put Tamanaco to death.3
Christopher Columbus sailed along the eastern coast of Venezuela on his third voyage in 1498, the only one of his four voyages to touch the South American mainland. This expedition discovered the so-called "Pearl Islands," Cubagua and Margarita, off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. Later Spanish expeditions returned to exploit these islands' once abundant pearl oysters, enslaving the indigenous people of the islands and harvesting the pearls so intensively that they became one of the most valuable resources of the incipient Spanish Empire in the Americas between 1508 and 1531, by which time both the local indigenous population and the pearl oysters were devastated.
In 1499 the Spanish expedition led by Alonso de Ojeda, sailing along the length of the northern coast of South America, gave the name Venezuela ("little Venice") to the Gulf of Venezuela because of its imagined similarity to the Italian city.
Spain's colonization of mainland Venezuela started in 1522. In the present-day city of Cumaná, Spain established its first permanent South American settlement.
At the time of the Spanish arrival, indigenous people lived mainly in groups as agriculturists and hunters: along the coast, in the Andean mountain range, and along the Orinoco River.
An abortive plan for German settlement from German Habsburg lands (which the Fugger bankers would have financed), never came to fruition.
By the middle of the 16th century not many more than 2,000 Europeans lived in present-day Venezuela. The opening of gold mines at Yaracuy led to the introduction of slaverywhen?, at first with the indigenous population, then with imported Africans. The first real economic success of the colony involved the raising of livestock, much helped by the grassy plains known as llanos. The society that developed as a result — a handful of Spanish landowners and widely-dispersed Indian herdsmen on Spanish-introduced horses — recalls primitive feudalism, certainly a powerful concept in the 16th century Spanish imagination, and (perhaps more fruitfully) economic comparison to the latifundia of antiquity.
During the 16th and 17th centuries the cities which constitute today's Venezuela suffered relative neglect. The Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru (located on the sites formerly occupied by the capital cities of the Aztecs and Incas respectively) showed more interest in their nearby gold and silver mines than in the agricultural societies of Venezuela. Responsibility for the Venezuelan territories shifted between the two Viceroyalties.
In the 18th century a second Venezuelan society formed along the coast with the establishment of cocoa plantations manned by much larger importations of African slaves. Quite a number of black slaves also worked in the haciendas of the grassy llanos. Most of the Amerindians who still survived had perforce migrated to the plains and jungles to the south, where only Spanish friars took an interest in them — especially the Franciscans or Capucins, who compiled grammars and small lexicons for some of their languages. The most important friar misión (the name for an area where the monks were active) developed in San Tomé in Guayana.
The Province of Venezuela came under the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (created in 1717). The Province was then transformed into the Captaincy General of Venezuela in 1777. The Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas held a close monopoly on trade with Europe. The Guipuzcoana company did a commendable job of stimulating the Venezuelan economy, especially in fostering the cultivation of cacao beans, which became Venezuela's principal export.4 It opened Venezuelan ports to foreign commerce, but this was recognizing a fait accompli. Like no other Spanish American dependency, Venezuela had more contacts with Europe through the British and French islands in the Caribbean. In an almost surreptitious, though legal, manner, Caracas itself had become an intellectual powerhouse. It had its own university since 1721, which taught Latin, medicine and engineering, apart (of course) from the humanities. Its most illustrious graduate was Andrés Bello, the greatest Spanish American polymath of his time. In Chacao, a town to the east of Caracas, there flourished a school of music whose director Jose Angel Lamas produced a few but impressive compositions according to strictest 18th century European canons.
Some Venezuelans began to grow restive under colonial control toward the end of the eighteenth century. Spanish neglect of its Venezuelan colony contributed to its intellectuals' increased zeal for learning. The colony had more external sources of information than other more important Spanish dependencies, not excluding the viceroyalties, although one should not belabor this point, for only the mantuanos (a Venezuelan name for the white Creole elite) had access to a solid education. Another name for the mantuanos class was grandes cacaos, named after the source of their wealth. (To this day in Venezuela the term is used for a presumptuous person.) The mantuanos were nothing if not extremely presumptuous and overbearing and overzealous in affirming their privileges against the pardo (mixed-race) majority of the population. The first organized conspiracy against the colonial regime in Venezuela occurred in 1797, organized by Manuel Gual and José María España, and was directly inspired by the French Revolution, but was put down with the collaboration of the "mantuanos" because it promoted radical social changes.
European events sowed the seeds of Venezuela’s declaration of independence. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe not only weakened Spain's imperial power, but also put Britain unofficially on the side of the independence movement. In May 1808, Napoleon asked for and received the abdication of Ferdinand VII of Spain and the confirmation of the abdication of Ferdinand's father Charles IV's in March 1808. Napoleon then appointed as King of Spain his own brother Joseph Bonaparte. That marked the beginning of Spain’s own War of Independence from French hegemony and partial occupation, before the Spanish American wars of independence even began. The focal point of Spanish political resistance, the Supreme Central Junta, formed to govern in the name of Ferdinand. The first major defeat that Napoleonic France suffered occurred at the Battle of Bailén, in Andalusia (July 1808). (At this battle Pablo Morillo, future commander of the army that invaded New Granada and Venezuela; Emeterio Ureña, an anti-independence officer in Venezuela; and José de San Martin, the future Liberator of Argentina and Chile, fought side-by-side against the French General Pierre Dupont.) Despite this victory, the French soon regained the initiative and advanced into southern Spain. The Spanish government had to retreat to the island redout of Cádiz. Here the Supreme Central Junta dissolved itself and set up a five-person regency to handle the affairs of state until the Cortes Generales could convene.
Word of these events soon reached Caracas, but only on 19 April 1810 did its "cabildo" (city council) decide to follow the example set by the Spanish provinces two years earlier. Other provincial capitals — Barcelona, Cumaná, Mérida, Trujillo, among them followed suit. Although the new Junta of Caracas had self-appointed élite members who claimed to represent the pardos (free blacks and even slaves), the new government eventually faced the challenge of maintaining the alliance with the pardos. Given recent history these groups still had grievances against the mantuanos. A segment of the mantuanos, among them a 27-year-old Simón Bolívar, the future Liberator, saw the setting up of the Junta as a step toward outright independence.
The Venezuelan War of Independence ensued. It ran concurrently with that of New Granada.5 On December 17, 1819 the Congress of Angostura established Gran Colombia's independence from Spain. After several more years of war, which killed half of Venezuela's white population, the country achieved independence from Spain in 1821 under the leadership of its most famous son, Simón Bolívar. Venezuela, along with the present-day[update] countries of Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador, formed part of the Republic of Gran Colombia until 1830, when Venezuela separated and became a sovereign country.
Venezuela needed, or so the mantuanos believed, a veteran and prestigious military leader. This they found in Francisco de Miranda. One of the distinguished products of the 18th-century Caracas enlightenment, Miranda had spent more than a quarter-century away from the colony, had served in the French Revolutionary Army and had lately resided in Britain, from where he had tried to promote Venezuela's independence. The establishment of the Caracas Junta and the break in communications with Spain permitted him to return unmolested to Venezuela, despite the reservations of some of the Junta members.
Miranda’s father, a Canary islander, had found himself snubbed by the mantuanos when he formed a Spanish militia. His son Francisco emigrated to Spain, where he obtained a royal officer's commission. From 1772 to 1783, he fought loyally for Spain in Africa and in the taking of Pensacola, Florida, in 1781 in the context of Spain's support for the rebels in the American War of Independence. After coming under suspicion of disloyalty in Havana, Miranda joined the French Revolutionary Army with the rank of general: his command of the artillery decided the issue in France's favor in the crucial Battle of Valmy against Prussia in 1792. Here again Miranda was suspected of not being unconditional and he was jailed but survived the Reign of Terror and was exonerated in 1795.6 It was at this time that Miranda began to dream of creating an independent South American republic, for which he invented the name of Colombia, in honor of Columbus. He personally designed the yellow, blue, and red flag, which are now the national colors used by Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. In 1806, Miranda invaded Coro, but he could not even sway the population of this small city and he retreated to live in London in a well-appointed house in Fitzrovia. The Caracas Junta sent a mission, which included Bolívar and Andrés Bello, to negotiate for Britain's recognition. Its members also met with Miranda and urged him to come and prepare his native land for war. Miranda accepted and he returned with Bolivar. Andres Bello, who never laid claim on martial ability, remained in London. (He devoted his time to studying, teaching, and writing and eventually emigrated to independent Chile a decade later, where he became a prominent cultural and juridical figure.)
Back in Venezuela, Miranda and Bolívar were pushing for independence, which was declared on 5th July 1811 by a congress of the Venezuelan provinces, which after 1810 had become nine after several regions established themselves as full provinces. The situation in Venezuela, though seemingly close to consolidating independence, was much more fraught. Of the four provinces of the former Captaincy General, two, Guayana and Maracaibo, along with the district of Coro (which would prove pivotal), did not favor independence at all. In addition there were no signs that the important ‘’pardos’’ anywhere in Venezuela were enthusiastic about independence, despite attempts to enlist their support. Although the young republic had a legal civilian president, Cristobal Mendoza, Miranda became military generalissimo, after a full civil war with royalist areas started. Ultimately what the First Republic counted on were the mantuanos, who had an uneasy relationship with the former émigré. In Coro, a frigate captain in the Spanish marines, Domingo de Monteverde, gathered a large force of disaffected people from republican areas and marched towards the central cities of Valencia and Caracas. With the rank of colonel in the Republican Army, Bolívar had put in command of the fortress of Puerto Cabello. Bolívar should have intercepted Monteverde, but he lost control of the fortress to royalist prisoners held there. After this Bolívar sailed to La Guaira, the port of Caracas. By July 1812, Miranda took a hard look about him and realized that the republic could not last much longer. The majority of the population, especially the pardos, did not support the Republic and the small mantuano army in Caracas was running short of ordnance. He opened negotiations with Monteverde and had worked out terms of surrender by the end of July, which should have allowed all former republicans to go undisturbed into exile, if they so chose. But when Miranda was about to leave Venezuela from La Guaira, Bolívar and other officers captured and handed him over to the royalists, accusing Miranda of trying to flee with part of the government treasury. With act and with the help of a republican-turned-royalist friend, Antonio Fernández de León, the Marqués de Casa León, Bolívar obtained a writ of safe passage from Monteverde himself. (The marqués had advised Miranda during the negotiations with Monteverde.) Bolívar sailed to Cartagena, which was still in patriot hands. From that moment on, the future independence of Venezuela rested on the shoulders of the young Bolívar, still shy of thirty years of age.
In the viceroyalties of La Plata and New Granada the Creoles displaced the Spanish authorities with relative ease, as Caracas had done at first. The autonomous movement swept through New Granada, but the country was far from politically united. Bogotá inherited the role of capital from Spain, but the royalists were entrenched in southern Colombia (Popayán and Pasto). Cali was a bastion of the independence movement just north of royalist territory. Cartagena declared independence not only from Spain but also from Bogotá. Bolívar arrived in Cartagena and was well received, as he was later in Bogotá, where he joined the army of the United Provinces of New Granada. He recruited a force and invaded Venezuela from the southwest, by crossing the Andes (1813). His chief lieutenant was the headstrong José Félix Ribas. In Trujillo, an Andean province, Bolívar emitted his infamous Decree of War to the Death with which he hoped to get the pardos and any mantuano who was having second thoughts on his side. At the time that Bolívar was victorious in the west, Santiago Mariño and Manuel Piar, a pardo from the Dutch island of Curazao, were successfully fighting royalists in eastern Venezuela. Quickly losing ground (much as Miranda had a year earlier) Monteverde took refuge in Puerto Cabello, and Bolívar occupied Caracas, re-establishing the Republic, with two "states", one in the west headed by Bolívar and one in the east headed by Mariño. But neither the successful invasions nor Bolívar's decree were provoking a massive enrollment of pardos in the cause of Independence. Rather it was the other way around. In the llanos, a populist Spanish immigrant caudillo, José Tomás Boves, initiated a widespread pardo movement against the restored Republic. Bolívar and Ribas held and defended the mantuano-controlled center of Venezuela. In the east, the royalists started recovering territory. After suffering a setback, Mariño and Bolívar joined their forces, but they were defeated by Boves in 1814. Republicans were forced to evacuate Caracas and flee to the east, where, in the port of Carúpano, Piar was still holding out. Piar, however, did not accept Bolívar’s supreme command, and once again Bolívar left Venezuela and went to New Granada (1815). (See Bolívar in New Granada). In Bogotá, he was given the task of reducing the independent state of Cartagena, which had not joined the United Provinces of New Granada. After failing to take the city or getting it to join him in a combined effort against neighboring royalist Santa Marta, he abandoned the enterprise.
In Spain, the French had been driven out and the restored Ferdinand VII sent a large expeditionary force to Venezuela and New Granada under Pablo Morillo, who had distinguished himself during Spain’s War of Independence. It is often said that the Venezuelan llanos were swarming with caudillos like Boves, but this is an exaggeration. Boves was the only significant pro-Spain caudillo and he was acting in concert with Francisco Tomás Morales, who was a regular officer of Spain. In the Battle of Urica, Boves was killed and Morales took command and carried out mopping up operations against the remaining patriot resistance, which included the capture and execution of Ribas. As was still common in the early 19th century, Morales had his head boiled in oil (to preserve it) and sent to Caracas. (See the Execution of Miguel Hidalgo in Mexico.) Morillo arrived in Venezuela and began operations with Morales. Royalist forces under Morillo and Morales captured Cartagena and Bogotá in 1816. Before leaving for New Granada Morillo had decommissioned most of the irregular forces that had fought under Boves, except those that he took to New Granada. With little prospects, some pardos and llaneros began to join the rebellions that were breaking out against Spanish rule in the broad plains of southern Venezuela. In the meantime, Bolívar chose to sail to Jamaica to enlist British aid, which was refused. From there, he went to Haiti, which had been the first Latin American republic to become independent. With the support of the Haitian president Alexandre Pétion and with the naval aid of Luis Brión, another émigré, who was a merchant from Curazao, Bolívar returned to Margarita Island, a secure republican redoubt, but his command of the republican forces was still not firm. Mariño, who had come back with Bolívar from Haiti, headed his own expeditions and succeeded in temporarily capturing Cumaná in 1817. With Brión supplying a small fleet, Bolívar sailed west along the Venezuelan coast to Ocumare de la Costa (the Expedition of Los Cayos), where, in fulfillment of Pétion’s request, he officially proclaimed the end of slavery (although this went unheeded). Morales, back in Venezuela after subduing New Granada, attacked the republican expeditionary force with an army that vastly outnumbered the republicans. Bolívar fled, sailing once again to Haiti with Brión. However, Piar and Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish soldier of fortune, who had previously been active in New Granada, managed to escape with their forces into the interior of the country, defeating Moreles at El Juncal in September 1816 before moving south to Guayana.
Bolívar and Brión returned and tried to capture Barcelona in 1817, where they were repulsed by the Spaniards. In the meantime, Piar and Mariño had occupied defenceless Angostura (a city where the Orinoco River is at its narrowest and deepest, hence its name, and is today Ciudad Bolívar), to where Bolívar headed and was chosen as supreme leader of the independence movement. (It was at this time that Bolívar ordered the addition of a new star for Guayana to the seven stars on the Venezuelan flag, which represented the number of provinces that originally had favored independence. Since Bolívar plays a central role in the symbolism of the current Venezuelan government led by Chávez, this long-forgotten change was revived in the 2006 revision to the flag.) Once in Guayana, Bolívar quickly cashiered Piar, who had been trying (or was accused of trying—historians still debate this) to form a pardo force of his own, by having him arrested and executed after a court martial in which Brión was one of the judges. British veterans of the Napoleonic wars began arriving in Venezuela, where they formed the nucleus of what later became known as the British Legion (although it was really mainly Irish and some Germans). Morillo returned to Caracas and Morales was given troops to dominate eastern Venezuela, which he did successfully. Francisco de Paula Santander, a New Granadan who had retreated to the llanos after Morillo’s invasion, met with Bolívar and agreed to join forces. Morillo’s other lieutenant, the second in command of the expeditionary force, Miguel de la Torre, was ordered to put down a significant rebellion in the llanos of Apure led by José Antonio Páez. At the time in the Southern Cone of South America, José de San Martín had concluded the liberation of Chile with the essential support of the Chilean Bernardo O'Higgins.
In the year 1818 a stalemate was reached with the patriots based in Angostura and free-wheeling in part of the llanos, and Morillo entrenched in Caracas, triumphant in eastern Venezuela, and operating in the llanos as far as Apure. This is the time during which Marx claims that Bolívar dilly-dallied and lost one skirmish after another, also saying that European officers in Angostura were egging him on to attack the center of Venezuela, which Bolívar did attempt but was defeated at La Puerta. At the time it is true that, under James Rooke, there were over 1,000 European soldiers in Venezuela. But Morillo had larger forces, and not just of Spanish line troops but also of pardos still loyal to the Spanish crown.
In 1819, Bolívar proclaimed the creation of Great Colombia which included Venezuela and New Granada. New volunteers arrived in Venezuela, though most, like those that preceded them, were in essence mercenaries probably under the illusion that there were fortunes to be made in Venezuela, which was hardly the case. There is no evidence that the British government was backing them, but since Spain was no longer a British ally, it wasn’t hindering them either. In Europe, generally, Bolívar’s name was known as was the Spanish American movement for independence, which had the sympathy of every liberal-minded person, as did the independence of Greece, then also in the process of emancipation. Morillo had his hands full and pardos were starting to look towards patriot leaders. Campaigns in eastern Venezuela began turning the tide for independence and in the llanos Páez defeated Morillo and Morales in Apure. This cleared the way for Bolívar and Santander to invade New Granada, where, in Pantano de Vargas, the Spaniards were defeated in a battle in which the British Legion played a central role and its commander, Rooke, was killed in action. In the battle of Boyacá (1819), Spanish power was crushed in New Granada, except in the south. Páez occupied Barinas and, from New Granada, Bolívar invaded Venezuela.
After a certain point, the Venezuelan war of independence cannot be disentangled from the Argentine war of independence, even though they occurred through parallel but separate and distant political processes and only converged in Perú.5 In Buenos Aires, a junta similar to that of Caracas had been established on 25 May 1810, but the interior of Argentina, which was still called La Plata (silver)—the name “Argentina”, from silver in Latin, which was first adopted in 1826— either out of royalism or fear of the capital— remained fractious until Gen. Jose de San Martin brought it to heel between 1814 and 1817.
In Spain in 1820, liberal sections of the military, under Rafael Riego, established a constitutional monarchy, which precluded new Spanish invasions of America. Before being recalled to Spain, Morillo signed a truce with Bolívar. Miguel de la Torre was left in command of the royalist forces. The truce ended in 1821 and Bolívar had all available forces converge on Carabobo, a hilly plain near Valencia, to face de la Torre and Morales. The defeat of the Spanish right, which is credited to the British Legion, whose commander Thomas Farrier fell, decided the battle. Later memoirs by the European legionnaires said that Venezuelan troops fled in this action, but as Venezuelan losses, including two important commanders, were high, this is a fabricationcitation needed. The remnants of the royalists tried to resist in Maracaibo and Puerto Cabello but by 1824 all had been reduced by Mariano Montilla and Jose Prudencio Padilla. After Carabobo, a congress met in Cúcuta, Santander’s birthplace, and approved a federalist constitution for Great Colombia.
The liberation of Quito obeyed both strategic and jurisdictional reasons. There was a Quito-Pasto-Popayán royalist axis which was a thorn in the side of Great Colombia, more accurately its bottom. Jurisdictionally, Quito was a dependency of the viceroyalty of New Granada and Bolívar always believed that the new Spanish American nations should keep to the approximate borders they had under colonial jurisdiction, which was not a question so much of aggrandizing Great Colombia as of trying to prevent future border disputes. There was an additional factor and it was that Guayaquil, Quito’s port, had declared its independence and needed support. Peruvian soldiers under orders from San Martin, then occupying Lima, had arrived in Guayaquil. A young Venezuelan general, Antonio José de Sucre, had shown his mettle in previous campaigns and Bolívar sent him with troops by sea to Guayaquil while he invaded from the north. Bolívar defeated the royalists early in 1822, but Pasto was opposing his advance. After failing twice to march directly on Quito, Sucre occupied Cuenca and from there, leading a coalition army in which probably Colombians and British or Irish were a marginal majority—it must be kept in mind that most of both the patriot and royalist sides usually never concentrated above brigade size (5,000 men)—he marched on Quito and occupied the side of the Pinchincha volcano facing the city. The Spanish commander tried to outclimb him but the patriots in the end got the best of their enemies in hand to hand combat. In both Bolívar’s and Sucre’s advances, the British Legion participated importantly, although it was definitely not the winner of the battles. Sucre entered Quito and then turned north and repressed the extremely recalcitrant Pasto royalists, making it possible for Bolívar to join forces with him.
San Martin had not invaded the interior of Perú where Spanish viceroy José de la Serna had his forces intact. When the Colombian liberation of Quito had been accomplished, he sailed to Guayaquil for a “summit of Liberators” with Bolívar. The two leaders met in secret and there has been much speculation about what they talked about. Some believe that San Martin wanted to claim Quito; others that he sought Bolívar’s help to defeat the Spaniards in Perú. San Martin was a strictly military man. He did not like intrigues and he was not prominent in the political infighting in Buenos Aires. As he was uncomfortable in the political world of Lima, which had not been especially keen on liberation, it is likely that he did ask Bolívar to finish the war in Perú, upon which both generals were agreed on its strategic necessity for the consolidation of South American independence. As the viceroyalty of La Plata, from which the independent United Provinces of La Plata had emerged, had once been the administrative center for Upper Perú (today’s Bolivia), and additionally there had been two previous Platean invasions of the region, it is also likely that he indicated his country’s interest in Upper Perú. Be that as it may, San Martin left Lima, went back to Buenos Aires, and shortly later emigrated to London, where he spent the rest of his life.
Bolívar was summoned to Lima, which is also likely as Peruvian aristocrats by now knew that their loyalty to Spain could become a drawback once Perú had become independent. The Spaniards still occupied the port of Trujillo in northern Perú, which Colombian forces secured (1823). Bolívar landed in El Callao, the port of Lima, but skirted the fort where a Spanish force was holed up and only surrendered in 1826. In Lima itself he was named dictator. Bolívar and Sucre went after the royalist forces which they beat in the battle of Junin (1824. The battle consisted of cavalry charges on both sides. Bolívar went back to Lima and Sucre chased La Serna’s army and defeated it in the battle of Ayacucho, considered the landmark victory of South American independence for it involved the highest number of troops ever engaged in the wars of independence (possibly around 20,000 in all). While these events were going on in South America, in the USA, which already had 42 years as an independent state, president James Monroe enunciated in 1823 the doctrine that bears his name declaring the Western Hemisphere, except Canada, its area of influence and warning European powers not to encroach on it. Bolívar’s response to American claims of hegemony was the convocation of the Congress of Panamá, which was held in June-July 1826 and which the USA did not attend. Sucre went on to Upper Perú, apparently without Bolívar’s authorization, and he defeated feeble local resistance and created the Republic of Bolivia (1825), named after Bolívar. Bolívar made public the letter in which he reprimanded Sucre, but he wrote the constitution for Bolivia, which he considered his legislative masterpiece. Sucre became president of Bolivia.
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Although Bolívar was feted in Lima and his political ascendancy was never disputed, neither Perú nor Bolivia were hospitable to Colombians. Peruvians themselves were probably a majority on both sides in the battle of Ayacucho. Besides, in Venezuela, nominally a province of Great Colombia, Páez, backed by the former mantuanos (and now the ruling clique in Caracas), tentatively initiated the separation of Venezuela in 1826. Bolívar returned post haste to Bogotá, where vice-president Santander complained about Venezuelan insubordination. Bolívar traveled to Caracas and seemingly put Páez in his place (1827). Sucre left Bolivia the same year. Santander was disappointed and on top of that he opposed Bolívar’s plans to implant the Bolivian constitution in Great Colombia, for which a convention was convoked in the town of Ocaña. Thus began the rivalry between Santander and Bolívar. In 1828, in view of the political opposition he was facing both in Venezuela and New Granada and that his Great Colombia was coming apart, Bolívar named himself dictator. He escaped an assassination attempt with the help of his mistress, Manuelita Sanz, a pardo woman from Quito. Santander was exiled but Jose Prudencio Padilla, the pardo general who had helped corner Morales after Carabobo in Maracaibo, was executed instead. The Peruvians were now emboldened and invaded Guayaquil. Bolívar had to return to Quito in 1829 to repulse them, which didn’t take much doing for the invasion fizzled before Bolívar arrived. Back in Bogotá, Bolívar pleaded for unity and, though he had offered to resign various times during his career, this time, when Great Colombia had a new constitution (not Bolívar’s Bolivian one) and a president, Joaquin Mosquera, Bolívar finally did resign in 1830. At that point, Páez not only had declared the second independence of Venezuela but promoted a campaign of vituperation against Bolívar. Seeing the state of things, Quito followed suit under Venezuelan general Juan José Flores, and Sucre was assassinated while riding alone through a thick forest on his way to that city. A downcast Bolívar rode to the coast with the intention of leaving the country, but he was truly exhausted and very sick. He died in Santa Marta, Colombia, at the age of 47.
How does this summary on Bolívar stack up to “Marx’s Bolívar”? Bolívar was not cowardly in any possible sense of the word, but, as military commander, he tended to be cautious. He was fond of power despite his protestations that he only wanted to be an “ordinary citizen”. And he also relished the tributes that were showered on him. It is no secret that he was a ladies’ man. He was a good dancer and easy with compliments. Although this story is an obvious fake and there is no conceivable reason why its Peruvian author, Ricardo Palma, a pardo nostalgic for the viceroyalty, should have invented it, it tells that, when Bolívar first entered Lima, there was a maiden waiting in his chamber. Afterwards, a bloody cloth was waved aloft to the people as evidence of her virginity and Bolívar’s virility, an odd display which, it has been said, was something of a ritual in rural Sicily. But Palma goes a bit further and claims that this cloth was the origin of Perú’s flag, which is white in the center and red on both sides. The report of Bolívar sacking Bogotá has no grounds. We already explained that Bolívar besieged Cartagena because it refused to obey Bogotá. Bolívar did not lose any significant battle against Morillo. The skirmishes in the llanos during Morillo’s offensive obviously indicate that he was engaging in guerrilla warfare, which is what Spaniards had done against France. Bolívar only retreated when the odds were too high against him. Cowards are not usually endowed with a tenacious will, and this no one begrudges Bolívar. The foreign legionnaires under his orders did yeoman duty but by themselves they never would have won a single battle, and Bolívar always gave them their due. Bolívar’s aide de camp during his campaigns after Angostura was the Irishman Daniel O’Leary, who also compiled the largest number of accounts and documents about Bolívar and the Colombian wars of independence. Bolívar never supported Venezuela’s separation from Great Colombia. Aside from proclamations, he never kept his word to Pétion to free the slaves, but that would have been as if Robert E. Lee, who freed his own slaves, had tried to impose their emancipation in the Confederacy. Bolívar did seem to have something about pardos, but Piar was engaging in sedition when Venezuela most needed unity and it is certain that Padilla, who was also pardo, did participate in the plot to kill Bolívar.
Contrary to what is often said, the Venezuelan 19th century after independence was not one continuous civil war during which one caudillo followed another without rhyme or reason and the victors liquidated the defeated as a matter of course.7 As in all human affairs everywhere, there were patterns of political ascendancy, downfalls, and resurgences.8 The same geographical reasons that had made possible the formation of Venezuela as a distinct national entity separate from New Granada during the colonial period, also made Venezuela a country difficult to govern. Venezuela had various regions: the Andes, the plains that stretched from the borders with New Granada to the Orinoco delta, Guayana, the Maracaibo basin, the Coro region, the Barquisimeto region, and central Venezuela formed by the Caracas-Valencia axis and its surrounding areas. The llanos were further subdivided into the eastern part which included the Cumaná region (and the island of Margarita by extension), the Apure llanos, and the central and western llanos. Except for the llanos, where there were no geographical barriers between them, the other regions were separated from each other by either outright mountain ranges or rough mountainous terrains. The distinction between the eastern and the central and western llanos was due to political precedents and circumstances. The eastern llanos, and Guayana, had practically fought their own war of independence within the wider war of independence. They also had outlets to the sea. The central and western llanos, which politically were considered extensions of Caracas (except Barinas), had varying access to the central region. The Apure llanos were a prolongation of the central llanos. The western llanos, with the capital in Barinas, had been a province separate from Caracas, but they were in effect (the same as Apure) part of the same social, military, and political landscape.
Upon independence, Venezuela was possibly the most impoverished country in Spanish America. In 1800, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt had estimated the population of the province of Venezuela at around one million.9 A calculation made by Agustin Codazzi, an Italian officer and engineer who chose Venezuela as his homeland, put the population at 810,00010 Whether these figures are reliable or not, it is undeniable that after over a decade of incessant warfare, Venezuela’s population must have gone down, if not from the wars themselves, from the unstable social conditions they engendered. Venezuela had no means of communication outside of the caminos reales (royal roads) from the colonial period. There existed a stone-paved camino real from Caracas to La Guaira and there were earthen roads that crisscrossed central Venezuela from Caracas to Valencia and from the center to the llanos. In the llanos themselves, there were the trails made by cattle-herders from one town to another. In the rest of Venezuela, roads were no better than mule tracks that followed lines of least resistance. Caracas had started re-building itself when the war for independence ended, but by all measurable social standards the city had deteriorated from its colonial apogee. It had no public buildings of any note. Its cathedral would have been considered a minor church in México. In terms of social organization, Venezuela had inherited the colonial distinctions between the minority ruling whites, the majority un-enfranchised pardos, and the slaves. Government was mostly a local affair. The country was 90% or more rural and the regional caudillos exerted their authority from their own large land holdings through the small towns that acted mostly in name as capitals in all the regions. Despite its relative insignificance as a city, Caracas was the symbol of political power and its control was considered to some extent legitimating. In brief, Venezuela was not a cohesive country, but the political forces that determined its history were not entirely arbitrary or chaotic.
In the seventy years from 1829 to 1899, by one official tally, Venezuela had thirty presidential terms, but this leaves out some transitional presidencies bringing the figure to 41. In reality, there were 28 terms which were not transitional and these were filled by only sixteen presidents. This is not to say that Venezuela was not an unstable country. During the same period, there were at least thirty insurrections, but the majority of these were suppressed. The usual pattern was that some local, usually white, caudillo would “recruit” an “army” of 100 or more pardos and make a pompous “revolutionary” proclamation. If this caudillo had some measure of charisma, he could put other caudillos on his side and, with the other recruited pardos, march on Caracas. Most of the time this pattern did not succeed, but sometimes it did, and when this happened Venezuela had a period of relative political tranquility. A successful caudillo was one who could get other caudillos to put down the minor insurrections that cropped up here and there for him. There were other features of note. In Venezuela, as if the caudillos had a tacit understanding among themselves, there were no political executions with but one minor exception. All a significant caudillo had to fear from failure was either jail, usually for a short term, or exile. However, these privileges did not extend to the pardos, who were easy to recruit, easy to punish, and easy to forget once a caudillo was in power.
Roughly, the 19th century history of Venezuela can be divided into the following periods: (1) the José Antonio Páez ascendancy (1829-1847), during which he had the support of Carlos Soublette; (2) the Monagas ascendancy (1847-1858); (3) the Great War of the Caudillos (1858-1863); (4) the Federalist period (1863-1870); (5) the Antonio Guzmán Blanco ascendancy, whose main caudillo supporter was Joaquin Crespo (1870-1887); and (6) the civilian presidencies and the Crespo ascendancy (1887-1899).11
Páez was a pardo, but he won his spurs during the War of Independence and nobody in Venezuela could contest his right to govern, especially as the white oligarchy in Caracas supported him warmly. Páez once named as his successor the civilian José María Vargas, which provoked the first of the failed insurrections. This is often attributed to a militaristic reaction, but in fact Vargas had royalist antecedents and those who tried to overthrow him were veteran officers of the War of Independence. The leader of the insurrection was José Tadeo Monagas, whose base was the eastern llanos, but as Páez had no effective authority there, Monagas suffered no consequences for his insubordination. Besides Monagas had as much a right as Páez to be considered one of the “liberators” of Venezuela and he had the additional credential that, whereas Páez had turned his back on Bolivar’s Great Colombia, he, at least in principle, had manifested his allegiance to it until its disintegration was irremediable.
Soublette was an honest but lackluster president, in some ways a foil to Páez, and he could not prevent the “election” of Jose Tadeo Monagas to the presidency in 1847. It is the accepted wisdom that all the “elections” that are mentioned as occurring in the Venezuelan 19th century were a sham or non-existent, but this is not exactly accurate. There were elections, but these were held at the municipal level and of course the pardos had no vote. This tradition of indirect elections through local councils would last in Venezuela until 1945. There were three Monagas presidents: the elder José Tadeo, the younger José Gregorio (always at the side of his brother, but a competent officer in his own right), and José Ruperto, son of José Tadeo, (although he was not president during the Monagas ascendancy, but during the Federalist period). The eastern llanos were so fertile in caudillos because its economy was open to international trade and the exports from that region (cattle, hides, coffee) were staples of the Venezuelan economy.
The two Monagas brothers were at first respectful of the central Venezuelan oligarchy. But then they dissolved congress and succeeded each other by decree. During his presidency, Jose Gregorio abolished slavery. A reaction against the Monagas was led by Julián Castro from Valencia. He was the first military ruler who had not fought in the War of Independence. Castro was a creature of the Caracas-Valencia oligarchy and not very effectual. During his presidency, there was a proliferation of aspiring caudillos in Caracas itself and he exiled them all. This was what provoked the Great War of the Caudillos, called in Venezuelan historiography the Guerra Federal or the Federalist War, although federalism was not what these men really had in mind. Castro was not competent either as president or as soldier and he handed power to the civilians of the oligarchy, who were soon being overwhelmed by insurrections in the central and western llanos. Páez, who had been exiled by the Monagas, was called backed from the USA, but he was no longer the caudillo he once was and he had to surrender to the leader of the federalists, Juan Crisóstomo Falcón. One result of the War of the Caudillos was that the official denomination of Venezuela was changed from “republic” to the “United States of Venezuela”, a national name it had, as well as the motto “God and Federation”, until a dictator in the mid-20th century changed it back to “republic”.12
Falcón had been an excellent caudillo, but he made a feckless president, especially as he was wont to spend a lot of time in his native Coro. He was succeeded by weak presidents from central Venezuela. Jose Ruperto Monagas tried to save the federalist government, but he was no match for the greatest of the guerrilla leaders, Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who had spent much of his public life as Venezuelan ambassador at large. When he came to power, he did not do so in the name of federalism, which he once espoused, but as a liberal. Venezuela was a country of peripheral enclaves, defined by ports through which international commerce was carried on. These enclaves were the source of customs revenues, which, with some foreign loans, were the main fiscal resources of the Venezuelan government. Caracas had its port of La Guaira, to which it had been connected by a railroad. Valencia was linked to Puerto Cabello. Maracaibo constituted an enclave in itself. It was the outlet for coffee, mostly by river and lake Maracaibo from Táchira, in the Venezuelan Andes, and from Colombia. The eastern llanos had an excellent natural harbor near Lecherias, but its potential was not discovered until well into the 20th century with the rise of the oil industry. The telegraph had been introduced since the 1850s, but it went from Caracas to Valencia.
Guzmán Blanco was the most sophisticated Venezuelan president during the 19th century. He was also the most charismatic of the caudillos. He was adept at contracting loans for Venezuela, from which he amassed a small fortune. Guzmán Blanco had ambitious goals for Venezuela. He wanted to make Caracas a mini-Paris and he did build some theaters and a capitol, but these projects were on a very minor scale. He was also good at progressive legislation. He declared education free and obligatory for all Venezuelans, but Venezuela still had no roads, so his decree was wishful thinking. He did build the railroad from Caracas to Valencia and tried in other ways to modernize the country, but the facts were stacked against him in a country of over one million square kilometers with a wild and inhospitable topography and its some 1,200,000 inhabitants living mostly in rural areas. The political stability of Venezuela was principally the doing of his principal lieutenant, Joaquin Crespo, a pardo from the central llanos.
Guzmán Blanco probably got bored of ruling Venezuela and he decided to retire to Paris in 1887 at the age of 59. He died there in 1899. He had left behind statues of himself and other reminders of his prolonged direct and indirect rule. Also, he left a country in relative peace. His appointed successor, Hermógenes López, was a colorless caudillo, who inaugurated some of the projects Guzmán Blanco had started, among them a submarine cable to Curazao, which linked Venezuela to the rest of the world, and the Valencia-Puerto Cabello railroad. López was replaced by the civilian Juan Pablo Rojas Paúl with Guzmán Blanco’s far-away blessing. Crespo, who thought he should have been chosen president, went into exile and started planning his own revolution. Rojas Paúl actively promoted an anti-Guzmán popular reaction in Caracas and other cities. He turned power over to another civilian, Raimundo Andueza Palacios, who forgot the cardinal rule of relying on caudillos for support, a power vacuum which Crespo promptly filled in 1892. Ambitious but unassuming, Crespo ruled until 1898 and handed power to Ignacio Andrade, but Crespo was the military mainstay of the government. In suppressing a serious threat to the government he was killed in action and Andrade was left to fend for himself.
For a complete list of Venezuelan leaders, see List of Presidents of Venezuela.
Of all the regions of Venezuela, the Andes and Guayana had not participated actively in the many insurrections that had plagued the other parts of Venezuela. The llanos had been the great battleground of most of the confrontations between caudillos, whose struggles spilled over into Barquisimeto. Coro had been the favorite landing site for most of the rebellions, especially the Great War of the Caudillos. Maracaibo at one time tried to go autonomous and had to be taken by arms. Guayana was so under-populated it hardly counted. But the Andes was another story. It was the richest region of Venezuela through the export of coffee. It had a healthful, high-altitude climate. It probably accounted for perhaps half the total population of Venezuela. Malaria and yellow fever and other tropical scourges had become endemic in the llanos. A rebel from Trujillo, the Andean province closest to central Venezuela, had once tried and failed at rebellion. But in the 1890s the Andeans, especially in Táchira, started flexing their muscles. When Crespo was killed, Venezuela entered a period of uncertainty as Andrade was not himself a caudillo and he was Crespo’s placeman. In 1899, the Tachirense Cipriano Castro, a short-tempered and highly ambitious man, formed a real army with Andean recruits and the support of his friend Juan Vicente Gómez. Castro met practically no resistance on his march to Caracas. His forces were larger now under the command of Gómez. As was to be expected, the new government was like lighting not one but many fuses to many enterprising, aspiring caudillos. Castro was himself courageous, but he did not need to take the field: he had Gómez, who in two years of active campaigning with his Andean troops put down not only the on-going rebellions, but even made sure that there were not to be any more rebellions by placing Andean lieutenants and Andean troops in all the regional capitals of Venezuela.
There are two things about Castro who few deny: he was a debauchee with an insatiable taste for cognac and he was a daredevil in foreign relations defying Europe as if he had a navy and adequate coastal defences. Many Venezuelans consider Castro a great patriot but in fact, when he got embroiled with his Venezuela's European creditors, he did not hesitate to invoke the Monroe Doctrine in defense of his country’s sovereignty. Guzman Blanco had tried to have Britain recognize Venezuelan sovereignty to the Essequibo river, in modern terms over half of the state of Guyana. Britain ignored this claim but in 1887 in tried to extend the boundary far into the actual territory of Venezuela prompting the first Venezuelan appeal to the Monroe Doctrine. The USA in 1895 asked that Britain submit its claim to arbitration, which London refused at first creating tension with Washington. There was some eye-winking on the two sides and finally Britain accepted arbitration, which validated its rejection of the Essequibo river boundary, and accepted a broad interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine.13 Castro had nothing to do with this affair, but he inherited from his predecessors a burden of foreign debt which he refused to honor. An international fleet of European gunboats blockaded Venezuela’s coasts in 1902. With the Guiana border precedent in mind, Castro invoked again the Monroe Doctrine. Germany was aggressively pursuing its siege in western Venezuela, where there was a large colony of German merchants in Maracaibo, and this preoccupied the Theodore Roosevelt administration, which told the Germans to back off.14 But at the same time it told Castro that the Monroe Doctrine did not apply to unpaid debts.15 The debt question was sent to the Hague Tribunal which faulted Venezuela. Castro was reluctantly forced to start paying up, but the total cancellation of the overdue bills did not occur under his government.
In 1908, Castro was too sick to be cured in Venezuela and he left for Germany leaving Gómez in Charge. Castro had not gone further than the outer Antilles when Gómez took over the government and forbade Castro from returning. This was the beginning of a regime that lasted until 1935 and is interwoven with the early development of the oil industry, the greatest influence ever on the history of Venezuela. One of Gómez’s first measures was to start canceling outstanding Venezuelan international debts, a goal which was soon achieved. Under Gómez, Venezuela acquired all the appurtenances of a regular national army staffed and officered almost entirely by Andeans.16 At the time, the country had a widespread telegraphic system. Under these circumstances, the possibility of caudillo uprisings was curtailed. The only armed threat against Gómez came from a disaffected former business partner to whom he had given a monopoly on all maritime and riverine commerce. Although there are many tales of Gómez’s cruelty and ruthlessness, they are mostly exaggerations by his enemies. The man who had tried to overthrow him, Roman Delgado Chalbaud, spent fourteen years in jail. He later claimed that he was in ball and chains during all that time, but he was released by Gómez.17 His son, Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, would later become president of Venezuela. When university students staged a street demonstration in 1928, they were arrested but were soon released. But Gómez was indeed ruthless in throttling all opposition and he allowed a personality cult, but this was as much his doing as that of his sycophants, who were numerous all over Venezuela.18 Gómez, unlike Guzmán Blanco, never erected a statue of himself anywhere in Venezuela. He was a stickler for legal formalisms, which in essence meant that he introduced new constitutions any time it suited his political ends, although this was also the rule during the 19th century. During his dictatorship, Gómez appointed two figurehead presidents while he kept a tight hold on the armed forces from Maracay, his favorite city, west of Caracas, which he embellished and made the main Venezuelan garrison, a status which it retained until at least the 1960s.
It did not take much geological expertise to know that Venezuela had large petroleum deposits, because the petroleum oozed out from seeps all over the country and there was even an asphalt lake which had formed naturally. Venezuelans themselves had tried to extract oil for a small hand-pumped refinery early in the 20th century. As the word spread internationally of Venezuela’s oil potential two things happened: representatives of large foreign companies came to the country and started lobbying for rights of exploration and exploitation and Gómez established the concessionary system. Venezuela had inherited from Spain the law that the ground surface—presumably, as deep as a plow or a water well went—could belong to individuals but everything under the soil was state property. Thus, Gómez began to grant huge concessions to family and friends. Any one who was close to Gómez eventually would become rich in one way or another. Gómez himself accumulated immense expanses of grasslands for cattle-raising, which had been his original occupation and was a life-long passion. The Venezuelan concessionaires leased or sold their holdings to the highest foreign bidders. Gómez, who didn’t trust industrial workers or unions, refused to allow the oil companies to build refineries on Venezuelan soil, so these were built them in the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curazao. The one in Aruba was for a time the second largest in the world, after the one in Abadan, Iran. Although the Venezuelan oil boom started around 1918, the year when oil first figured as an export commodity, it took off when an oil well called Barroso blew a 200-foot (60 m) spout that threw up an average of the equivalent to 100,000 barrels a day. It took five days to bring the flow under control. After that, there was no looking back.19 By 1927, oil was Venezuela’s most valuable export and by 1929 Venezuela exported more oil than any other country in the world.
It has been said that Gómez did not tax the oil companies and that Venezuela did not benefit from oil production, but this is only a half-truth.20 The Venezuelan government derived considerable income from the concessions and from taxes of one sort of another, but the original fiscal laws which applied to the oil companies were hammered out between the government and American lawyers. The laws were relatively lenient, but Gómez, who had an acute business sense, understood that it was necessary to create incentives for investors in the Venezuelan oil fields, some of which were very accessible but others were deep in jungles. Oil income allowed Gómez to expand Venezuela’s rudimentary infrastructure and the over all impact of the oil industry on Venezuela was a modernizing trend in the areas where it operated. But in a wider sense, the Venezuelan people, except for those who worked for the oil companies and lived badly but had a steady income, benefited little or not all from the country’s oil riches.
When Gómez took power, Venezuela was a very poor illiterate country. The white/pardos social divide was still very much in place. When Gómez died in his bed in 1935, Venezuela was still a poor illiterate country and if anything the social stratification had been accentuated. The population had grown from perhaps one million and a half to two million. Malaria was the greatest killer. Gómez himself probably had Amerindian ancestry, but he was overtly racist and he was much influenced by a historian, Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, who published a book claiming not inaccurately that the Venezuelan War of Independence was really a civil war with the dubious added argument that pardos were a menace to public order and Venezuela could only subsist as a nation ruled by white strongmen.21 Gómez, for instance, prohibited all immigration from black Caribbean islands. Even though Venezuela’s population in his time was 80% pardo, passports, which were first issued under Gómez, identified carriers by the color of skin, which they still did until the 1980s. Venezuela did change considerably under Gómez. It had radio stations in all the important cities. There existed an incipient middle class. But it still had only two or three universities. It was estimated that 90% of families were formed through common-law marriages. The social progress that did take place was through a spontaneous trend towards modernization in which oil played the central role.
Gomez was succeeded by his minister of war, Eleazar López Contreras, a tall, thin, disciplined soldier with a solid education. Before arriving at his post, he served the Gomecista government loyally wherever he was sent, including at one time Venezuela’s eastern land’s end, a village called Cristobal Colón, across from Trinidad. In power, López Contreras allowed the pardo masses to vent for a few days before clamping down. He had Gómez’s properties confiscated by the state, but the dictator’s relatives, with some exceptions who left the country, were not harassed. Gomez never married but he had various illegitimate children. Initially, López Contreras permitted political parties to come into the open, but they tended to become rambunctious and he proscribed them although he did not use strong repressive means, which weren’t necessary anyway as the politicians that led them, called in Venezuelan historiography the 1928 Generation, did not yet have large popular followings. One of the reasons for this hard stance was that, during his first year as president, Lopez Contreras was faced by a labor strike which paralyzed the oil industry in Zulia state, whose capital was Maracaibo, in western Venezuela, where the most productive fields were located. Lopez Contreras had created a labor ministry and his representative there, Carlos Ramírez MacGregor, was ordered to make a report of the situation, which confirmed the workers’ grievances, but he also had instructions to declare the strike illegal, which he did and government forces made the workers return to their jobs, although after that incident the oil companies did start taking serious initiatives to improve conditions for Venezuelan workers. Among the notable goals of Lopez Contreras was a campaign to eradicate malaria in the llanos. This task was finally accomplished during the following presidency through the use of DDT.
The oil strike was led by Rodolfo Quintero and the oil worker Jesús Faría, both communists. The history of Marxism in Venezuela is rather complex, but a brief overview is that communism never sunk roots in Venezuela and its impact on mainstream politics was minimal. Even Chávez today is not a Marxist. His sloganeering has communistic overtones but he has not carried out a systemic communist ordering of society as Castro did in Cuba. Lopez Contreras tried to create a political movement called Cruzadas Civicas Bolivarianas (Civic Bolivarian Crusades), but it did not pan out, for whatever he did had the taint of his background as a pillar of the Gómez regime. Even the name “crusades” was suspect with its clerical overtones.22 Constitutionally, López Contreras finished Gómez’s last term and in 1936 he was elected by the docile congress for the term ending in 1941.
After a vote in the same congress for the 1941-1946 term, López Contreras handed power to his war minister and personal friend, the Andean general Isaías Medina Angarita, who in many ways made a strong foil to his predecessor. He was stout and good natured and did not make excessive demands on himself. Medina Angarita legalized all political parties, including the divided communists: some were hard-line, such as the Machado brothers of a traditional Caracas family; and others, gradualists or conciliatory, led by Luis Miquilena, an union leader who supported Medina’s step-by-step approach and for a time was allied to one of the Machado brothers. Under Medina there was an indirect democracy, which followed the 19th century custom of elections at the municipal council level. But Medina was committed to a still restricted but wider national democratic election. For that he had officialdom in all the Venezuelan states form a pro-government party named Partido Democratico Venezolana or PDV (Venezuelan Democratic Party). But the real genius at political organization was Rómulo Betancourt, who created from the bottom up what was in effect a pardo party with a strongly reformist, but not Marxist, agenda.
In exile Betancourt had flirted with communism but he was realistic enough to understand that he wasn’t going to get very far along that path. Medina fostered the further professionalization of the Venezuelan officer corps. Among others, he sent Capt. Marcos Pérez Jiménez to the Peruvian military academy, which was reputed in Latin America as being very efficient, where the young Andean officer had as professor Gen. Manuel Odria, later to become dictator of Perú. Another Peruvian influence on Venezuelan politics was Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who tried to create an inter-American alliance of leftist anti-imperialist parties, which vaguely fitted Betancourt’s own program. Another up-and-coming officer was Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, the son of the anti-Gomez conspirator previously mentioned. Delgado Chalbaud had spent most of his life in France, where he studied engineering and later attended the St. Cyr military academy. He returned to Venezuela in 1939 and was promptly commissioned in the Venezuelan army by Lopez Contreras. Because of his background, Delgado was the undisputed leader of a group of conspirational officers, among whom the second most important was Pérez Jiménez.
As the 1945 elections approached, Betancourt, who knew how large his national political base was now, accepted Medina’s invitation to participate in them on the tacit understanding that the official candidate, Diogenes Escalante, would win with the support of Acción Democrática (AD), as Betancourt’s party had been named. In exchange, the following elections would be totally democratic. Escalante was party to this agreement, but on his return to Venezuela from Washington, where he was ambassador, to participate in his own election, he started mumbling and making incoherent statements. The man was insane! Medina then made a mistake, which was to choose a substitute for Escalante without consulting AD. Betancourt was incensed and thus it was that the strongest political party in Venezuela and the military conspirators, none of which had a rank higher than major, made a deal whose consequences were to be long-lasting. In October 1945, the military declared themselves in open rebellion in Caracas and Betancourt called on the people to stage a civilian uprising.23 Medina resigned, but it is generally acknowledged that the army, except for the rebels, was on his side and could have put down the pardo adecos as well as arrest the insubordinate officers. This is believable because the army was the making of Gomez and Lopez Contreras and even Medina. It was a disciplined institution. But there was the other historical antecedent and that was the long history of violence in Venezuelan politics during the previous century and Medina did not want a bloody civil war on his hands.24
A junta was formed which was headed by Betancourt with Delgado as minister of defence. Fully democratic elections were held for congress, in which it was shown that AD under Betancourt had indeed become the party of the vast majority of Venezuelans. Two other parties were founded: COPEI (Independent Electoral Committee), by the pro-clerical Rafael Caldera, whose party later was later re-baptized Social Christian COPEI; and URD (Republican Democratic Union), which was joined by Jóvito Villalba, considered one of the greatest orators in Venezuelan history, and made over practically into his personal party. Since the death of Gomez, the following governments had been gradually increasing oil taxes. In the junta, energy minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo decreed a 50-50 sharing agreement with the oil companies. The junta also took other daring measures. Catholic schools, which were the best in the country, were forced to close temporarily while a new national curriculum was elaborated. Agrarian reform was approved. But most noticeable was that bureaucracy, which previously had been kept at the barest possible minimum, made a phenomenal forward leap, and not just because of all the reforming that had to be done but also because AD had to reward its more prominent backers.
The white/pardo divide was in theory demolished although in practice not many pardos could fulfill even the lowest requirements for civil service, into which nevertheless many entered. 25 A national educational campaign was inaugurated, but fundamentally, as the majority of Venezuelans were still illiterate, all this amounted to was that the few who could read would be teaching the many that could not. There was a national election for the presidency in 1947, which the adeco candidate, the talented novelist Romulo Gallegos, won, again by a huge margin. But at the time there was much discontent in the middle class, which was Caldera’s base of support—he got 262,000 votes—not to speak of the upper crust; and of course the officers who had ushered AD into power were on the lookout for the main chance. There was no particular incident that set off the bloodless 1948 coup, which was led by Delgado Chalbaud. There was no popular opposition. This might have meant that the odds were too great or that the pardo masses had not noticed any particular improvement in their lives despite the incessant government propaganda. All prominent adecos were expelled. The other parties were allowed but muzzled.
Delgado Chalbaud was twice a betrayer, but Venezuelan historians tend to speak well of him, analogously as they argue in America that John F. Kennedy would not have allowed the Vietnam war to escalate. But both positions are contrafactual, hence un-provable. What is often said is that Delgado Chalbaud was planning to restore Venezuelan democracy.26 If that was his intention, he did not get the chance to accomplish it. One day in November 1950, as he was being driven unescorted through a wooded part of Caracas towards the presidential palace, he was cut off by cars and kidnapped. His captors took him to an isolated house in southern Caracas. All versions of this incident are more or less agreed that someone’s gun went off wounding the leader of the kidnappers, that Delgado was then hustled out of the car and he confronted his abductors, and that finally they shot him to death. The main kidnapper, who was bleeding badly, was soon captured and later, in the then official version, he was killed trying to flee. No one accepts this version, which is why it is widely believed that it was his political partner, Pérez Jiménez, who had Delgado Chalbaud assassinated.
Delgado had formed a triumvirate with Pérez Jiménez and Luis Felipe Llovera Páez. With his death the remaining triumvirs chose a civilian president, Luis Germán Suárez Flamerich, who was dismissed by the military in 1952, and the ambitious Pérez Jiménez became dictator with the consent of Llovera Páez, who was an obscene non-entity. The former majors, who had risen to colonels in the democracy, were now generals. Pérez Jiménez himself was physically not very impressive. He was short, balding, and tubby, and read speeches monotonously, although surely on the personal level he must have had some magnetism. He was a megalomaniac of much character that when a Time magazine interviewer asked him what Rome’s greatest legacy was, he said, : “Its ruins”, apparently wanting to give the impression that while the ruins of Rome were all that remained of its greatness, his own will surpass them with his grand-scale building projects. In some ways, this is understandable. Pérez Jiménez, unlike most Venezuelans, received a thorough education from the military academies he had attended and graduated from with highest honors. By the time he came to power, Pérez Jiménez had developed a flair for fascist opulence and boasting about his projects in making Venezuela the major power of South America. The greatest of Venezuelan writers at the time (and for a long time after that) was Arturo Uslar Pietri and he became famous on television with analytical biographies of great historical figures. Uslar Pietri had a felicitous phrase: “Sow the oil”, which became a national slogan meaning that the state’s oil income should be productively invested. But in Venezuela “sowing the oil” implied “sowers” and the country did not have too many of these. In fact, it was the undeclared understanding that “sowing the oil” really meant “give Venezuelans employment by creating government jobs”.
The other reason for Pérez Jiménez’s “ruins revelation” was that what he intended to do as president, apart from becoming rich, which he did, like Gomez, with his own military and civilian cronies, was to build and build and build, and here too he was undeniably successful. It is only fair to point out here that while Gomez did become immensely rich, he never had in his life a foreign bank account (as ignorant as he was, not to mention the time in which he was living), and even though Pérez Jiménez in relative terms was not as rich as Gomez, all the dollars he accumulated went offshore. Pérez Jiménez also had an efficient secret police, but the stories about tortures and killings were, like those about Gomez, mainly inventions by the frustrated adecoscitation needed, although whoever in Venezuela tried to be active clandestinely was sure to be either imprisoned or shot if he resisted. Also like Gomez, Pérez Jiménez had a theoretician, Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, who happened to be the son of Gomez’s own historian and had his father’s persuasions. Like his father, this Vallenilla was also a racist. It was he who authored the immigration policy of the regime. By the time Pérez Jiménez had all the power in his hands, which despite his uninspiring qualities he did manage to do, Venezuela had around five million inhabitants. Depending on which measures you apply, the country can be said to have been under-populated. If you consider, for instance, that population density is not necessarily good, then it could be argued that Venezuela was not under-populated but under-educated. The idea that Vallenilla Lanz and Pérez Jiménez had was to open the doors of the country to as many Europeans as wanted to come, with which they, and many non-pardo Venezuelans, believed that two flies would be killed with one swat: the country’s population would grow, but not with more ignorant pardos: with Europeans who brought with them, however lowly they might have been in their own countries, a higher average education than Venezuelans had. But this backfired for the immigrants were precisely from countries that had given rise to the existence of pardos--a euphemism for bastardy and ridiculous illiteracy.
Up to a point, this kind of social engineering might have been defensible, but the immigrants, who came from Spain, Portugal, and Italy on the rationale that they would adapt better to Venezuela and Venezuelans would adapt better to them (than, say, to Swedes), did not emigrate from their countries to give Venezuelans lessons in civics. They came for a better income and probably the majority of the some two million who did come started returning as soon as they had made enough to live better in their own lands. This counter-flow became massive during the 1980s, when Venezuela’s economy started sliding down like a luge. It is possible that the proportion of the white population in Venezuela might have increased slightly. Many of the emigrants did make a lot of money and chose Venezuela as their country, but as to industrializing or increasing agricultural production, their effect was not and is not noticeable; and this for the simple reason that the Venezuelan government considered that diversified industrial development was its responsibility and private citizens of any nationality—in this sense, it can be said that Venezuela is perhaps the most un-discriminatory country in the world—were given ample rights in the areas of commerce, of services, and of other ancillary activities. Despite this insidious racism, it was under Pérez Jiménez that the mythification of the Amerindian caciques, who supposedly had resisted the conquistadors everywhere in Venezuela, was given a big boost, especially when an exchange house founded by an Italian immigrant brought out a series of souvenir gold coins in which each cacique was depicted with facial traits that were invented out of whole cloth by Pérez Jiménez’s laureate painter, Pedro Francisco Vallenilla. Despite his rigorous Catholic upbringing, Pérez Jiménez also encouraged the underlying animism of Venezuelans when he erected in the middle of Caracas’ first speedway a statue of Maria Lionza, a sort of Amerindian goddess who sits atop a tapir and is much worshipped in a jungle sanctuary in Yaracuy in central Venezuela.
Pérez Jiménez was so cocksure that he was doing a good job as dictator, that he scheduled elections for 1952 with his official party against COPEI and URD, which had only managed puny showings against AD in the presidential election of 1947. When the time came to vote, Venezuela’s pardos wanted their adecos back and the exiled leadership of the party let it be known that it wanted URD to win. As the results started coming in showing that AD was still the political top dog in Venezuela, Pérez Jiménez shut down the polls, and the country, and after a few days, during which he probably was making sure that he counted with the loyal
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