| THE TERRITORY THAT BECAME Venezuela lay outside the
geographical boundaries of the great pre-Hispanic civilizations
of Central and South America. And although it was the first
locale in which Christopher Columbus set foot on the mainland of
the New World, Venezuela was of only marginal consequence within
the Spanish American empire during most of the next three
centuries. It was not until the late eighteenth century that the
colonial region that encompassed present-day Venezuela provoked,
thanks to growing agricultural and trading activity under the
auspices of the Caracas Company, more than minor interest from
the Spanish crown.
Venezuela's historical significance perhaps reached its peak
during Spanish America's struggle for independence during the
early nineteenth century. In 1810 it became the first colony
formally to declare its independence. Venezuela also provided
Latin America with its greatest hero of that era, and perhaps of
all time, in Simón Bolívar Palacios. Bolívar, known as "The
Liberator," played the leading role in expelling the Spanish
colonial authorities not only from Venezuela, but also from
Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. He died in 1830,
tragically broken after having seen his dream of Latin American
unity shattered by the realities of regional caudillismo (rule
by local strongmen, or caudillos).
Venezuela remained marginal primarily because it lacked
deposits of gold, silver. or the precious stones that
constituted Spain's fundamental interest in the New World. No
useful purpose existed during colonial times for the
petroleum--dubbed "the devil's excrement" by early Spanish
explorers--that oozed out of the ground near Lago de Maracaibo.
Venezuela's growing prosperity toward the end of the colonial
era was based instead on its flourishing production and trade of
cocoa. When the ravages of Venezuela's independence struggle
combined with a collapse in the international market to put an
end to Venezuela's cocoa "boom," coffee became the nation's
principal export. This second phase in Venezuela's agricultural
export economy lasted nearly a century, until petroleum became
king with the popularization of the internal combustion engine
in the early twentieth century.
The petroleum industry in Venezuela began under the control
of foreign firms. Beginning in the 1930s, it gradually came
under the government's authority. The nationalization of the
remaining assets of the foreign oil firms in 1976 represented
the culmination of full government control. Nonetheless, the
government had little effect on the international price of crude
oil, despite the efforts of the Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC), of which Venezuela was a founding
member. Fluctuations in the price of oil during the 1970s and
1980s exercised a commanding impact on the political as well as
the economic life of the nation.
In strictly political terms, Venezuela's republican history
exhibits a seeming incongruity between the instability and
dictatorial rule of the period prior to 1935 and the stability
of its post-1958 democracy. Scholars have posited a variety of
explanations for this fortuitous transformation, most of which
cite the usefulness of vastly increased petroleum revenues in
allowing the state to address the demands of virtually every
politically active sector of society. The marked decline in
petroleum revenues during the 1980s therefore placed significant
strains on this political system, which for over two decades had
been the envy of the other nations of Latin America. |
