US Imperialism and the Venezuelan Oligarchy

The January 3 US strikes in Caracas have no historical precedent, not only for Venezuela but for all of South America. It was the first US military attack against a capital in this part of the world in our history as independent nations. 

To understand the underlying motivations behind such an outrageous bombing of Caracas, and going beyond the professed US interests in the country’s natural resources, we have to understand the position, the ideas, and the role played by elites in shaping key areas of national interest, including the concept of sovereignty, the nation’s resources, the model of state, and Venezuela’s foreign relations – in their own image, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This meant the imposition of a political thought and socioeconomic model that ended up, above all, benefiting the Spanish-descendant or Creole oligarchy, which had been known in colonial times as the mantuanos.

Venezuela emerged from the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest as what is known in Venezuelan historiography as the “colonial-implanted society” (1), that is, a settler formation. At its zenith, it was a Creole elite with ample economic privileges but with a highly restricted political reach, limited to participation in municipal town halls (“cabildos”). This privileged sector was the dominant political class in colonial society for three centuries, with deep Hispanic cultural roots, a notion of superiority towards the popular classes alongside a complex of inferiority towards peninsular Spaniards who controlled the political and administrative affairs of the colony.

Between 1810 and 1816, the Creole elite played a leading role in the national independence struggle. Later, during his Caribbean tour of Jamaica and Haiti, the Liberator Simón Bolívar managed to pierce through his social and ideological class blinders, thus evolving from a mere mantuano military chief to become the revolutionary leader of the process of Venezuelan and South American emancipation. The historic step was taken through the decree issued in July 1816, in Ocumare de la Costa, with the momentous incorporation of enslaved people into the independence struggle, promising freedom, land, and citizenship to all those who answered the patriotic call. This revolutionary act, like many others in Bolívar’s life, would provoke splits and internal conflicts among military leaders and patriotic politicians, which would later lead to the separation of Gran Colombia in 1830 and the creation of Venezuela as an independent state. Likewise, the founding of the new Venezuelan republic in that same year by the Creole elites was essentially based on anti-Bolivarian political and ideological foundations, and it would undergird the model of the state and the socioeconomic system to be maintained until the end of the twentieth century. (2)

The main political positions assumed by Bolívar during his lifetime certainly did not please certain social sectors within independent America. His clear vision of a centralist government in contrast to the federal model adopted in the United States; his desire to grant freedom to enslaved Black people so that they could become citizens with full rights; his ideal of Colombian unity and the creation of a confederation of independent American states under a model of regional integration –all these plans became factors of discord and internal disagreement among the Venezuelan elites who, together with seditious elements in New Granada and Quito, ultimately brought about the disintegration of Gran Colombia.  

At the same time, in 1823, a geopolitical doctrine emerged from the United States that would mark the history of US interventionism in the hemisphere to this day. Known as the Monroe Doctrine, it proclaimed US hegemony over political, economic, and military affairs in the hemisphere, against any intervention from outside the region and in favor of US capital, exacting a horrific toll on the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean over the last two centuries.

In Venezuela, the entire first century of republican life was marked by struggles between liberal and conservative elites. Conservative sectors launched political campaigns against liberal factions with the hidden intention of handing the country over to foreign interests while securing their own economic benefits. Once the republic was established, internal strife prevented the Venezuelan political class from even diplomatically agreeing on the border limits with Colombia, eventually leading the country to lose vast territories due to external interference before the borders with our neighbors were ultimately settled. (3) Later, amid the post-1858 crisis, Conservative Creole elites even promoted the creation of an English protectorate in Venezuela, with Pedro Gual and Manuel Felipe Tovar appealing to the then United Kingdom chargé d’affaires in Venezuela, Edward St. John, for British intervention in order to prevent the Liberal Party from coming to power with the support of the African-descendent masses. It was this ongoing political hostility between these two parties for almost three decades that, over time, inevitably degenerated into the so-called Federal War or Long War, between 1859 and 1864, the last episode of civil war in the country.

Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, Venezuela lost all the political power it had gained during independence, all the accumulated military power that had led it to victory across the continent, and all its productive and economic capacity. It became trapped in a monoculture agricultural dependency based on coffee and cocoa crops. In addition, during these times of neglect, the country became a republic without the material capabilities needed to institutionalize a central state that did not even have its own infrastructure until 1873, when the first part of the Federal Legislative Palace was finally built. 

Later, at the end of the nineteenth century, during the government of General Cipriano Castro, a military chief from the southwestern Andean state of Táchira who put an end to the struggles between liberal and conservative elites, the country once again fell victim to imperialist designs on the national wealth. In 1899, in the so-called Paris Arbitration Award, Venezuela was stripped of a significant part of its eastern territory when it lost Guayana Esequiba to the British Empire, thanks to the legal assistance of Russia, acting as judge, and the United States, as the supposed defender of Venezuelan interests before the international courts.  

A few years later, in 1902, Venezuela was once again the target of imperialist threats through diplomatic siege and international media campaigns against the government by the UK, Germany, and Italy. Under the pretext of collecting debts acquired by the Venezuelan state, the European powers imposed a naval blockade and took over the ports of La Guaira and Maracaibo. These events were clearly acts of intervention intended to trigger a military invasion of the country, supported by elite sectors in favor of the presence of imperialist forces in the country.

There has thus been a clear continuity in the servility of the Creole oligarchy to imperial powers since the nineteenth century, with the appeal for an English protectorate, followed by whitening immigration policies, territorial dispossession, and a naval blockade. In the twentieth century, the subordination took the form of oil concessions, with petroleum becoming a key battleground for class struggle. Fast forward to the present, over the past 27 years, Venezuela under the Bolivarian Revolution, has been the target of relentless US-led hybrid warfare, with traditional manutano elites like María Corina Machado openly calling for a US military intervention. 

These internal and external efforts to dismantle the sovereign national project and seize the country’s vast wealth and resources finally culminated in the January 3 US bombing of Caracas and kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, bringing two centuries of republican history full circle.

Notes

1. The term “colonial-implanted society” was coined by Venezuelan historian Germán Carrera Damas to explain the long and ongoing process of the establishment of Venezuelan society, which began in the 1500s and can be approached theoretically and methodologically as a historical continuity that extends to the present day. By the 19th century, the socioeconomic elites would promote policies to position Venezuela as a mere supplier of raw materials for the global capitalist system, while guaranteeing their economic privileges. This sociopolitical dynamic, institutionalized through national projects, would continue until the end of the twentieth century. 
2. Not only in Venezuela, but the separatist oligarchies of Quito and New Granada, after their separation from Gran Colombia, also imposed political and administrative models contrary to Bolivarian ideas, establishing federal republics in the US style and opposed to Bolívar’s centralist model. 
3. The Pombo-Michelena dispute between the governments of Venezuela and Colombia, which lasted from 1833 to 1840, led to diplomatic conflicts between the two countries that were ultimately settled by Spain in an 1891 arbitration, with Queen Regent Maria Christina of Habsburg as the decision-maker. This award significantly harmed Venezuela, granting extensive territories to Colombia, such as La Guajira, the plains of Casanare, and the regions of the Meta, Guainía, and Vichada rivers.

The Insurgent History column features Venezuelan historians who explore key episodes of the country’s nineteenth and twentieth century history and their relevance for the present.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.

Christian E. Flores G. (Caracas, 1974) holds a bachelor’s degree in History from the Central University of Venezuela and MSc. in Venezuelan History from the National Experimental University of the Arts (UNEARTE). He currently serves as Director of Research and Historical Advisory Services for the Venezuelan National Assembly, Professor of Critical History of Puntofijismo (1958-1999) and Critical History of the Bolivarian Revolution at UNEARTE. He’s a researcher with more than 20 years of experience, and some of his published books are: 4F: Collapse of the Puntofijista Parliamentand 1815-2015, bicentennial of the Letter from Jamaica, in addition to articles and papers in Venezuelan and international publications.