With this, the second to last post on the provenance of the Venezuelan ranchitos, we are now circling the airfield.
We’ve looked at the encomienda and hacienda systems, the latter of which predominated well into the mid-20th century, after which ranchitos began to sprout like wild mushrooms along the Caracas mountainsides.
Despite real poverty in prior centuries, ranchitos in Venezuela were mostly a 20-century phenomenon which persists into the 21st.
What gave rise to them?
The usual answer, which you see in Wikipedia, magazine articles, and books, is the oil boom, which drew folks from difficult, farm labor to easier work in the cities. However, there’s something facile and unsatisfactory in that reply.
In our last post we looked at the first four of the five Andinos who ruled Venezuela in the first half of the past century, the most consequential of whom was General Juan Vicente Gómez, in office from 1908 to his death in December, 1935. He and those who followed him created an environment of stability such as had not been seen or experienced in Venezuela in well over a century. See here for more.
The last of the “pre-democracy” Andinos was the almost equally consequential General Marcos Pérez Jiménez in office from 1951 to his abdication/overthrow in 1958.
Pérez Jiménez sought to enhance Venezuela’s independence by promoting oil and ore concessions and improving or expanding the transit infrastructure. The country was further catapulted onto modernity. Caracas was modernized with skyscrapers, including the symbolic Humboldt Hotel overlooking the capital city. Construction projects were launched to build large public housing projects, bridges, and South America’s finest highway system, most of which are still in use into the 21st century, including the then-spectacular La Guira-Caracas expressway in 1953 and the Tejerías-Caracas expressway in 1954.
Furthermore, his tenure saw the creation, in 1956, of cable car transport to the 6,000 ft. Mt. Ávila, which stands like an imposing sentinel over Caracas. He also commissioned the building of the even more remarkable cable car system to the 20,000 ft. Pico Bolivar in the Andes in the western state of Mérida (Mérida). Both systems were built by Swiss engineers and materiel. During his presidency, Venezuela was transformed into the most modern nation in South America: “modern” defined as excellent infrastructure, breathtaking skylines, and a rapidly growing middle class.
A telling but quickly forgotten change imposed by Pérez Jiménez was the revision of the official name of the nation. Since 1864 the country’s name was “United States of Venezuela”, a name favored by José Antonio Páez (see Ranchitos III) and officialized by a successor in 1864. This name reflected Simón Bolivar’s admiration for the United States, but not his conviction that South America should not seek to emulate a similar type government because, as he put it, “the United States form of government will only work for saints, which is what they are [and what we are not]”; Marcos Pérez Jiménez, apparently understanding Bolivar’s admonition, changed the name to “Republic of Venezuela”, a name which stuck until the 21st century, when another authoritarian politician changed the name yet again, but left Venezuela’s 20 states intact.
A plebiscite was held in December, 1957, which he won by a wide margin, but which opponents insisted was a rigged exercise. He went into self-imposed exile in Miami Beach, in 1959, only to be deported later by the Kennedy administration, which vainly believed it could afford to break, for the first time in its history, the United States’ promise of asylum in exchange for the applause of Venezuelan politicians: honor out; applause in.
But, as often happens with asymmetrical swaps, Kennedy succeed with the former, weightier matter, and failed with the latter, transitory one.
Unbelievably, Jiménez was, in 1968, elected to the Senate, even though he ran in absentia from Spain; however, the Venezuelan politicians, who were known to have too much time on their hands, succeeded in overturning his election on technicalities. In 1973, his supporters nominated him for the presidency; however, the political parties amended the constitution, in effect prohibiting him from running for office again.
He never returned to Venezuela. Nevertheless, love him or hate him, his administration’s negotiations with the petroleum industries brought matchless prosperity to the country. This promise of future increase and liberality was reversed by the overturning of his economic policies which tended to favor free enterprise locally, coupled with pragmatic agreements with foreign companies, within a low tax and regulatory environment. Our next post, the last in this series, will report on this in more detail.
Amazingly, all major projects undertaken by Pérez Jiménez still stand, unsurpassed: either still in use, such as in the case of the magnificent, now barely maintained, and, therefore, in many places, dangerous expressways, or as silent, empty monuments of a long past era, such as the Humboldt Hotel, alone and padlocked, alternating between stints as a reflector of countless brilliant sparkles of sunlight or as a lone sentry shrouded in clouds atop Mr. Ávila, reminding all who look and wonder, that historical eras ought not to be simplistically catalogued as bright or dark, evil or good. Much depends on who tells the story, how it’s told, of whom it is told, and, of course, by whom it is told.
At the end of his rule, Venezuela was by far the largest supplier of iron ore to the United States and one of its primary suppliers of petroleum. The ore was ultimately incorporated in America’s magnificent bridges, skyscrapers, monuments, homes, and automobiles.
Although some of his policies did genuflect to politicians who demanded state interventions, these were limited and, most importantly, he honored private property thereby maintaining a centuries’ old tradition in Venezuela.
We now approach the threshold of the birth and growth of the ranchitos, where we will see that tradition of respect for private property assailed.
