SPANISH COLONIAL LIFE
Colonial Venezuela's primary value to Spain was geographic:
its long Caribbean coastline provided security from foreign
enemies and pirates for the Spanish bullion fleet during its
annual journey between Portobelo, in present-day Panama, and
Cuba. Venezuela's own form of mineral wealth, petroleum, was
noticed as early as 1500, but after being hastily scrutinized,
its vast deposits were ignored for nearly four centuries.
Venezuela lacked political unity for the first two and a half
centuries of colonial rule, in part because it was of no
economic importance to the Spanish officials. Before 1777, what
we today label Venezuela consisted of a varying number of
provinces that were governed quite independently of one another.
These provinces were administered from neighboring colonies that
the Spanish considered more important. Beginning in 1526, they
were under the jurisdiction of the Audiencia de Santo Domingo.
Then in 1550 their colonial administrative seat moved to the
Audiencia de Santa Fé de Bogotá, which in 1718 was upgraded to
become the Viceroyalty of New Granada. During most of the
remainder of the eighteenth century, what is today Venezuela
consisted of five provinces: Caracas, Cumaná, Mérida de
Maracaibo, Barinas, and Guyana. Because these provinces were far
from each other and from the centers of Spanish colonial rule,
their municipal officials enjoyed a degree of local autonomy
unknown in most of Spanish America.
By the late sixteenth century, agriculture had become
Venezuela's chief economic activity. The rich farmlands of the
Andean region, the western llanos, and especially the fertile
valleys surrounding Caracas made Venezuela agriculturally
selfsufficient , and also provided a surplus of a number of
products for exportation. Wheat, tobacco, and leather were among
the early products exported from colonial Venezuela. The Spanish
crown, however, showed little interest in Venezuela's
agriculture. Spain was obsessed with extracting precious metals
from its other territories to finance a seemingly endless series
of foreign wars. As a result, as late as the early eighteenth
century, Venezuela sold the bulk of its considerable surplus of
agricultural goods to British, French, or Dutch traders who,
under the Spanish crown's medieval notions of commerce based on
bureaucratic control and mercantilism, were labeled as
smugglers.
Starting in the 1620s, cocoa became Venezuela's principal
export for the next two centuries. Cocoa was a quasi-narcotic
bean used in the processing of chocolate, a native product of
Venezuela's coastal valleys. Its impact on colonial Venezuelan
society was immense. Its sizable profits attracted, for the
first time, significant immigration of Spaniards, including
relatively poor Canary Islanders, and its plantation culture
created a great demand for African slaves during the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. These two population groups
would complete a social hierarchy that became virtually a caste
system. On top was a small elite of white peninsulares
(those born in Spain) and criollos (those born in America of
Spanish parentage); they were followed by the white Canary
Islanders, who typically worked as wage laborers; then came a
large group of racially mixed
pardos, who by the late eighteenth
century made up more than half the total; they were followed by
African slaves, who constituted about 20 percent of the
population; and, lastly, by the Indians. The native population,
decimated by slavery and disease throughout the colonial period,
constituted less than 10 percent of the total at independence.
Enormous profits obtained from the triangular trade of
African slaves for Venezuelan cocoa, which was then shipped
across the Caribbean and sold in Veracruz for consumption in New
Spain (Mexico), made the Venezuelan coast a regular port of call
for Dutch and British merchants. In an effort to eliminate this
illegal intercolonial trade and capture these profits for
itself, the Spanish crown in 1728 granted exclusive trading
rights in Venezuela to a Basque corporation called the Real
Compaña Guipuzcoana de Caracas, or simply the Caracas Company.
The Caracas Company proved quite successful, initially at
least, in achieving the crown's goal of ending the contraband
trade. Venezuela's cocoa growers, however, became increasingly
dissatisfied. The Basque monopoly not only paid them
significantly lower prices but received favored treatment from
the province's Basque governors. This discontent was evidenced
in the growing number of disputes between the company and the
growers and other Venezuelans of more humble status. In 1749 the
discontent erupted into a first insurrectionary effort, a
rebellion led by a poor immigrant cocoa grower from the Canary
Islands named Juan Francisco de León. The rebellion was openly
joined by the Venezuelan lower classes and quietly encouraged by
the elite in Caracas. Troops from Santo Domingo and from Spain
quickly crushed the revolt, and its leadership was severely
repressed by forces headed by Brigadier General Felipe Ricardos,
who was named governor of Caracas in 1751.
The growth of the cocoa trade, the success of the Caracas
Company, and the assertion of the royal will manifested by the
suppression of the 1749 revolt all helped to centralize the
Venezuelan economy around the city of Caracas. In recognition of
this growth, Caracas was given political-military authority as
the seat of the Captaincy General of Venezuela in 1777, marking
the first instance of recognition of Venezuela as a political
entity. Nine years later, its designation was changed to the
Audiencia de Venezuela, thus granting Venezuela
judicialadministrative authority as well.
Barely three decades later, however, Venezuela would
suddenly--after almost three centuries on the periphery of the
Spanish American empire--find itself at the hub of the
independence movement sweeping Latin America. Present-day
Venezuelans continue to take pride in having produced not only
Francisco de Miranda, the best known of the precursors of the
Spanish American revolution, but also the first successful
revolt against Spanish rule in America and, of course, the
leading hero of the entire epic of Latin America's struggle for
independence, Simón Bolívar Palacios. |
