V. Castro and Gomez

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 Gomez. Castro met practically no resistance on his march to Caracas. His forces were larger now under the command of Gomez. 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 Gomez, who in two years of active campaigning with his Andean troops put down not only the on-going rebellions, but even made sure that there were not to be any more rebellions by placing Andean lieutenants and Andean troops in all the regional capitals of Venezuela.

            There are two things about Castro who few deny: he was a debauchee with an insatiable taste for cognac and he was a daredevil in foreign relations defying Europe as if he had something he totally lacked, which were a navy and adequate coastal defences. Many Venezuelans consider Castro a great patriot but in fact, when he got embroiled with his countries’ European creditors, he did not hesitate to invoke the Monroe Doctrine in defense of his country’s sovereignty. Venezuela’s borders are a story in itself, but for now we shall only mention the border with British Guiana. 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. 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. But at the same time it told Castro that the Monroe Doctrine did not apply to unpaid debts. The debt question was sent to the Hague Tribunal which faulted Venezuela. Castro was reluctantly forced to start paying up. But the total cancellation of the overdue bills did not occur under his government.

            In 1908, Castro was too sick to be cured in Venezuela and he left for Germany leaving Gomez in Charge. Castro had not gone further than the outer Antilles when Gomez 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 Gomez’s first measures was to start canceling outstanding Venezuelan international debts, a goal which was soon achieved. Under Gomez, Venezuela acquired all the appurtenances of a regular national army staffed and officered almost entirely by Andeans. 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 Gomez 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 Gomez’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 Gomez. His son, Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, would later become president of Venezuela. When university students stage a street demonstration in 1928, they were arrested but were soon released. Tales were told of his police applying a torture, called tortol in Venezuela, which consisted in placing a noose around a man’s head and slowly tightening it until a confession was extracted, or the eyes plopped out, or so it might have seemed to the hapless victim. If this was the case, it was applied to common delinquents, mainly pardos blamed for murders or important robberies. But Gomez 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. Gomez, unlike Guzman 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, but then it must be considered that this was also the rule during the 19th century. During his dictatorship, Gomez 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 Gomez 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, Gomez began to grant huge concessions to family and friends. Any one who was close to Gomez eventually would become rich in one way or another. Gomez 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. The Arcaya family, which was prominent in Gomez’s circle of friends—remarkably consistent during the decades of his autocracy—was granted a concession near its native city of Coro. To make it effective, the Arcayas bought for pennies communal lands designed in colonial times to protect Amerindian communities. There was no oil there, but in time the lands became the core of the Venezuelan large refining industry. But they had to wait, because Gomez, 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 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. 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 Gomez did not tax the oil companies and that Venezuela did not benefit from oil production, but this in only a half-truth. 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 the American lawyer Tom Armstrong. The laws were relatively lenient, but Gomez, 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, in one of which the last Amerindian resistance to foreign encroachment took place. Oil income allowed Gomez 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 Gomez took power, Venezuela was a very poor illiterate country. The white/pardos social divide was still very much in place. When Gomez 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 to one million and a half. Malaria was the greatest killer. Gomez 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. Gomez, 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 Gomez, identified carriers by the color of skin, which they still did until the 1980s. Venezuela did change considerably under Gomez. 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.