Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Hemisphere to Petroleum's Empire

Judith Ewell. Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Hemisphere to Petroleum's Empire. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Bibliographical essay, index, 267 pages; hardcover $50, paperback $20.

Judith Ewell departs from the premise that cultural divergences are responsible for "a degree of discordance" in relations between the United States and Venezuela over the past two hundred years. Cultural forces operate, she says, in the context of national power "as measured by population, wealth and resources, military force, and political stability" (p. 1). These realpolitik factors have cast Venezuelans more often as supplicants in their relationship to the United States. Like the wily Uncle Rabbit (No Conejo) in their traditional folktales, says Ewell, Venezuelans have sought to distance themselves from the claws of their northern neighbor, the powerful Uncle Tiger (Tio Tigre).

A less sensitive and knowledgeable writer might lapse into a stereotyped portrait of Venezuelan society and culture, but Ewell utilizes this cultural framework very loosely. It serves her best in the part of the book covering 1790 to 1935, the year the dictator General Juan Vicente Gomez died and modem mass politics in Venezuela began. Early on, Venezuelans were eager for an active U.S. policy on behalf of their interests. Most were initially enthusiastic about the Monroe Doctrine, seeing in it a commitment by the United States to promote Venezuela's interests against European powers. More often than not, however, U.S. actions led to disillusionment.

Diplomats and elites on each side brought varying degrees of sophistication to their work. Each side appreciated the importance of influencing public and elite opinion through carefully placed interviews and manipulation of the news media. These writings both reflected and shaped mass prejudices at home. Cultural stereotypes, racism, and conflicts of interest all infected the attitudes and behavior of diplomats, particularly on the U.S. side. Venezuelans had reason to be appalled by the highly irregular behavior (in one case exposing themselves in the nude to local officials) and improper business dealings of many U.S. diplomats and businessmen.

Venezuelans have their rogues as well as heroes in this story, but Ewell makes it clear that U.S. officials usually operated on crude stereotypes. Corruption, however, was often in the eye of the beholder, even before the dance of oil concessions. If the northerners were sometimes victimized by administrative inefficiency and delays, it was not always because of graft. U.S. businessmen and diplomats were often unfamiliar with Venezuelan law. Many North Americans passed suspiciously from diplomatic to business posts in the country-before and after the oil epoch dawned. The motive for obstruction was not always pecuniary; sometimes Venezuelans were merely playing the wily Tio Conejo to keep the more powerful foreigners at bay (p. 54).

For the period after 1890, Ewell emphasizes two distinct but interrelated aspects of U.S.-Venezuelan relations: oil policy and Venezuela's attempt to improve its bilateral bargaining position through a multilateral framework. Venezuelan politicians and diplomats, invoking Bolivarian mythology, have encouraged greater hemispheric coordination of Latin American policy toward the United States, but they have often been disappointed in the U.S. response to bilateral initiatives and Pan American proposals. Today, Ewell argues, Venezuelan foreign policy is more globally oriented, as reflected in important contributions made by Venezuelan diplomats to the formation and actions of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The problem of reconciling multilateral initiatives with the reality of U.S. hegemony, however, persists.

Ewell characterizes this Venezuelan dilemma as "James G. Blaine's curse." The reference is to the secretary of state's exploitation of Pan American sentiment as a wedge for widening U.S. economic influence in the region. Venezuelans had hoped Blaine's support for the Pan American Conference of 1889 would help them rally hemispheric support in their boundary dispute with Britain. But Blaine had in mind promoting the opening of Latin American markets to U.S. exports more than Pan Americanism in the Bolivarian style.

Given this theme, one might have hoped for a deeper treatment of the U.S. role in mediating the boundary dispute between Venezuela and Britain (arbitrated in 1899) over Guayana (sic), which left a legacy of mistrust and a sense of betrayal on the part of Venezuelans. On the other hand, other key events, such as the U.S. intervention against the regime of General Cipriano Castro (1899-1908), are well detailed.

U.S. policy has been chronically afflicted by the racist presumption that the Venezuelan masses, especially those with African ancestry, are incapable of governing themselves democratically. Constant Venezuelan instability in the nineteenth century reinforced a fear of "race and revolution" in U.S. diplomacy. U.S. Consul Benjamin Shields, for example, advised the State Department in 1848 that Venezuelan Liberals could be understood to resemble "the Mexican character" modified by "the idleness, want of energy, ignorance and credulity natural to the African race" (p. 50).

These attitudes persisted well into the twentieth century. An embarrassing number of U.S. diplomats and elites (albeit with notable exceptions) denied the ability of the Venezuelan masses to govern themselves democratically and endorsed the harsh dictatorships of Gomez and General Marcos Perez Jimenez (1948-58). After 1958, Cold War priorities often put U.S. policy at odds with Venezuela's support for electoral democracy (the Betancourt Doctrine) in the hemisphere. Today U.S. policy seems more consonant with the Betancourt Doctrine, but Ewell cautions that U.S. security and economic interests have historically taken precedence over democracy and may do so again.

By weaving in the human element, Ewell allows us to appreciate the elements of folly, naivete, wisdom, and inventiveness in the diplomacy on both sides. She mines newspapers and official sources for anecdotes and incidents emblematic of these cultural stereotypes and misunderstandings. This lends her book a picaresque quality, wherein lies both its strength and its weakness. For the period when Venezuela was on the extreme periphery of both the world system and the U.S. foreign policy horizon, the approach is fruitful; but it is less satisfactory for understanding Venezuela's role within "petroleum's empire."

The author does well to avoid demonizing the Gomez regime on oil policy. This approach can be attributed to her own research into primary sources and her reliance on B. S. McBeth's Juan Vicente Gomez and the Oil Companies in Venezuela, 1908-1935 (1983), which challenges the conventional depiction of the Gomez administration as devoid of any nationalist content. This view would have been considered historical heresy until very recently, but revisionist views are emerging as Venezuelan scholars wean themselves from the mythology prevalent in the writings and public philosophy of Romulo Betancourt, the country's towering democratic figure of the century, and his contemporaries in the party he founded, Accion Democratica (AD). Some of this finds its way into Ewell's book, but there are places, particularly in her treatment of "petroleum's empire," where a certain degree of orthodox mythology is allowed to color the interpretation.

For example, Ewell correctly credits President Isaias Medina Angarita with "imposing a new taxation policy" on the oil companies in 1943 "with a perceptive unwillingness to challenge U.S. control of the oil fields." But more was at stake in Medina's quarrel with the companies than the relative share of profits. Medina's achievement lay in reasserting Venezuelan sovereignty over the companies (which included Shell, not just U.S. companies) operating on its soil. The companies fiercely resisted Medina's new law not only because it increased revenues, but because it established Venezuela's right to "raise the rent" using its sovereign powers of taxation.

Ewell errs in attributing to Medina the agreement to divide profits equally between the companies and the state (p. 170). The famous "50-50" policy was implemented under the first AD regime (1945-48) when Betancourt, operating under far less favorable international circumstances (the World War nearing conclusion) than did Medina, reached an agreement to maintain a "50-50" split of oil profits with the companies. Betancourt's secret gentleman's agreement not to raise the govemment's share unilaterally was revealed when the interim government of Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal, which replaced the dictator Perez Jimenez and preceded the election of Betancourt in December 1958, raised taxes on the companies without prior negotiations, an important episode overlooked in this book.

Ewell says, "multinational petroleum experts worried that Venezuela's success in securing a 50-50 split in oil revenues could prompt the new Middle Eastern Producers to demand the same" (p. 169). Whether the companies resisted or welcomed the AD's 50-50 policy of 1945 is disputed among Venezuelan experts, but there is no doubt that U.S. companies ultimately decided that the policy would work to their advantage. As Bernard Mommer shows in La cuestion petrolera (1988), the U.S. companies used the Venezuelan example as leverage to compete with their European rivals for access to Middle Eastern oilfields. Even if one concludes that the "50-50" arrangement was a Venezuelan victory, one cannot assume conversely that it was a setback for the North American companies or a threat to their interests in the Middle East.

This book is not, however, principally about oil policy. Ewell is much more concerned with describing the Venezuela that lies above its subsoil wealth. Ewell has a reputation for skillfully weaving accounts of daily life and the human element into Latin American history, and this book stands out in elaborating the ways the United States has influenced social and cultural tendencies in Venezuela over the last two centuries. Ewell's account concerns baseball, movies, and consumerism as much as high diplomacy. Teachers might find the book a corrective for students prone to assume that U.S. representatives abroad were lesser embodiments of Jefferson and Franklin or that democracy has always been the main goal of U.S. foreign policy. Though somewhat lacking in its account of "petroleum's empire," this book excels in describing how cultural stereotypes and misunderstandings have shaped the relationship between two countries.

Daniel Hellinger

Webster University

Copyright Journal of Interamerican Studies Spring 1998
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