Venezuela– History in a Capsule

by Luis Rumbaut

Venezuelans today are mainly a Creole people of Spanish, African, and Native American descent. When Columbus landed in 1498, at the mouth of the Orinoco River, he thought he had landed on the coasts of Asia. In fact, Venezuela’s inhabitants were Carib-, Arawak-, and Chibcha-speaking peoples, thought to have been about 50,000 in number. While as separate peoples, concentrated in the remote interior of the country, they make up today but a small part of the population, they have become a significant part of its racial and cultural mix. The Spanish, — according to some, Amerigo Vespucci — finding the people living in houses atop stilts and surrounded by canals, called the land “Little Venice,” and, as elsewhere in America, set about searching for gold, precious stones, and other riches. It was off the coast, on Margarita Island — today a resort — that Columbus first saw pearls.

In time, however, the Spanish decided that Venezuela was not to become one of their richest possessions, and eventually it became more a land of plantations, like Peru and Mexico, than a source of precious metals. As in the U.S., African slaves were brought to work the cocoa, sugar, cotton, coffee, and tobacco fields. And, as in the rest of America, the people of the colony were destined to forge a separate identity and seek independence from Europe.

A major, albeit unsuccessful, independence effort was led by Francisco de Miranda, a military man who had served in the Spanish army, participated in the American Revolution of the thirteen English colonies, and fought in the French Revolution. Miranda failed to cultivate a following in Venezuela, however, and eventually abandoned his efforts and moved to England. He would die a prisoner in Spain.

It fell to the great Venezuelan and pan-American leader Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, to lead the forces of independence to victory. Like Miranda, Bolívar knew Europe and had been schooled in the revolutionary ideas of the period. Born to the Creole aristocracy, he determined as a young man to devote himself to the cause of independence. He took Caracas in 1813, but was driven out. It would not be until 1821, after years of struggle, that he returned again as the leader of a new and vast region in South America free from Spain.

Bolívar’s dream of a unified Gran Colombia, however, never became a reality. Driven by the divisive force of personal and provincial interests, as well as by political differences, Gran Colombia broke apart into Colombia (of which Panama was still part), Ecuador, and Venezuela. For more than a hundred years, Venezuela would be subject to a series of caudillos and dictators. Not until 1958 would there begin a period of stable governmental succession through elections. In the 1920s, Venezuela began to pump and export oil, becoming for a time the richest country in the southern continent. The oil income, however, was not invested effectively in production independent of the extraction of natural resources, nor did the industry remain free of corruption and waste. When oil prices fell, so did the national economy, and only a small upper class hung on to the oil wealth. This reversal of fortunes led to Venezuela’s abandonment of its traditional political parties, and in turn, the establishment of a new constitution and the election of a new government in 1999.

That new government soon faced a natural and social calamity, torrential rain and destructive mudslides, which added to the crises in housing, production, and services. Venezuela enters the new century trying to rebuild itself, physically as well as institutionally.