IV. The Venezuelan 19th century

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. As in all human affairs everywhere, there were patterns of political ascendancy, downfalls, and resurgences. 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, 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 an extension of the central llanos. The western llanos, with the capital in Barinas, had been a province separate from Caracas, but they were in effect (the same as Apure) part of the same social, military, and political landscape.

            Upon independence, Venezuela was possibly the most impoverished country in Spanish America. In 1800, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt had estimated the population of the province of Venezuela at around one million. A calculation made by Agustin Codazzi, an Italian officer and engineer who chose Venezuela as his homeland, put the population at 810,000. Whether these figures are reliable or not, it is undeniable that 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 as we shall see the political forces that determined its history were not entirely arbitrary or chaotic.

            In the seventy years from 1829 to 1899, by one official tally, Venezuela had thirty presidential terms, but this leaves out some transitional presidencies bringing the figure to 41. In reality, there were 28 terms which were not transitional and these were filled by only sixteen presidents. This is not to say that Venezuela was not an unstable country. During the same period, there were at least thirty insurrections, but the majority of these were suppressed. The usual pattern was that some local usually white caudillo would “recruit” an “army” of 100 or more pardos and make a pompous “revolutionary” proclamation. If this caudillo had some measure of charisma, he could put other caudillos on his side and with the 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 Paez ascendancy (1829-1847), during which he had the support of Carlos Soublette; (2) the Monagas ascendancy (1847-1848); (3) the Great War of the Caudillos (1858-1863); (4) the Federalist period (1863-1870); (5) the Guzman Blanco ascendancy, whose main caudillo supporter was Joaquin Crespo (1870-1887); and (6) the civilian presidencies and the Crespo ascendancy (1887-1899).

            (1) Paez 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. Paez once named as his successor the civilian Jose Maria 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 Jose Tadeo Monagas, whose base was the eastern llanos, but as Paez had no effective authority there, Monagas suffered no consequences for his insubordination. Besides Monagas had as much a right as Paez to be considered one of the “liberators” of Venezuela and he had the additional credential that, whereas Paez 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.

            (2) Soublette was an honest but lackluster president, in some ways a foil to Paez, 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 Jose Tadeo, the younger Jose Gregorio (always at the side of his brother, but a competent officer in his own right), and Jose Ruperto, son of Jose 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.

            (3) 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 Julian 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. Paez, who had been exiled by the Monagas, was called backed from the USA, but he was no longer the caudillo he was before and he had to surrender to the leader of the federalists, Juan Crisostomo Falcon. 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”.

            (4) 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. If you travel the ruts in the gorgeous semi-arid Paraguana peninsula in northern Venezuela, not far from Coro as the crow flies, you are likely be surprised by the ruins of a large neo-classical structure, which are all that remain of the palace Falcon built in that desolate wilderness.  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 Guzman Blanco, who had spend 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. Up to this time, 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.

            (5) Guzman 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. Guzman 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 mostly the doing of his principal lieutenant, Joaquin Crespo, a pardo from the central llanos.

            (6) Guzman 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, Hermogenes Lopez, was a colorless  caudillo, who inaugurated some of the projects Guzman 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 Paul, with Guzman Blanco’s far-away blessing. Crespo, who thought he should have been chosen president, went into exile and started planning his own revolution. Rojas Paul actively promoted an anti-Guzman popular reaction in Caracas and other cities. He handed power 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.