I. The “land of contrasts”

The history of Venezuela is an international ghost. Except for the oil industry, no one took much interest in the country. There is a great deal of biographical material on the dictator Juan Vicente Gomez because of his fame as a cruel, arbitrary man, but full biographies are rare. It was said that his police would routinely hang political enemies by the testicles. The victims apparently survived to tell about it.[1] Not likely! Actually, Gomez, nicknamed clandestinely El Bagre (catfish), was a popular favorite in Venezuela and there were many stories of his sense of fairness. One told of an occasion in which he was being honored and a peasant offered him a gigantic cassava root, a staple of the Venezuelan diet, which Gomez rewarded with a handful of morocotas, a large coin made of almost pure gold. A courtier imagined how large his reward would be if he gave Gomez his own golden ring, which he did with a florid sycophantic toast to the Benemérito (the well-deserving), as Gomez was officially called. Gomez heard him out and rewarded him with the cassava he had been given before! Venezuelans love stories like this and they swear by certain clichés. Youth is always pure and idealistic. All Venezuelans, even the wealthiest, will tell you that they are socialists at heart. Simon Bolivar, The Liberator, was a superman without a mean bone in his small body. Venezuela has never been a racist country, even though pardos, those with mixed white, brown, and black ancestry, were effectually disenfranchised, in a general social sense, even during the democracy that began in 1958.

            Venezuela did get some fictional attention from the writer Joseph Conrad, but only as the setting for his novel Nostromo, which takes place in and around the gulf port of Sulaco, in the western part of a country called Costaguana, ruled by one Guzman Bento, a barely nominal mask for the Venezuelan ruler Guzman Blanco. In Sulaco, the economy was in the hands of foreigners, as it had always been in Maracaibo, the capital of the homophonous Zulia state. The gulf described in the book is a replica of the semi-lake which Maracaibo fronts and bears its name. As it had natural if shallow outlets to the open sea—a deep navigation channel was later dredged—Lake Maracaibo is technically a brackish water gulf. In Nostromo, Sulaco is trying to go independent from Costaguana and Zulia was indeed autonomous for a time in that period of Venezuela’s history. The rest is pure invention, for Conrad was not trying to say anything about Venezuela but about human foibles, just as his novel Victory, part of it set in the coast of Colombia, has no relation to this country except as natural backdrop for another of his moral parables. Venezuela does occasionally make an entrance in English-language fiction, as it did in the Thomas Pynchon novel V., in which the one-letter title makes a sidewise reference to the country. But if the world now and then does cast a curious glance on Venezuela, there has been very little cultural or literary reciprocity. Venezuela is insular and even the educated stubbornly speak Spanish and only Spanish. On a cultural tour sponsored by the American embassy, John Updike turned up in Caracas, but the crowd invited to a reception where questions, in Spanish or English, were actively encouraged had never heard of him and the affair eventually petered out with Venezuelans talking to each other and Updike chatting with the diplomats. If foreigners have looked towards Venezuela, Venezuelans in general are very inward-looking, except about Florida, and they are possibly, proportionally, the most mono-lingual nation in the world. They obstinately refuse to learn other languages, preferring their own un-Castilian version of Spanish. The best Venezuelan diction is to be heard in culebrones (literally, “long snakes”), Venezuelan soap operas, once an important cultural export. Venezuelan foreign ministers that spoke English can be counted with the fingers of one hand. The only English word that the actual one probably knows is “OK”, but that has been part of the Venezuelan vernacular since long ago.           

            During the democratic administrations from 1958 to 1999, Venezuela went unnoticed except for the occasional political turbulences, and even on these occasions not much. It took the election of Hugo Chavez Frias, a failed military putschist who spent barely two years in jail, and his subsequent friendship with Fidel Castro of Cuba and his rhetorical socialism and especially his antagonism towards the USA, for the American press, and with it that of the rest of the world, to take note of Venezuela. But if you wanted to know about the country’s history you would be hard put to find a source in English. The Venezuelan historian Guillermo Moron wrote a multi-volume history of Venezuela, which he condensed into a one-volume translation into English, but it has not had a second printing. The only body of work which approaches a social history of Venezuela is the doing of Federico Brito Figueroa, a Marxist who, like fellow Marxist sociologists, considers that Venezuelan history went through a “feudal period”. Another Marxist writer and politician, Domingo Alberto Rangel, not only subscribes to the feudalism thesis, which is usually shrugged off by serious foreign historians, but also believed, at least in the 1970s, that the Venezuelan economy had entered the monopoly phase of capitalism predicted by Marx, even though then as now, and really throughout Venezuelan history, the only monopolies in the country were held by government corporations or directly by the state. Brito Figueroa depicted a Venezuelan caudillo, Ezequiel Zamora, who spoke up for the pardos in the 19th century, as practically a socialist who had probably been assassinated by a jealous fellow caudillo in the battle in which both were fighting as allies. Presumably, Zamora would have transformed “feudal Venezuela” into God knows what, because the chances that he would have rid Venezuela of caudillismo, just for starters, are extremely fanciful. Brito Figueroa was taken seriously by lecturers at the London School of Economics in the 1980s, and perhaps even to this day. The academic books that were written by foreign scholars about Venezuelan democratic politics framed them in a social context that was more like that of a developed country, such as the USA, rather than in the reality of Venezuela, despite the abundant use of tables and statistics. These academicians also took sides for either of the two dominant political parties, and the partiality showed. There does exist a 15-volume history of the Venezuelan republic during the 19th century written by Francisco Gonzalez Guinan, who was also a Guzman Blanco unconditional and later a minister under Gomez. The vast work is a basic source, but as a rule it confuses official talk in Caracas for the real social background of Venezuela’s history. It writes of elections when there were none and of constitutions that consisted of ephemeral verbiage.[2]

            The best-selling ever Venezuelan novelist did have a keen interest in Venezuela’s past but he had an obsession with what can only be described as the sexual prowesses of the country’s strongmen. He made a sensation, in Venezuela, with a fictionalized account of one of the premier villains of Venezuelan history, the anti-independence caudillo Jose Tomas Boves, born in Asturias, who supposedly cut the throats of Spain’s enemies to a tune called El Piquirillo, which no one in Venezuela has ever heard. It was the counter-point to the Carmagnole, the French Jacobin chorus, adapted in a Creole version by Venezuelan patriots. The Carmagnole is a bloodthirsty call for the execution of all enemies of the French Revolution. In Herrera Luque’s story, Boves is called the urogallo, an Asturian bird which reputedly expands its gullet to the size of a big red balloon when it is in rut.[3] Before becoming a successful novelist, Herrera Luque, who was a psychiatrist by profession, had researched the demographic origins of Venezuela and seriously documented the thesis that the country had originally been settled by only a few hundred Spaniards. Assuming, as Herrera Luque argued, that immigrants are “misfits”, or otherwise they would not have left their places of origin, Venezuela had been peopled by semi-lunatics! The sexual crossings with Amerindians and black slaves had engendered a general population that itself was collectively psychotic. In sum, Herrera Luque believed that Venezuelans were descendants of madmen. It must be said as partial explanation that Herrera Luque was a pupil of the Spanish psychiatrist, Gregorio Marañon, who believed that hormones was all there was to psychology and wrote a book in which he classified “shyness-induced” sexual impotence in two categories: that which affected people with what he called “eunuchocoidal pre-puberal adiposity” and that of finicky romantics who, like Dante, could not settle for a single specimen of womanhood and in some cases, as that of the Swiss writer Henri-Frederic Amiel, chose to be life-long masturbators. Marañon also thought that the elongated figures in El Greco’s paintings were due to an eye deficiency.[4] In his practice, Herrera Luque routinely dealt with his patients by having them have a testosterone test. If the index was average or low, he would look disappointed and say: “No wonder”.

            Out of jealousy for his success, the Venezuelan intelligentsia did not take Herrera Luque seriously. This was in part justified. When a critic mentioned to his editor that Herrera Luque’s books were very ungrammatical, the man looked surprised and hurt and said it couldn’t be because he had followed Herrera Luque’s texts to the letter, which meant that the imaginative novelist was not that literate, although it cannot be denied that he researched his works well and he wrote with verve. He also deserves credit, during the time his fame gained for him the ambassadorship in México, for rejecting an equestrian statue they sent him of Simon Bolivar, which looked as if the national hero was riding a burro. Venezuela’s notable young writers in the 1970s and onwards used to gather in a part of Caracas abounding in bars and called the “republic of the east”, although it was more towards the center of the city. There, some of them, not devoid of talent, drank themselves to death. The doyen of Venezuelan literature was Miguel Otero Silva, a life-long communist or fellow traveler who churned out novel after novel and had his acolytes, the poet Luis Alberto Crespo leading the pack, promote him for the Nobel prize in the pages of Otero Silva’s own newspaper El Nacional. When Otero Silva died, his son took over the daily, which, ironically, today is considered a leading opponent to the Chavez leftist regime. [5]     

            Perhaps the most important person in the contemporary history of Venezuela is practically a nobody, certainly internationally but as well in his own country. His name is Manuel Quijada.[6] If you write his name in some browsers you will come up with a baseball pitcher of the same name. He is of lower than medium height, definitely of Spanish ancestry, and he has a discreet pepper-and-salt mustache, which matches the color of his hair. He is handsome and has an easy, infectious laugh. He is a fast-talker and can be very disdaining. But his awesome talent is that he can cotton up to people and bend them to his will without seeming to be doing so, especially if they are military officers. Quijada’s origins are obscure, although any Venezuelan can tell from his mild accent that he is from the eastern part of the country. He is a lawyer by profession and by vocation a politician and conspirator, but he did not figure in anybody’s list of influential Venezuelans, that is, until he was captured with the officers who had rebelled against the democratic government in the Puerto Cabello garrison in 1962. By all accounts, he was the moving force behind the rebellion, doomed from the start, which makes him a kind of Dale Carnegie among soldiers. During the taking of Puerto Cabello, the general in charge, who had peremptory orders to quell the uprising with all deliberate speed, made the tactical error of sending in troops behind tanks into a city where snipers were hidden in buildings along the narrow main street, and when these opened fire the casualties among the soldiers was high. A picture of a priest giving the last rites to a fallen soldier won the Pulitzer prize in the USA. Despite the mayhem, Quijada and his fellow subversives were given lenient sentences and Quijada went back to his usual routine, which was courting people who had clout.

            During the 1970s, he moved in leftist circles, but somewhere along the line he realized he wasn’t going anywhere with people who were basically losers. Without making ripples, he suddenly emerged as the minister of labor in the government of the Social Christian Luis Herrera Campins, who won the elections of 1979 without any identifiable political agenda, mainly as a backlash against the disappointing government of his predecessor Carlos Andres Perez. Once out of office, Quijada became just another face, but this time in the heavyweight political crowd. Nobody knew what he was up to. But those who did know him suspected that they hadn’t heard the last of him. Chavez, a former paratroops commander, was imprisoned after a failed coup in 1992 during the second presidency of Perez. He proclaimed that he did it because the country could no longer tolerate corruption in high places. Most Venezuelans considered that corruption was the source of all the country’s ills. Chavez, who is of the mixed pardo ancestry he shares with a large majority of Venezuelans, struck a dignified, defiant pose when he was allowed to speak on television after his arrest. He spent exactly two years in jail. He was pardoned by president Rafael Caldera, a veteran of more than half a century of Venezuelan politics. While in prison, Chavez was visited by a host of supporters of all hues and among them was Manuel Quijada. While it was presumed that had Chavez gained power he would have dumped the Venezuelan constitution that was promulgated in 1961, nobody was aware that constitutional reform was an issue with him on a par with corruption. But Quijada did have this idea. Considering that Venezuela has had more constitutions than rulers—Bolivar alone was the author or guiding light of four constitutions—this particular piece of political rhetoric did not seem very promising, but when Chavez was released and began to campaign openly for the presidency he made it the center piece of his discourse arguing that a new constitution would mean the end of all social inequities and the start of a whole new political order. Quijada had done it again! With his novel message, Chavez gained widespread middle class support. When he won the presidency with an absolute majority of votes, he put Quijada in charge of judicial reform. Had Quijada finally arrived? There were too many competitors for Chavez’s ear and in his usual unspectacular way, Quijada resigned and was named ambassador in Portugal, where, by law, he had the right of permanent residence with all diplomatic immunities even without the official posting. The whereabouts of Quijada nowadays are not widely known. He might have chosen to remain in Portugal. He might be in Venezuela. But one thing you can be sure of is that if there is a political upheaval some time in the future in Venezuela, Quijada will be in the midst of it.

            Internationally, the most influential Venezuelan politician, before Chavez, was something of a very talented oddball. Even Chavez, who is trying very hard to be that, cannot match what Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo did. [7] Perez Alfonzo was a prominent member of the long-time unbeatable Venezuela party Accion Democratica (henceforth AD), which first climbed to power as an ally of military conspirators in 1945. He was named minister of development and implemented the 50-50 formula for profit-sharing with the oil companies. Despite the military coup of 1948, the oil legislation that Perez Alfonzo applied remained in place. When his party returned to power in 1959, Perez Alfonzo naturally was named oil minister. In that position, he steered Venezuela, with the active support of Saudi Arabia, towards the creation of the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC). During his earlier tenure as minister, Perez Alfonzo had dictated that there would be no more land concessions for foreign oil exploration. The dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez had abrogated this measure, which was re-instated, and the objective of OPEC went beyond the conservation of Venezuelan oil reserves to the restriction of oil production on a global scale. Perez Alfonzo was a canny observer and he was taking the measure of how the land laid. OPEC was not the overnight success its founders wanted. Oil prices were mostly flat and low. Another thing that Perez Alfonzo observed was the incompetence of Venezuelan democracy at administering such a wealthy country. He became convinced that the 50-50 agreement was unworkable because oil companies were adept at hiding real production and profit figures. This made him a partisan of oil nationalization, but at the same time he was fearful of what Venezuela would do with any increase in its oil fiscal intake. Perez Alfonzo had built a pedestal in the garden in back of his house on which he mounted a shiny Singer coupé. When guests asked, he explained that he had brought the car from México without oil for the trip and a driver tried to take it to Caracas in that condition with the result that the engine melted irreparably. He did not say whether he had given instructions to have the engine filled with lubricant and his hearers out of politeness never asked, for his point, in essence, was that Venezuelans were backward. Perez Alfonzo retired in 1963. In 1973, his efforts were rewarded when, due to the Arab boycott against Israel, prices hit the possible ceiling then. But Perez Alfonzo wasn’t celebrating. He had to know that the price rises were more beneficial to the oil multinationals than to the oil exporting countries. What’s more, when Venezuela nationalized the oil industry in 1976, Perez Alfonzo was not among the cheerleaders. He would have preferred to shut down all the oil wells until Venezuela was in a position to use its riches better, and he knew that the country was heading to a bureaucratic, state-created disaster, in what he was absolutely spot on. Despite living like a monk, Perez Alfonzo, who was very health-conscious, died of cancer in 1979, in the midst of the economic chaos that he had foreseen.

            In 1955, a Venezuelan girl, tall with long flowing black hair, Susana Duijm, won the title of Miss World in London. Despite the Dutch name, her skin was a lovely light cinnamon. This was in the time of the dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez and Susana became the toast of Caracas. An immigration flux was then at its height. Mostly the immigrants came from Europe, but one came as a child from Cuba. His name is Osmel Sousa. In 1979, at the start of the Luis Herrera Campins presidency, like another bolt out of the blue tropical sky, Venezuela had a Miss Universe, and then two years later, still in the time of Herrera Campins, who himself is swarthy, Venezuela had another Miss Universe, Irene Saez, tall and curvy (needless to say) and a true blonde to the roots of her hair; and additionally the same year still another Miss World. Under president Jaime Lusinchi, there was a Venezuelan Miss World in 1984 and a Miss Universe in 1986. Besides beauty, what all these girls had in common was that they were graduates of the Osmel Sousa “academy”, where they trained and if necessary underwent minor facial surgery to mold their features like ancient Grecian statues. Sousa has been named the “Venezuelan Pygmalion”. In 1991, during the second presidency of Carlos Andres Perez, there was another Miss World and in the time of his successor, Rafael Caldera, there was yet another Miss World in 1995. Another thing all these girls had in common was that they did not look at all like the average Venezuelan woman, not least in being very tall and light-complexioned. There were, then, between 1979 and 1995, eight Venezuelan  international “beauty queens”. When a Venezuelan did not win an international beauty pageant, the country had 23 finalists. By the middle of that period the UN had well over 150 members. Sousa was acclaimed as a miracle worker. Beauties from other countries sought his help (although none even had the success of Venezuelans).  If you happened even to wonder about these miraculous apparitions in front of Venezuelans you were likely to be told: “What are you, gay?” Perez had a roller-coaster career from being twice lionized as no Venezuelan president ever had been to being first repudiated and then despised as no Venezuelan ever has been. Democratic Venezuelan presidents have always disposed of a budget item which is considered confidential and discretionary. It was from this fund that after 1958 for a time Venezuela became the biggest contributor to Interpol. The hate-Perez period culminated in 1993 when he absolutely refused to reveal what the presidential fund had been used for, even though it wasn’t large, certainly much less than the fortune he had accumulated during two terms in office. Perez was forced to resign and he spent the remaining time of his second presidency mostly under house arrest at the home of his mistress, not herself ever a beauty contestant, although almost every middle class Venezuelan woman will tell you that at some time in her life she was a beauty queen or runner up in this or that local contest. During the electoral campaign of 1998, former president Luis Herrera Campins got his party to support Irene Saez as its presidential candidate. She was then mayor of a district of Caracas. After losing badly, she was elected governor of the island state of New Sparta (Margarita) and later became a supporter of Chavez. She cut short her political career because of pregnancy. The international misses competitions are, as every one knows, profit-making corporations. The Miss Universe title, incidentally, assumes that all alien forms of life have to be like humans. [8]

            Venezuela is often called a “land of contrasts”, which it is and it isn’t. With the exception of smaller countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, it is the most racially mixed nation in Latin America. With no exceptions, it is the most tropical country in the region. Ecuador, whose name would seem to make it that, has only half the population of Venezuela and a half of that lives in the high Andes whereas in Venezuela 90% of the population lives below 1,000 meters of altitude. The majority of Venezuelans live in a climate which on average has a higher temperature than Ecuador, and fully tropical countries, such as Panama and Cuba, have in all not twice the population of Venezuela. Venezuelans are justly proud that their country was the first in the world to abolish the death penalty, which it did in 1863, although the Roman Republic had done so in 1848 but it lasted less than a year. With one exception, no Venezuelan president has been assassinated. The only prominent political execution in Venezuela was carried out in 1817 against Manuel Piar by a military tribunal empowered by none other than Bolivar himself. Yet jails and penitentiaries in Venezuela can only be described as Dantesque. Caracas has been since the 1970s one of the murder capitals of the world. Venezuela is not noted for the export of luxury goods, but one of the high-power international fashion and cosmetics companies was founded by the originally Venezuelan Carolina Herrera. The repertoire of native Venezuelan musical instruments is rather poor. The national instrument is a wooden ukulele called the cuatro, because it only has four plastic strings and descends from a more sophisticated Portuguese version called cavaquinho. The Venezuelan harp has one quarter of the strings in a classical harp. Venezuelans invented the maracas which are gourds with a handle filled with beads, surely descended from what the aboriginals played before the arrival of Europeans. A very popular Venezuelan genre is called the gaita, which in Spanish means bagpipes, but in Venezuela consists of an ensemble of maracas, scrapers of wood or metal (sometimes both), drums—there are many types of drums in Venezuela, all of African origin—and a thing called furruco, which consists of a wooden rod attached to a drum and makes a noise which it would be vulgar to describe. Yet a Venezuelan, the 26-year old Gustavo Dudamel, was named chief conductor the Los Angeles symphony orchestra and shortly after that conducted a gala in honor of pope Benedict XVI. He was trained in Venezuela, not by the self-promoting unofficial “minister of music”, Jose Antonio Abreu, but by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra directed by Rodolfo Saglimbeni. Long before this, Venezuela had in Maria Teresa Carreño one of the 19th century truly outstanding pianists, certainly the greatest among women. Venezuela is not easy to describe or comprehend. One can dare hope that it will be seen some time that Venezuela is truly the country of tomorrow, but that, unlike what Brazilians say of their country with admirable self-parody, it will not always be the country of tomorrow.

            But this hope could be misplaced, because the great enigma of Venezuela is how could a country that started on the road to riches with a population of some three million inhabitants could have grown to a 26-million size hobo, albeit dressed in a tuxedo (but no shoes). It’s an astounding riches-to-rags saga. It began eons ago. Half of Venezuela occupies what is called the Guayana shield, one of the oldest dry-land formations on earth. The great Andes geological upheaval came much later and, although it only marginally affected parts of Venezuela, it is responsible for the small Venezuelan Andes (highest elevation 5,000 meters) and of the intricate system of mostly minor ranges in all of western Venezuela. Next, or thereabouts, two tectonic plates were rubbing against each other in different directions, which produced the coastal range that rises in central Venezuela and stretches to its eastern terminus. In between these elevations, there were mostly shallow seas and it was the sediment from the mountains that gradually formed the rest of Venezuela. The Andean run-off, added to what originally was a stream emanating within elevations in the Guayana shield, formed the Orinoco river, which empties in a large delta into the Atlantic ocean. During the sedimentation period, roughly the Cretaceous (144 to 66 million years ago), algae and tiny creatures with shells mixed in the mud and formed deposits that, through successive layering and filtrations, were gradually transformed into petroleum (rock oil).[9] When the discovery and exploitation of Venezuelan petroleum began, Venezuela was ruled by the shrewd dictator Juan Vicente Gomez, who knew the riches the country had but also that Venezuela by itself could not develop them. After him, even though Venezuela was still not in a position to run a large oil industry, its successive governments started demanding greater and greater shares of the foreign oil companies’ profits. It cannot be said that any Venezuelan president after Gomez, dictatorial or democratic, caved in before the oil companies, although some were more liberal than others in granting rights of exploration. It was after 1945 that a populist Venezuelan government was the first in the world to demand a 50-50 share of earnings, but the beneficiary of this measure was a benighted military dictator who believed that infrastructure and showy government buildings were the way to go. This was Perez Jimenez, whose degree of culture can be measured by this real-to-life story. Perez Jimenez had a total contempt for Venezuelan intellectuals, so he took the ineffable initiative of commissioning from the Spanish writer Camilo Jose Cela  a novel about Venezuela, a country Cela knew nothing whatsoever about, but he did write the novel, titled La catira (“blond woman” in Venezuelan), a word that the Royal Spanish Academy did not then know existed. Cela was rewarded as if he had produced a best-seller, which it wasn’t even in Venezuela.

            When democracy was restored in 1958, it was thought that the time had finally arrived in which Venezuela would use its fiscal bounty for full economic development. Chavez is the result of that illusion. And here’s where the enigma is embodied. The democratic (at least elected) governments that Venezuela had until the arrival of Chavez, who is not non-democratic but merits consideration apart, “managed” trillions of dollars—[the exact figure will be computed later]—but Venezuela was as underdeveloped at the end of that spending spree as it was at the beginning. Dozens upon dozens of institutes were created for waterworks, electrification, social security, dredging, manual and crafts training, basic industries, land reform, and so on. Yet 30% of Venezuelans still do not have access to adequate sanitation and no Venezuelan who can do otherwise would be caught dead drinking water from a tap. Until recently, you could not find a Venezuelan plumber or a carpenter. Colombians were the people who did this sort of work. The cattle and dairying industries (on which much more below) had only Colombian workers, for Venezuelans did not deign to accept such lowly employment, and this in a country where fully one quarter or more of the population lived (and lives) in lowly urban rancherías (shantytowns). Some of these rancherías have gradually been transformed into barrios, which means concrete-and-mortar houses rather than the formerly usual cardboard-and-tin parodies. But no sooner had a rancheria improved than two more went up. In Chile they used to be called callampas, which means “mushrooms”, but Chile is past that phase with a diversified export economy whereas Venezuela, which had tremendous industrial potential, is still a one-export country, even if it is highly priced oil.

            Now, at this point, you might think and wonder: “Obviously Venezuela was under-educated, so what was done about this problem?” And here the enigma deepens. When democracy arrived, Venezuela had three universities. At present, counting public and private, it has upwards of fifty. (It must pointed out, though, that somewhere between 20 and 30% of Venezuelan university students are specializing as “systems analysts”, of which the rest of the world has a plethora.) Venezuelans have been over 90% literate for a long time, but secondary-level education is mediocre. “So then, the problem was that Venezuela did not have good educators?” Of course it couldn’t have with the social background in which democracy began! But Carlos Andres Perez back in 1974 funded a program called Becas Ayacuchos (Ayacucho scholarships), through which hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan high-school graduates were sent to universities the world over. In theory, Venezuelan science and technology should have blossomed. They haven’t so far. An anecdote about late Ayacucho becarios (scholarship-receivers) could perhaps provide at least a clue for an answer. When a couple of Venezuelan students in Japan were asked: “So how’s your Japanese?”, their eyes popped and they answered: “Oh no, no, Japanese is a language only a Japanese can speak.” They also told the person who inquired not to be afraid of the Tokyo crows because, although they looked scary, they wouldn’t attack people. [I thought I was in Hitchcock’s The Birds.]

            The education enigma will be solved gradually as the narrative expands. But it still remains to explain how Venezuela wasted a Himalaya-size mountain of dollars and was left with a dry, dusty wasteland. Corruption is a reason Venezuelans often adduce. Incompetence is a concept Venezuelans, and many outside of Venezuela, even in developed countries, do not grasp (for some enigmatic reason). But the corruption argument can be shown to be inapplicable with many historical examples. What we can do here, initially, is give some very rough estimates—[to be sharpened later]—on how Venezuela spent its oil trillions. At least 30% left the country, but not just carried out of it by corrupt politicians. That Venezuelan politicians are corrupt, there is no doubt, but even ex-presidents, even the very symbols of corruption, such as Jaime Lusinchi (president in the 1980s) and Perez, did not steal anything anywhere near what Ferdinand Marcos did in the Philippines. It is true that every Venezuelan who has been a minister made his bundle, but first, of not one of them has there been proof of corruption (despite a free press and enemies); second, none has become inordinately rich; three, therefore, if ministers stole they did it in subtle, surreptitious ways, like, say, getting large un-repayable bank loans. Venezuela has a sorry record of banking industry crashes. In Venezuela, as everywhere for that matter, there exists a class of people who are professional “corrupters”. They know something that your average citizen does not, which is how to pad official purses and look straight in the eye of the functionary being corrupted. In fact, it is the straight and serious look that is probably the secret of the “art” rather than winks and nods. The huge number of remittances from immigrants must also be taken into consideration, especially as the Venezuelan government’s immigration policies were a failure and most immigrants have returned at least middle-class rich back to Spain, Italy, and Portugal (much more on this below). About 40% was spent on bureaucracy and on the armed forces. This money was not entirely a waste for it helped form the 5,000,000 or so Venezuelans that can be classified as middle-class. [10] The remaining 30%, excluding inevitable under-the-desk commissions, was probably usefully invested, though this “usefully”, which includes public works, must be conditioned in the sense that many investments were only potentially profitable, so in the end part of the bureaucratic 40% also went into subsidies. This is probably as close as any one can get to the big Venezuelan enigma. But it is not close enough. To put crucial finishing touches on this canvass, we have to go to the entire history of Venezuela from its formation to its Chavez present, which many might say is not much of a present for Venezuelans.