This is the history of Venezuela. See also the history of South America and the history of present-day nations and states. HIStory - Past, Present and Future, Book I is a double-disc album (one half greatest hits, one half studio album) by American musician Michael Jackson released in June of 1995 by the Epic Records division of Sony BMG. The first disc, (HIStory Begins) contains fifteen hit singles from the past... While perhaps the last continent--except Antarctica-- to be inhabited by humans, South America has a history that spans the full range of human cultural and civilizational forms. ... This is a list of articles on the history of contemporary countries, states and dependencies. ...

Pre-Hispanic period

Human habitation of Venezuela is estimated to have commenced at least 15,000 years ago, from which period leaf-shaped flake tools, together with chopping and plano-convex scraping implements, have been found exposed on the high riverine terraces of the Rio Pedregal in western Venezuela.^[1] Late Pleistocene hunting artifacts, including spear tips, have been found at a similar series of sites 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 the Spanish colonization of Venezuela began, indigenous peoples such as the Mariches, themselves descendants of the Caribs, were systematically killed. Indian caciques (leaders) such as Guaicaipuro and Tamanaco attempted to resist Spanish incursions, but were ultimately subdued; Tamanaco himself, by order of Caracas' founder Diego de Losada, was also put to death.^[3] Look up foliage in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Flake can be: fish flake, a platform made from dried timber where fish (predominantly cod-fish) can be cured in the sun. ... A modern hammer is directly descended from ancient hand tools A tool or device is a piece of equipment which typically provides a mechanical advantage in accomplishing a physical task, or provides an ability that is not naturally available to the user of a tool. ... Look up chop in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up plane in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up convex in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A scrape is another name for a nest made by ground birds, it usually describes a nest made in a shallow depression. ... Late Pleistocene (also known as Upper Pleistocene or the Tarantian) is a stage of the Pleistocene Epoch. ... Hunting spear and knife, from Mesa Verde National Park. ... Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring isotope carbon-14 (14C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years[1]. Raw, i. ... The Spanish colonization of the Americas began with the arrival in the Western Hemisphere of Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón) in 1492. ... ... Mariche is the name of a former native Venezuelan tribe. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Cacique may be in reference to: Cacique is one the finest brands of rum produced in Venezuela. ... Minted gold coin depicting Guaicaipuro Guaicaipuro, (circa 1530 – 1568) was a native (indigenous) Venezuelan chief of both the Teques and Caracas tribes. ... Minted Gold coin depicting Tamanaco Tamanaco, was a native Venezuelan chief, who as leader of the Mariches and Quiriquires tribes led during part of the XVI century the resistance against the Spanish conquest of Venezuelan territory in the central region of the country, specially in the Caracas valley. ... Diego de Losada (b. ...

Spanish period

A palafito, like the ones seen by Amerigo Vespucci

Venezuela was colonized by Spain in 1522. In what is now the city of Cumaná, Spain established their first permanent South American settlement. Image File history File links Palafito. ... Image File history File links Palafito. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Colonialism. ... South America South America is a continent crossed by the equator, with most of its area in the Southern Hemisphere. ...

At the time of the Spanish arrival, the indigenous people were mainly agriculturists and hunters living in groups along the coast, the Andean mountain range, and along the Orinoco River. Nueva Toledo, the first permanent Spanish settlement in South America, was established in Venezuela in 1522. A Hupa man, 1923 The scope of this indigenous peoples of the Americas article encompasses the definitions of indigenous peoples and the Americas as established in their respective articles. ... This page is about the Orinoco River, for the Aphra Behn novel see Oroonoko With a length of 2140 km, the Orinoco is one of the largest rivers of South America. ... South America South America is a continent crossed by the equator, with most of its area in the Southern Hemisphere. ...

An abortive plan for German settlement from German Habsburg lands, to be financed through the Fugger bankers, never came to fruition. By the middle of the 16th century, there were still few more than 2,000 Europeans in what is now Venezuela. The opening of gold mines at Yaracuy led to the introduction of slavery, at first with the indigenous population, then with imported Africans. The first real success of the colony was 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 — was so primitive that it recalls feudalism, certainly a powerful concept in the 16th century Spanish imagination, and perhaps more fruitful economic comparison to the latifundia of antiquity. In this map of German colonies, yellow marks Klein-Venedig and red the Prussia colonies, some of them in the Caribbean. ... Coat of arms Map of Württemberg before the French Revolutionary Wars, showing the County of Fugger, with the Danube shown running through the centre of the image and the Iller forming the border between Württemberger lands (coloured) and Bavarian lands (non-coloured) Capital Weißenhorn (nominally) Imp. ... Estado Yaracuy is one of the 23 states (estados) of Venezuela. ... Slave redirects here. ... Roland pledges his fealty to Charlemagne; from a manuscript of a chanson de geste. ... Latifundia are pieces of landed property covering tremendous areas. ...

During the 16th and 17th century, the provinces which constitute today's Venezuela were relatively neglected. The Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru (located on the sites formerly occupied by the capital cities of the Aztecs and Incas) were more interested in their nearby gold and silver mines than in the agricultural societies of Venezuela. Responsibility for the Venezuelan territories shifted between the two Viceroyalties. Flag of New Spain New Spain (in the Spanish language Nueva España) was the name given to the Spanish colonial territory in North America from c. ... It has been suggested that Mexica be merged into this article or section. ... For other meanings of Inca, see Inca (disambiguation). ...

In the 18th century, a second Venezuelan society formed along the coast when cocoa plantations were established, this time manned by much larger importations of African slaves. Quite a number of black slaves were also to be found in the haciendas of the grassy llanos. Cocoa beans in a cacao pod Cocoa is the dried and partially fermented fatty seed of the cacao tree from which chocolate is made. ... Hacienda is a Spanish word describing a vast ranch, common in the Pampa. ...

The Province of Venezuela was 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 Viceroyalty of New Granada was the name given to a group of colonial provinces in northern South America, corresponding mainly to modern Colombia. ... This is the history of Venezuela. ...

19th century: Independence and post-independence to 1899

The 19th of April, 1810. Painting by Juan Lovera. (1835)

The Venezuelans began to grow restive under colonial control toward the end of the eighteenth century. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe weakened Spain's imperial power and the Venezuelans achieved home rule after a coup on April 19, 1810, and later declared independence from Spain on July 5, 1811. The Venezuelan War of Independence ensued. 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 what are now Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador, was part of the Republic of Gran Colombia until 1830, when Venezuela separated and became a sovereign country. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Combatants Austria[1] Portugal Prussia[1] Russia[2] Sicily  Spain[3]  Sweden United Kingdom[4] French Empire Holland Italy Naples [5] Duchy of Warsaw Bavaria[6] Saxony[7] Denmark-Norway [8] Commanders Archduke Charles Prince Schwarzenberg Karl Mack von Leiberich João Francisco de Saldanha Oliveira e Daun Gebhard von... A coup détat, or simply a coup, is the sudden overthrow of a government, usually done by a small group that just replaces the top power figures. ... April 19 is the 109th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (110th in leap years). ... 1810 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... is the 186th day of the year (187th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1811 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... The Venezuelan War of Independence in 1811-1812 was Venezuelas first war for independence from Spanish colonial rule. ... December 17 is the 351st day of the year (352nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1819 common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... Angostura was the name of the town in Eastern Venezuela that was renamed Ciudad Bolívar in 1846. ... Gran Colombia Capital Bogotá Language(s) Spanish Religion Roman Catholic Government Republic History  - Established December 17, 1819  - Disestablished November 19, 1831 Gran Colombia (Spanish for Great Colombia) is a name used today for the Republic of Colombia of the period 1819-1831. ... “Bolívar” redirects here. ...

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.^[4] As in all human affairs everywhere, there were patterns of political ascendancy, downfalls, and resurgences.^[5] 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 axis Caracas-Valencia 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 over all 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 various accesses 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. New Granada can mean: the English rendering of any Spanish geographical or administrative name Nueva Granada, always named after the deep southern Spanish port city Granada, as in: the Spanish American colonial Viceroyalty of New Granada the post-colonial Republic of New Granada (1831 to 1856), which included modern Colombia...

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.^[6] A calculation made by Agustin Codazzi, an Italian officer and engineer who chose Venezuela as his homeland, put the population at 810,000 ^[7] 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. An 1859 portrait of Alexander von Humboldt by the artist Julius Schrader, showing Mount Chimborazo in the background. ...

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 total of 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 for him the minor insurrections that cropped up here and there. 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 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).^[8] José Antonio Páez José Antonio Páez (June 13, 1790 - May 6, 1873) was the first President of Venezuela. ... Carlos Soublette was President of Venezuela 1837-1839 and 1843-1847. ... Antonio Guzmán Blanco (1829–1899) President of Venezuela, a caudillo who dominated the nation from 1870 to 1888. ... Categories: Stub | 1841 births | 1898 deaths | Presidents of Venezuela ...

Páez ascendancy

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. José María Vargas was President of Venezuela 1835-1836. ... José Tadeo Monagas was President of Venezuela 1847-1851 and 1855-1858. ...

Monagas ascendancy

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 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, but he was not president during the Monagas ascendancy but during the Federalist period. Why the eastern llanos were so fertile in caudillos was due to that its economy was open to international trade and the exports from that region (cattle, hides, coffee) were staples of the Venezuelan economy. José Gregorio Monagas was President of Venezuela 1851-1855. ... José Ruperto Monagas was President of Venezuela 1868-1870. ...

Great war of the Caudillos

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”.^[9] Julián Castro was President of Venezuela 1858-1859. ... Juan Crisóstomo Falcón y Zavarce (27 January 1820 – 29 April 1870) was president of Venezuela (1863-1868). ...

Federalist period

Falcon 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 basically went from Caracas to Valencia.

Guzmán Blanco ascendancy

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 basically 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.

Civilian presidencies and Crespo ascendancy

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. Lopez 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. Hermógenes López was President of Venezuela in 1888. ... Juan Pablo Rojas Paúl was President of Venezuela 1888-1890. ... Raimundo Andueza Palacio was President of Venezuela 1890-1892. ...

20th century

Rómulo Betancourt

For a complete list of Venezuelan leaders, see List of Presidents of Venezuela. Image File history File links Rómulo_Betancourt. ... Image File history File links Rómulo_Betancourt. ... The President of Venezuela (Spanish: Presidente de Venezuela) is the English political nomenclature that designates both the head of state and head of government of Venezuela. ...

Castro and Gómez

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 over-spilled 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 basically 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. Cipriano Castro was a dictator who controlled Venezuela from 1899 to 1908. ... Juan Vicente Gómez. ...

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. ^[10] 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. ^[11] But at the same time it told Castro that the Monroe Doctrine did not apply to unpaid debts. ^[12] 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. U.S. President James Monroe The Monroe Doctrine is a U.S. doctrine which, on December 2, 1823, proclaimed that European powers would no longer colonize or interfere with the affairs of the newly independent nations of the Americas. ...

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. ^[13] 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 gaol and he later claimed that he was in ball and chains during all that time. But he was released by Gómez.^[14] 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. ^[15] 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 stuff 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. ^[16] 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 in only a half-truth. ^[17] 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. Population had grown from perhaps one million and a half to two million. Malaria was the greatest killer. Gómez himself probably had Amerindian ascendants, 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 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. ^[18] 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.

Aborted road to gradual democracy

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, was not harassed. Gomez neve married but he had verious 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. Eleazar López Contreras was President of Venezuela 1935-1941. ...

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. ^[19] 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, 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 (Democratic Venezuelan 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. Isaías Medina Angarita (born on July 6, 1897 in San Cristóbal, Venezuela, died on September 15, 1953 in Caracas, Venezuela) was a Venezuelan militar and politican, president of Venezuela since 1941 until 1945. ... Luis Manuel Miquilena Hernández is a Venezuelan politician. ... Rómulo Ernesto Betancourt Bello (February 22, 1908 – September 28, 1981), The Father of Venezuelan Democracy, was President of Venezuela from 1945 to 1948 and again from 1959 to 1964. ...

The October 1945 revolution

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. Marcos Pérez Jiménez Marcos Pérez Jiménez (April 25, 1914 – September 20, 2001) was president of Venezuela from 1952 to 1958. ... Manuel Apolinario Odría Amoretti (November 26, 1897–February 18, 1974) was the President of Peru from 1948 to 1956. ... Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (22 February 1895 – 2 August 1979) was a Peruvian political leader who founded the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) political movement. ... Carlos Román Delgado Chalbaud Gómez (January 20, 1909 - November 13, 1950) was President of Venezuela 1948-1950. ...

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 Accion Democratic or AD 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. ^[20] 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.^[21] Democratic Action (Spanish: Acción Democrática, abbreviated as AD) is a Venezuelan social democratic political party. ...

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. Copei - Social Christian Party of Venezuela (Copei, Partido Social Cristiano de Venezuela) is a political party in Venezuela. ... Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso (13 December 1903 – 3 September 1979) was a prominent Venezuelan diplomat and politician primarily responsible for the inception and creation of OPEC. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Pérez Alfonzo helped found the political party Democratic Action (AD; Acción Democrática). ...

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. ^[22] 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 mainstay—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. ^[23] 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.

Pérez Jiménez dictatorship

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 basically 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, ulike the rest of Venezuelans, received a thorough education from the militay academies he had attended and graduated from with highest honors. By the time he came to power, Pérez Jiménez had developed a flare 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 has 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”. Germán Suárez Flamerich (April 10, 1907 - June 24, 1990) was President of Venezuela (1950-1952). ... Arturo Uslar Pietri (May 16, 1906 – February 26, 2001) Was one of the most prominent Venezuelan figures of the twentieth century. ...

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 n 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 adecos, 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 the 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 everyhere 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.Of course, this was a terrible blow to what was developing as a policy of 'ethnic improvement', for having had Swedes, after one measures the tremendous social and intellectual backwardness of today's 'Chavismo', would have made the country a sanctuary of envious qualities. What a waste now...But it should have been predictable as Pérez Jiménez himself was part of the 'pardo' legacy.

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 loyalty of his generals, he published results that were so lopsidedly in his favor as to seem ludicrous. Pérez Jiménez thus inaugurated himself for another five years as president, and just as he had intended from the beginning. he went on spending on infrastructure and way beyond this to gigantic industrial, agricultural, and power-generating projects. In foreign affairs, Venezuela was a faithful ally of the American government, although servile would probably be more to the point. When the government of the socialist Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala was implementing real social reforms in a country that badly needed them, Venezuela was host to a conference of the OAS (Organization of American States) in which Guatemala was ostracized. Shortly afterwards the CIA sponsored a coup in which Arbenz was overthrown. Pérez Jiménez also changed entirely the face of Caracas with a building program such as the city had not seen since Guzman Blanco, and compared to what Pérez Jiménez built, Guzman’s buildings, one of which Pérez Jiménez had cut at the nose, were dwarfs. The author of this “face lifting” was Luis Malausena, whose taste was in all to Pérez Jiménez’s sense of grandeur and went from the ultra-modern to a non-descript “neo-classicism”. The Caracas that one sees today is, then, the unimaginative creation of a character whom no one remembers, and no one probably will as, after he made millions upon millions, he fled the country with Pérez Jiménez never to be seen again. Caraqueños, incidentally, have never complained about the legacy of Malausena. As a significant footnote, Hugo Chávez Frias was born in 1954 in what, as he tells it, was a thatched hut.

By the end of 1957, it was time for a presidential election. Pérez Jiménez thought he had learned from the 1952 political debacle and instead of an election he decreed a plebiscite on his government. He probably knew he wasn’t going to win this one either, so the results were foreordained. The people who queued to vote were civil servants and indirect employees of the government and its subordinate companies and institutions, who were instructed to show some proof that they had voted for the regime, usually by presenting the “no” card, although this was a silly ploy. All the government needed was a turnout, and that is what it got. Economically, Venezuela apparently was not doing so badly, but the signs of prosperity were mostly in the cities, and the countryside, where half of Venezuelans still lived, had social indexes way below what would have been expected from such a fiscally rich country.

Pérez Jiménez’s illegitimacy was so patent that some officers were conspiring to overthrow him. There was also some cautious civilian clandestine agitation. On the last day of 1957, a military uprising coordinated by officers of air and tank forces struck, but the coordination was not that good. The air force rebels flew over Caracas and dropped randomly some bombs while a commander started out from Maracay with a column of tanks. Somehow the signals got crossed, the tanks turned back, and the pilots fled the country. These officers probably thought that Pérez Jiménez would turn tail in the face of this demonstration, but the bulk of the armed forces remained loyal. However, this show of defiance did set off a sequence of events which eventually made Pérez Jiménez fear for his political survival. The underground civilian opponents started goading the people in Caracas, where they needed little goading and were out in the streets whenever and wherever they could. The repressive secret police rounded up all civilian suspects, but this was like trying to do the little Dutch boy trick. The popular resistance to the government was not just a pardo thing and reached to all levels of society. The navy had taken a non-committal attitude in a situation where its guns were not of any service. It was not in on any conspiracy. There were signs of restiveness in the land forces with some officers working to rules, so to speak, but there was not at any time a military insurrection. But the crowds were getting bigger and bigger. Finally, with various suitcases stuffed with dollars, Pérez Jiménez took off in his private DC-3 and sought refuge in the Dominican Republic, where his resilient colleague, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, had been ruling since 1930.

What followed the flight of the dictator is as amazing an incident as the history of Venezuela contains. Pérez Jiménez had been unsure of whom to trust. He was arbitrary and authoritarian but there is no evidence that he was particularly courageous. Like Guzman Blanco, he possibly considered that hanging on to power was not worth the effort, especially considering that his fortune would allow him to live royally outside of Venezuela. When he fled, the country was for all practical purposes acephalous. The Caracas masses had no leader, first, because no one in the streets had the stature to be one, and, second, because any potential leader was in jail. For various days before his hasty departure, Pérez Jiménez had not been giving any inspiration or even orders to the army generals loyal to him, which were still a majority. There were junior officers here and there acting on their own. A military committee was functioning in the military academy. When these officers received word that Pérez Jiménez had left, they felt reasonably enough that it was up to them to exercise authority. Thus it was that Wolfgang Larrazábal, an admiral who owed to Pérez Jiménez his rise in the services and who had never manifested any disaffection to him, was chosen to lead the country solely because he outranked every one else. Had Pérez Jiménez ordered the commander of the Caracas garrison to arrest any officer not at his post and to put the fear of volleys into the crowds, he would have been obeyed, so in some way it redounds to his credit that, like Medina Angarita before him, he ran because he did not want bloodshed, although Medina had not run at all but had been imprisoned and released. As soon as it became unmistakable that Pérez Jiménez was out, the exiled politicians started streaming in. Larrazábal was made head of a civilian-military junta. Overnight, without having lifted a finger to deserve it, Larrazábal became the idol of Caracas, though in the rest of Venezuela the pardos were still adecos to the tip of their tails (as they say in Venezuela). Wolfgang Larrazábal was President of Venezuela 1958-1959. ...

Arrival of full democracy

1958 is a crucial year in Venezuelan contemporary history. ^[24] Larrazábal was a fluke. He had no more legitimacy than Pérez Jiménez and no sooner was the new government installed, committed to democratic elections before the end of the year, than the question of who really had overthrown Pérez Jiménez, the military uprising or the Caracas masses, became a disquieting issue. The original rebellious officers felt that they were entitled to rule and started brewing their own conspiracies. But Larrazábal was generally accepted as the leader of the armed forces. Most importantly, the political parties, which were busily rebuilding their national organizations, gave him their total support, including the few but vociferous communists. As before, it was Betancourt who proved the master organizer through his revived AD party. Another source of support for Larrazábal was that he decreed demagogic measures to conciliate the discontented masses. These measures were being adlibbed and one in particular, the most influential, was completely irrational.

A so-called Emergency Plan was put into place which consisted in hand-outs to those who could claim they were unemployed. These popular subsidies were far above what the average Venezuelan earned in the rural areas and there followed inevitably a flood of migrants to Caracas, a city that before had few shantytowns, and settled and built shacks on the hillsides on the eastern and western edges of the valley in which Caracas nestles. The population of the city soon doubled with these rural, barely educated newcomers, who were obviously strongly pro-Larrazábal but were also a potential source of political de-stabilization. The pardos in effect became a force to be reckoned with in the forthcoming elections. But before these took place many things were occurring. The officers who felt they had been cheated staged various insurrections, even to an “invasion” by one of them from Colombia who managed to take over San Cristobal, the capital of Táchira state. All these conspiracies were contained although some required drastic means and at one point the Larrazábal government was in real danger of being toppled. The armed forces were instrumental in quelling the revolts, but each time there was one, Caracas mobs went wild prodded by the politicians.

The most menacing of these popular riots was provoked by the visit to Venezuela of vice-president Richard Nixon and his wife Patricia. He represented the Eisenhower administration, which had conferred on Pérez Jiménez the Medal of Honor for his crucial role in sanctioning the imperialist American overthrow of Arbenz. The Venezuelan government had not anticipated the raging public reaction to this emissary from Washington, possibly because it thought that it had assuaged public indignation by allowing the hysterical daily denigration of the former dictator. Venezuelans were not that versed in foreign affairs, but the communists were and it was at their instigation that crowds assaulted Nixon’s motorcade along an avenue that ran close to where many shantytowns had grown, ironically not far from a huge apartment complex that Pérez Jiménez had built for workers. Before the Venezuelan army intervened—preventing a ready-to-go Marines intervention—Nixon’s car had been rocked back and forth, its windows had been smashed, and the vice-president and his wife had been thoroughly drenched in spit. As would be expected, once safe in the American embassy residence, Nixon let loose with imprecations and he returned quickly to the USA. It says well of him that when he reported on his trip, which was meant as a fact-finding and conciliatory gesture to Latin America, he stressed that his country was partly to blame for the unfriendly reception in Caracas.

As the elections approached, the parties initiated talks to form an united political front in defence of democracy, which implied, if not a single candidate chosen among them, at least an understanding for future cooperation in ruling Venezuela democratically. The really significant pact that emerged during 1958 was the unspoken one by which, mainly Betancourt, agreed not to mess with the military in any way and let them run their own house. The military in their turn pledged that they were not to allow politicization within their ranks to the extend that they renounced to even the right to vote, which was made compulsory for the rest of Venezuelans. The foxy Betancourt, who sometimes is referred to as the “father of Venezuelan democracy” (much less in recent times than before), insisted that the communists were not to be included in the political talks, and excluded they were but took it very calmly. The chances of one candidate were slim and nothing came out of the negotiations except a well-meaning consensus that the parties would stick together in the defence of democracy from whatever threats might arise in the future. This meant that the electoral process was on and that each party had to look itself.

AD knew that it was still the most popular party all over Venezuela and Betancourt was its choice for candidate. Caldera had no rivals in COPEI, the party he founded, and he entered the political fray counting on the conservative middle class. Villalba and his URD party adopted an opportunistic strategy, which was practically an admission that they could not compete with the AD national pardo popular base. It was the pardo masses in Caracas that Villalba was targeting when, instead of postulating himself, he chose Larrazábal, who also had the communist with him, to be the URD candidate. Larrazábal turned over the provisional presidency to a civilian and he went on campaign. When the results were in, Betancourt was elected for the term that ended in 1964, but this time by a plurality and not the absolute majorities that AD had gotten in 1946 and 1947. Caracas was no longer an AD redoubt. The city from then on became an electoral maverick that could swing in any unforeseen direction and this time it went all out for Larrazábal, who came in second. Caldera did not do badly in third place and received proportionally more votes than he had in 1947. But the Venezuelan panorama was cloudy at best. Part of the 1958 demagoguery was that the UCV (Central University of Venezuela), which likes to style itself “casa primada” (first house of Venezuelan learning), was granted “autonomy”, which meant that the police were barred from the University City; and starting in 1960 it became a bastion of an insurrection that leftists started to recoup the chance they thought they had missed when Caracas was so politicized that they could get crowds in the streets by snapping their fingers, although Larrazábal’s showing with mainly URD votes should have taught them that they weren’t as popular as they thought, that they were not popular at all, to put it bluntly. Under its autonomy status, the UCV gave sanctuary to every leftist movement and its rectors were complicit with the communists or themselves Marxists. It got so bad that Caldera, when he finally got his shot at being president, was forced to close it for a year. But, as things in Venezuela have a way of taking surprising turns, when Chávez began to “revolutionize” Venezuela, the UCV was collectively, though mildly, opposing his regime.

Betancourt administration

Betancourt inaugurated his presidency as a moderate, except on the issue of dictatorships, for which he applied the idealistic foreign policy that Venezuela would not recognize dictatorial government anywhere, particularly in Latin America, but including the USSR, which was an USA pleaser. The “Betancourt doctrine” was un-realistic, for Venezuelan democratization occurred in the midst of a marked tendency in the rest of Latin America towards authoritarianism. He was also un-realistic in reviving Venezuela’s claim on British Guiana to the Essequibo river and he had all maps of Venezuela show this large territory as part of the country albeit as disputed. The British allowed free elections in their dependency in 1961, but when a Marxist, Cheddi Jagan, won them, it annulled the results and after three years permitted new ones which were won by a man, Forbes Burnham, who turned out to be as leftist, or more, as Jagan, and a monumental bungler to boot. The point is that when British Guiana became independent Guyana in 1966, the Venezuelan claim became an undecipherable legal tangle, but Venezuelan maps to this day still look as Betancourt had them drawn. That the Venezuelan claim was bogus populism had its most perplexing demonstration when the Guyanese allowed the mad Messiah from California, Jim Jones, to establish a religious community right next to the Venezuelan border in 1977. The Venezuelan minister of foreign affairs at the time, Simon Alberto Consalvi, only found about the Guyanese sleight-of-hand when a California representative went to Jonestown to investigate complaints from constituents about missing relatives. When the congressman got there in November 1978, the suicidal followers of Jones, many of them blacks, first shot him dead and then 917 of them, including 276 children, committed suicide with cyanide-laced Kool Aid. Jones too killed himself. This article is about the cult leader. ...

In other things, Betancourt was very realistic. He respected the virtual autonomy of the armed forces and he did all he could to keep on the good side of Washington. Betancourt was a great hater, and he held two particular grudges: Pérez Jiménez, for obvious reasons, and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the Dominican dictator against whom in his youth, with Jose Figueres of Costa Rica, he carried on an active subversive opposition. The first of these targets of his ire led him to undercut developmental projects which would have been beneficial to his country. His hatred for Trujillo almost cost him his life, although in the end it was Trujillo who lost his. Pérez Jiménez had left in place the basic plans and projects for the further modernization and for the heavy industrialization of Venezuela. Guayana had large iron deposits. The infrastructure for exploiting them was laid as well as the complementary huge steelworks. Communications had been a priority and Venezuela was endowed with a network of roads and bridges that covered the territory where over 90% of the population lived. Half or more of these were improved surface and all they lacked was the asphalt paving. This system linked with the many blacktops that the oil companies had built in eastern and western Venezuela. These had been traced for exploration and exploitation, but they also served for the use of the general population and were now linked to the national highway system. Pérez Jiménez had built motorways from Caracas to Valencia and from Caracas to the port at La Guaira. By 1955, you could drive from one end to the other of Venezuela in a matter of days where before it would have taken weeks, months if the rainy season hampered travel. In addition, Pérez Jiménez had begun the construction of a coherent railway system, although he had not had time to go further than the railroad from Puerto Cabello to Barquisimeto. Pérez Jiménez had also created government subsidiaries, called “institutos autónomos” (autonomous institutes)—the “autonomous” was supposed to mean non-political, but its real function was to allow them to negotiate foreign loans—that were to build waterworks and electric power plants in all important urban centers. To this end he had started the construction the huge Caroni river dam which in time was to provide the entire country with a reliable electric grid. Betancourt’s government adopted the plans and the administrative system for carrying them out that the dictatorship had left in place.

But the politics of repudiation had to have its pound of flesh and Betancourt and his cabinet also cancelled some crucial public works merely because they were initiatives taken by Pérez Jiménez. The railroads were scrapped with the argument that Venezuela did not need them having so much asphalt it could expand the road network at a lower cost. Pérez Jiménez had built a large reservoir in the central llanos with the irrigation potential to make Venezuela an exporter of rice. The adecos in power built instead a small hydroelectric dam for Caracas upstream and effectively starved the rice-producing scheme which was only realized to a fraction of its planned area. In time most of the land that would have been irrigated was converted into cattle ranches, the traditional but at that point inessential llanos economic activity. In addition to the government–financed development projects, Pérez Jiménez was not averse to protectionism and incentives to local industries, but the Betancourt government made a fetish of import-substitution and instead of allowing the free importation of industrial goods for which Venezuela did not have the training, it tried to force foreign suppliers to build plants in the country basically for the assembly or packaging of finished products that were allowed tariff-free into the country. The automobile “industry” was the import-substitution model. Venezuela still does not manufacture car engines and all that the Betancourt and successive governments achieved was to assemble cars, which did give some Venezuelans employment—some parts suppliers, like makers of windshields, also prospered—but made the cars more costly than if they had been imported entire from Detroit to feed Venezuela’s car-mania. But economic nostrums and interventionism went beyond that. The government had opted for “guided planning” and what this meant was that businesses were strictly regulated through a system of controls that went from the permission to start one to limits on where and on how they should operate. The author of this “developmental strategy” was Jose Antonio Mayobre, a former communist and Betancourt’s economic guru. All of this required more government employees and again, as after 1945, the Venezuelan bureaucracy bloomed, as it would go on doing with each new president until it reached a paroxysm under Carlos Andres Pérez, Betancourt’s personal secretary and future president. Another trusted Betancourt minister was Leopoldo Sucre Figarella, who considered that a long bridge to complete the Caracas-Valencia motorway was unnecessarily expensive and he had the six-lane highway constructed along the mountain contour, but the ground beneath was not firm and this section of the motorway started sliding and during the following decades the cost of shoring it up was at least ten times what the bridge would have cost.

But the real pound of flesh that Betancourt got was much more than a pound, more like the entire weight of Pérez Jiménez. The ex-dictator had gone from the Dominican Republic to Miami, but Betancourt had him accused of filching in the state treasury, which was true (although the evidence was circumstantial), and the Venezuelan supreme court convicted him. Venezuela asked the John F. Kennedy administration for his extradition and to every one’s surprise the USA complied betraying an unconditional ally it once medaled. Pérez Jiménez was first held in the Miami county jail and was finally sent to Venezuela to finish the term in a comfortable prison. In all he spent five years in calaboose.

"Milk Plan"

The weirdest of all import-substitution plans had to do with milk. The tropics are suited for extensive cattle farming, which is rather clever as, during the dry season, it lets cattle roam immense, unfenced areas with a density of 10 cattle/km², and when the rains come the cattle, without any herding, head on their own to the higher pastures, where they feed while the lower, flooded areas grow new grass. Since the late 19th century, there was a British cattle-raising company which held about one fourth of the Venezuelan state of Apure—that would be some 15,000 square kilometers—which, with the system described, provided Britain with a substantial amount of the beef it consumed. The company always kept a very low profile in Venezuela and those who knew of its existence called it la Lancaster, although it was always owned by the Liverpool Vestey family. There were reports that the Chávez government had it expropriated, at least part of it, in 2006 because it was mostly idle land, but it really wasn’t because you do need a large area to raise cattle in the tropics, especially in the Venezuelan lowlands, whose natural pasturages are not very nutritious and the soil cannot sustain good grass. Be that as it may, cows in Venezuela, even in cool Andes regions, only produce between four and six liters of milk a day, which, considering the size of a cow and the time it spends chewing the cud, is low indeed. But Venezuela wanted to be self-sustaining in milk. This project was a Pérez Jiménez heritage, for it was his government that cut a road through the thick jungles of southern Zulia state and encouraged dairying where it was futile. In other words, to be able to nurture underperforming cows, Venezuela had gone to a lot of expense and deliberately destroyed thousands of square miles of primeval jungle. Whether that jungle would have been good for anything other than making insects and ecologists happy, it cannot be said, but what followed upon its destruction was moronic enough to make any sensible head shake in disbelief.

The cows themselves, which cost a mint, were not slackers. In other latitudes they yielded milk for pasteurization, pulverization, and cheese-making for domestic markets with as much or more left over for exports. But when transplanted to sweltering lowlands denuded of jungle, though not of insects and parasites, they became sickly and sad and, mooing for Denmark or Switzerland, their udders dried up. As to make them truly contented would have required unimaginable investments in air-conditioning, it was thought that what they needed were the genetic strains of hardy tropical bulls among which the most renowned were the Brahma bulls of Asia, which meant spending another mint in another cattle-import program. Cross-breeding was carried out, which the cows liked, but the end results were still the measly four to six liters a day, the latter figure making cattlemen exude satisfaction. Their satisfaction had nothing to do with their cows performance, which they weren't dumb enough to believe was really anything to brag about, but for other reasons. By the time the jungles had been fell, deficient infrastructure had been built, bad quality pastures had been sown and wilted, cattle had been imported and crossbred, each liter of thinnish milk laboriously extracted from each squalid cow cost as much as a brick of gold. But the worst was that the producers claimed they could not make ends meet and rather than let them fend for themselves, the Venezuelan state opted for generous subsidies as if the uneconomical production of milk was the primary goal of economic development. Thus, the system for extracting watery milk from miserable cows for sale at exorbitant prices no one could pay, permanently substituted the previous natural order, and the beneficiaries of this brilliant scheme became multi-millionaire clients of the state. If they had returned in taxes part of what they were getting in subsidies, it would have been an absurd recycling system for making some people rich and creating badly remunerated jobs, filled by Colombians anyway, in lands which had no inhabitants to start with. But they weren't returning anything much and basically the state was giving away money.

Not content with having implanted this outlandish apparatus, the state then encouraged these enterprising dairy farmers to band together and invest in plants for making powdered milk, which they presumably could afford from all the free money they were getting, but this resulted in an outcry for more and greater subsidies. Since these would have bankrupted the state, the milk-producing powdered-milk industrialists were allowed to import huge amounts of duty-free powdered milk, which was precisely what the state had wanted to avoid in the first place with its milk subsidies. The “milk plan”, as it was called, reached its climax in the first government of Carlos Andres Pérez, when cronies, like Alberto Finol, became inordinately rich, and it was Pérez himself who in his second presidency finally put down this outlandish scheme. Of course, there’s always a reason for everything and if the milk plan might have looked crazy to any person who could add two and two, it made a lot of sense to the Finols and the Camachos, another family outfit that could afford King Airs through it, although it should be said that the Finols had a Falcon. ^[25]

All of the economic policies of the Betancourt government were underwritten by the Kennedy administration through the Alliance for Progress which used Venezuela as the exemplar for all of Latin America. The ideology behind this was a package called “development economics” expressed in a work by the economist W.W. Rostow, who described economic progress with the “take-off metaphor”: a developing economy was like an airplane which got its motors running, taxied to the head of the runway, then sped along until it took off, which was the historical moment of self-sustaining growth. ^[26] There were many other ideas of this sort. Another was the “trickle down effect”, which posited that, as an economy developed, its lower social strata would benefit from the achievements of free enterprise. But in Venezuela free enterprise was a very relative concept because of the proliferation of government regulations, not that Betancourt had anything like a “command economy” in mind, for the rights of private property were never meddled with. The trickle down effect took the form of political clientelism through which state hand-outs and local state-created posts, some purely nominal, were financed at the lower pardo levels. This was the rule in the Caracas shantytowns, but also in the rural and semi-rural areas where adeco loyalties were firm. The Betancourt government expanded educational facilities of all sorts on a large scale. New universities were created. Vocational and crafts schools were founded. Pérez Jiménez’s immigration policy was halted. Paradoxically, Venezuelans were not doing basic jobs, such as plumbing and carpentry, and a new and larger wave of immigration swept over the country mainly from Colombia, much of it illegal. Venezuela became for its neighbor what the USA was for México. There was no pardo discrimination—as such this had never existed in Venezuela—but when it came to upper echelon positions in and out of the government, Venezuelan whites and foreigners were generally preferred to the average Venezuelan. With Betancourt, Venezuela started becoming a nation of social parasites. But Venezuelans themselves had no trouble with that.^[27]

But the biggest problems that Betancourt in power faced was merely surviving, even in a personal sense. The underlying cause of the instability was that the 1958 elections had settled the issue of who had the right to govern democratically, but this was not as many disgruntled officers saw it, because they still felt very strongly that it was the armed forces and not the “people” who had overthrown Pérez Jiménez. This created an indescribable mélange of partisans of Pérez Jiménez, rightists who were calling Betancourt a communist in disguise, and new insubordinate officers who were clamoring for a “real revolution”. During his first year in power Betancourt was the object of an assassination attempt through a control-remote car bomb. He suffered minor lesions. The Dominican dictator Trujillo, who himself was assassinated by his own disaffected officers in 1961, was blamed, but the actual perpetrators were Venezuelans. Then, military insurrections in Carúpano and in Puerto Cabello, which were supposed to take place conjointly in 1962, instead followed upon each other. ^[28] The promoter among the military of these rebellious movements was a then little-known personage called Manuel Quijada. The military held their part of the 1958 agreement with Betancourt and suppressed them. But the strangest of all the movements against Betancourt, and the least effectual—although Carúpano and Puerto Cabello can only be described as aberrations—came from the communist left.

Fidel Castro occupied Havana in January 1959. He was considered a reformist compared with the unscrupulous mulatto dictator Fulgencio Batista, a man who as a sergeant had carried out his first coup in Cuba back in 1936. The first sign that Castro was different from all the caudillos that Latin America had ever had, was that he ordered the public executions of over a hundred Batista army men and policemen, although he himself had benefited by a pardon from Batista when he had tried to take over a military barracks in 1953. Once in power, Castro never concealed his anti-Americanism and in 1961 he claimed that he was and had always been a Marxist-Leninist. Venezuelan leftists, and especially the communists, were watching, and they came to the unreasonable conclusion, not entirely unlike that of the rightist officers who had plotted against Betancourt, that the 1958 “revolution” had been hijacked at its most popular and effervescent and that they were going to attempt a repeat of Castro’s real revolution. Urban guerrillas were formed even as in Congress leftists were clamoring against Betancourt. The subversive cells carried out some sensational acts, one being the daylight robbery of an exhibition of Impressionist painters sponsored by France at the Venezuelan art museum. In another more deadly action they shot and killed eight Venezuelan soldiers in the back to steal their weapons. Betancourt put his aide Pérez in charge of repression. The leftist deputies were arrested. The urban insurrection was brought under control, but the communists and their leftist allies took to the hills with the intention of repeating the pattern of Castro’s rural guerrillas. Betancourt wanted to back the American proposal at an OAS conference in Costa Rica to expel Cuba from that body, which was achieved, but his own foreign minister, Ignacio Luis Arc