VI. The aborted road to gradual democracy

Gomez was succeeded by his minister of war, Eleazar Lopez Contreras, a tall, gaunt, austere, 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 Colon, across from Trinidad. In power, Lopez Contreras allowed the pardo masses to vent for a few days before clamping down. He had Gomez’s properties confiscated by the state, but the dictator’s family, with some exceptions who left the country, was not harassed. Initially, Lopez 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 Ramirez 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 Jesus Faria, both communists. The history of Marxism in Venezuela is rather complex and will be told as events develop, but a brief overview is that communism never sunk roots in Venezuela and its impact on mainstream politics was minimal. Even Chavez today is not a Marxist, although his brother is. His sloganeering has communistic overtones but, telescoping far ahead our story, 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 Gomez regime. Even the name “crusades” was suspect with its clerical overtones. Constitutionally, Lopez Contreras finished Gomez’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, Lopez Contreras handed power to his war minister and personal friend, the Andean general Isaias 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 an pro-government party named Partido Democratico Venezolana or PDV (Democratic Venezuelan Party). But the real genius at political organization was Romulo 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 unrealistic path. Medina fostered the further professionalization of the Venezuelan officer corps. Among others, he sent Capt. Marcos Perez Jimenez 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 Victor Raul 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 Perez Jimenez.

            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 (Democratic Action), 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. 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.

            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 Jovito 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 Perez Alfonzo decreed the 50-50 sharing agreement with the oil companies. The junta also took other 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. 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 to. 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. 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, Perez Jimenez, who had him assassinated. But there are other versions, which we will examine in detail in the full development of this work.

            Delgado had formed a triumvirate with Perez Jimenez and Luis Felipe Llovera Paez. With his death the remaining duumvir chose a straw man civilian president, Luis German Suarez Flamerich, who was dismissed by the military in 1952, and the ambitious Perez Jimenez became dictator with the consent of Llovera Paez, who was basically an obscene non-entity. The former majors, who had risen to colonels in the democracy, were now generals. Perez Jimenez 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 so historically ignorant that when a Time magazine interviewer asked him what Rome’s greatest legacy was, he said literally: “Its ruins”. In some ways, this is understandable. Perez Jimenez, like the rest of Venezuelans, had a mediocre education. The greatest Venezuelan writer at the time (and for a long time after that) was Arturo Uslar Pietri and he became famous on television with fingernail biographies of great historical figures which any one could get from a one-volume encyclopedia. Uslar Pietri did have one felicitous phrase: “Sow the oil”, which became a national slogan meaning of course 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 a massive bureaucracy”. Uslar Pietri’s catchy phrase propelled him into advertising and he founded a company whose motto, “Let us think for you”, would have been laughed to scorn almost anywhere in the world. That was what Stalin had done for the USSR but even he did not say so.

            The other reason for Perez Jimenez’s “ruins revelation” was that what he intended to do as president, apart from becoming rich, which he did, like Gomez, with his 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, and even though Perez Jimenez in relative terms was not as rich as Gomez, all the dollars he accumulated went off shore. Perez Jimenez 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, Perez Jimenez 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 Perez Jimenez 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 Perez Jimenez 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 more with more ignorant pardos but with Europeans who brought with them, however lowly they might have been in their own countries, a higher average education than Venezuelans had.

            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. The statistics are not clear—[they have to be checked out]—but 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, long before Perez Jimenez, 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 Perez Jimenez 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 Perez Jimenez’s laureate painter, Pedro Francisco Vallenilla. Despite his rigorous Catholic upbringing, Perez Jimenez 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.

            Perez Jimenez was so cocksure that he was doing a good job as tyrant 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, Perez Jimenez 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. Perez Jimenez 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 with the virtual acquiescence of the OAS. Perez Jimenez 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 Perez Jimenez built, Guzman’s buildings, one of which Perez Jimenez had cut at the nose, were dwarfs. The author of this “face lifting” was Luis Malausena, whose taste was in all to Perez Jimenez’s sense of grandeur and went from the ultra-modern to a non-descript “neo-classicism”, in both cases irremediably vulgar. 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 Perez Jimenez never to be seen again. Caraqueños, incidentally, have never complained about the legacy of Malausena. As a significant footnote, Chavez 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. Perez Jimenez 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 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. Perez Jimenez’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 over-flew 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 Perez Jimenez would flee 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 Perez Jimenez 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, but 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, Perez Jimenez took off on his private DC-3 and took 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. Perez Jimenez 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, Perez Jimenez 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 Perez Jimenez had left, they felt reasonably enough that it was up to them to exercise authority. Thus it was that Wolfgang Larrazabal, an admiral who owed to Perez Jimenez 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 Perez Jimenez 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 nor run at all but had been imprisoned and released. As soon as it became unmistakable that Perez Jimenez was out, the exiled politicians started streaming in. Larrazabal was made head of civilian-military junta. Overnight, without having lifted a finger to deserve it, Larrazabal 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).