Venezuela in Focus: A Guide to the People Politics and Culture - Brossura

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Brossura

ISBN 10: 0906156920 ISBN 13: 9780906156926

Casa editrice: Latin Amer Bureau, 1994

Riassunto

Venezuela has been blessed and cursed by oil. Once Latin America's wealthiest country, its petrodollars paid for political stability, dramatic modernisation and rampant corruption. But the boom years are now long gone and Venezuelans face poverty and growing social conflict. Despite its political woes, South America's cultural melting pot is a vibrant centre for music, soap operas and sport, relecting its rich mix of people and influences.

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Venezuela in Focus

A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture

By James Ferguson

Practical Action Publishing

Copyright © 1994 Royal Tropical Institute/Novib and James Ferguson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-906156-92-6

Contents

Introduction, 5, 
1 Land and People – In Search of El Dorado, 7, 
2 Political System – Parties. Patronage and Power, 19, 
3 Economy – Boom and Bust, 32, 
4 Society – Plenty and Poverty, 46, 
5 Culture and Identity – Modern and Traditional, 60, 
Conclusion, 69, 
Further Reading and Addresses, 70, 
Facts and Figures/Reference Map, 71, 

CHAPTER 1

LAND AND PEOPLE

In Search of El Dorado

Venezuela has always been the prototype of El Dorado. The first Spanish conquistadores dreamed of fantastic treasure hidden in its jungles. Later, oil prospectors and companies rushed to the country in search of 'black gold'. Even today, gold miners from Brazil scour the Amazon forests for the find which may make their fortune.

Venezuela enjoys its self-image of grandeur and natural wealth. Each evening before the television news, Venezuelans are treated to a spectacular aerial panorama of their country's landscapes. To the strains of the national anthem, the film pans across idyllic Caribbean beaches, snow-capped mountains, the huge Orinoco river and the futuristic highrise skyline of the capital, Caracas.

Changing Landscapes

Venezuela's landscape is as varied as it is vast. The Andes reach 5,000 metres near the city of Mérida and their peaks are often covered in snow. The 300,000 sq km of the llanos or plains, in contrast, are flat, treeless and ideal for cattle ranching. To the East, the expanse of Guayana and the Amazonian territory is dominated by the Orinoco and includes jungle, plains and mountains. Venezuela is also a Caribbean country, with 72 offshore islands, hundreds of kilometres of beaches and growing tourism.

Venezuela's geography boasts many superlatives: it has the world's highest waterfall, Angel Falls, South America's largest lake, Lake Maracaibo, and the longest coastline in the Caribbean. Perhaps most importantly, Venezuela has one of the world's largest deposits of oil, with proven reserves of nearly 63 billion barrels.

The country's varied geography and resources have been key factors in its economic development. In Venezuela's history different regions have played different roles and have risen and fallen in prominence. Most recently, the transition from an agricultural economy to one based on oil and heavy industry has brought about significant changes in how Venezuelans view their land and its resources.

The Coast

Venezuela's first colonial settlements were on the islands of Cubagua and Margarita and then on the coast itself. The impenetrability of much of the country led the early colonists to stay close to the sea, and much of their trade was with the Caribbean island colonies of Cuba and Hispaniola. The huge Orinoco delta was seen as a possible entry into what explorers believed was the fabulous realm of El Dorado, but its heat, humidity and swamps discouraged any permanent settlement.

Most Venezuelans still live in the coastal region and hinterland, where the cities of Maracay, Valencia, Barquisimeto and Maracaibo are centres for agriculture or the oil industry. The first important export commodity, cacao, was grown in the coastal districts and valleys around Caracas. As cacao gave way to coffee in the 19th century as the country's main export, this region's economic importance lessened.

But two modern economic phenomena have revived the coastal region's fortunes. The first is oil, initially discovered in large quantities in Lake Maracaibo, which has transformed the north-western state of Zulia from a sweltering backwater into the country's economic powerhouse. The second is tourism which is gradually changing the face of the 1,500 km coastline. Already seaside towns and resorts like Puerto La Cruz, Choroní and Higuerote have lines of high-rise hotels and beachside bars, while Margarita island attracts charter flights and package tours from Europe and North America.

The Andes

The main spur of the Venezuelan Andes drops into the south-western corner of the country and turns north, cutting off the flat area around Lake Maracaibo to the west and finally levelling off into the Caribbean. Another range runs parallel to the coast, providing the spectacular mountain backcloth to Caracas.

Less dramatic than the Andes of Peru or Bolivia, Venezuela's part of the range is nonetheless impressive, with its mixture of windswept highlands, green valleys and glaciers. This part of the country had its economic heyday in the 1830s when coffee enjoyed an export boom through European traders. The valleys around Mérida and San Cristóbal became coffee plantations, creating enormous wealth for local landowners. Even before then, however, the Andean region had been the most agriculturally developed, with evidence of sophisticated cultivation techniques used by pre-Columbian indigenous communities.

Today, the region is still agriculturally productive, but economically insignificant compared to other oil-rich parts of the country. The climate and scenery attract many visitors, and Mérida is an important university and tourist town, but the days of Andean supremacy are long gone.

The llanos

The vast expanse of plains known as the llanos accounts for about one third of Venezuelan territory but contains probably less than 10 per cent of its human population. People are outnumbered by cattle, of which there are approximately five million. With the exception of occasional hillocks (mesas) and clumps of palm trees, the region is relentlessly flat. Meandering rivers are the habitat for an extraordinary range of wildlife, including the ferocious piranha fish . Each year from May to November torrential rains flood the plains, forcing the cowboys to drive the cattle up onto the mesas. Eventually the herds are driven to the fertile valleys near Valencia and Maracay to be fattened for slaughter.

There are few towns in the llanos and roads are poor. In the 19th century the state of Guárica was briefly one of the richest and most populated regions of Venezuela, attracting migrants and capital with its huge ranches. But Venezuela's livestock industry could not compete with the modernised, refrigerated export businesses of Argentina and Uruguay and the llanos reverted to their state of wilderness. Until recently the region was the most undeveloped and neglected in Venezuela. The government is now investing in cotton and rice production in parts of the llanos, while the flat plains continue as home to millions of cattle.

Guayana

The huge area known as Guayana covers 45 per cent of Venezuela and contains some of its richest resources and most beautiful scenery. The region has always fascinated explorers and adventurers and was for a long time reputed to contain the legendary kingdom of El Dorado. In the late 19th century there was a shortlived gold rush at El Callao, and since then miners have scoured rocks and rivers in search of a quick fortune. In September 1993 a Canadian mining company announced that it had identified reserves of gold totalling 150 tonnes in Bolívar State.

Nowadays most of Guayana's wealth lies in its massive petrochemical, steel and aluminium plants which are powered by hydroelectricity from the Caroní river. Since the 1960s the new town of Ciudad Guayana has grown from a small provincial outpost to a burgeoning city of more than 600,000 people.

The unique scenery of the Guayana region has encouraged a small but growing tourist industry in this otherwise remote area. The chief attraction is the extraordinary Angel Falls, the 979 metre high waterfall named after the us pilot, Jimmy Angel, who crash-landed his light aircraft there in 1937. The 'Gran Sabana', a vast valley dotted with some 100 flat-topped mountains (tepuis) is reputed to have inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and more recently featured in the spectacular special effects of Jurassic Park. An exotic landscape of rivers, rapids, lagoons and forest appeals to a growing number of environmentally-conscious tourists who stay at the jungle resort of Canaima.

Angel Falls

The world's highest waterfall flows breathtakingly over the rim of the Auyantepui ('devil mountain'), one of the Gran Sabana's flat-topped mountains. Fifteen times higher than Niagara, the falls are named after a us pilot and adventurer, Jimmy Angel, who came across them in 1937. Angel had already taken part in a gold-panning expedition in the area, landing his aircraft on top of a tepui accompanied by a mysterious prospector whom he had met In a Panama City bar. Together they had returned with forty pounds of gold. Determined to find his own El Dorado again, Angel flew back to the Gran Sabana and this time crash-landed on top of Auyantepui.

The second trip produced no gold, but Angel chanced upon the enormous waterfall which had hitherto remained unknown in modern Venezuela. After a trek of eleven days, he returned with stories of his extraordinary discovery. It was not until 1949 that an overland expedition verified Angel's claim. His aircraft now stands outside the small local airport at Ciudad Bolívar, having been dug out of the muddy mountain-top in 1970. Angel died in a plane crash in Panama in 1956, poor, unknown and over· fond of whisky.

The Melting Pot

Venezuela prides itself on being the melting pot of South America. Its 20 million people include indigenous Indians, Europeans, Africans and migrants from other Latin American and Caribbean countries. Racism, it is claimed, is unknown in a café con leche (coffee with milk) culture. As Arturo Uslar Pietri, the country's most venerated intellectual, has written, 'In Venezuela there are neither whites nor blacks, neither mestizos nor Indians. There are only Venezuelans.'

The mixture of Americans, Africans and Europeans has given Venezuela a rich variety of social and cultural forms. The country contains some of South America's remotest indigenous communities which until recently have avoided contact with modern civilisation. It is also home to a large population of immigrants from Europe who arrived in the 1950s and settled in Caracas and other cities. Slavery has also left its mark on Venezuela, with a distinctive Afro-Venezuelan culture on the Caribbean coast.

Together, and with the addition of recent immigrants from Colombia and Guyana, these cultures have formed a mixed population very different from the original hierarchical colonial society. Under Spanish rule the white elite occupied the top of the social pyramid, the mixed-race pardos the middle, and blacks and Indians the lowest positions. Today, 69 per cent of Venezuelans define themselves as mixed-race, 20 per cent as white, 9 per cent as black and 2 per cent as Indian.

But despite its claims to racial democracy, Venezuela is still a highly unequal society, in which wealth and power tend to lie in the hands of a white elite. In the expensive hotels and clubs of Caracas there are few black faces other than those of the staff. At the same time, the capital's shanty towns and the poor rural villages contain a large proportion of darker-skinned Venezuelans.

The First Venezuelans

On a dusty, litter-strewn roadside in the modern jungle city of Ciudad Guayana a group of Indian women and children stand listlessly waiting for the traffic lights to turn red. The impatient motorists mostly ignore their outstretched hands at the car windows, unwilling to let the sweltering heat outside ruin their air-conditioned comfort.

The indigenous people of Venezuela are among the country's poorest and most marginalised communities. Some are forced to come and beg in the towns and cities between the Orinoco river and the Brazilian border or have become dependent on the handouts of missionaries. Others, remaining in their traditional Amazonian lands, are vulnerable to attacks from garimpeiros, miners and gold prospectors who often come from Brazil.

The Yanomami, who number about 14,000, face the threat of violence and disease as well as the poisoning of rivers and streams by miners' mercury. They complain that the government has defined their ancestral lands as 'areas under special administrative rule' or national parks in order to stop them from using their natural resources.

In July 1993, at least 13 Yanomami, including six children were murdered by garimpeiros in the remote border region. The miners, it is thought, had come to take revenge on the community after two of their fellow workers had been killed in a dispute with some Yanomami, five of whom were killed on that occasion.

But not all Venezuela's Indians are victims. Numbered between 200,000 and 315,000, a large proportion live in and around the Sinamaica lagoon, 45 kilometres north of Maracaibo and close to the Colombian border. Here, the largest indigenous group, the Guajiras, have preserved their language and cultural traditions while prospering from cattle raising and handicrafts for tourists. During the 1960s and 1970s they were also reputed to have done well from exporting Colombian marijuana to the US.

Conquest

Today, according to the National Indian Council of Venezuela (CONIVE), there are 27 linguistically and culturally distinct indigenous groups in the country. History does not record how many people were living in the area when Christopher Columbus first reached the gulf of Paria in August 1498, but estimates have suggested 350,000, divided into many communities. A second Spanish expedition the following year, led by Alonso de Ojeda, made its way into Lake Maracaibo where it came across groups of Indian huts built upon stilts in the shallows. Perhaps sarcastically, the explorers likened the lakeside villages to the canals of Venice, and named the territory Venezuela or 'little Venice'.

The indigenous people whom Columbus and his followers first encountered on the Caribbean coast were just part of a much bigger population which covered much of present-day Venezuela. There were nomadic groups, living from fishing and hunting, around the coast, in the central plains and in the vast forests. The most developed agriculture and trading, however, were to be found in the Andes, although these communities were small and unsophisticated in comparison to the Incas or Aztecs.

But while the great civilisations of Peru and Mexico gave way easily to the conquistadores, Venezuela's indigenous people resisted long and hard. The Spanish colonists' first attempts to establish towns and trading routes met with fierce opposition.

The cruelty of the colonists in enslaving Indians to dive for pearls worsened hostilities. In the end, it was disease, principally smallpox, which defeated the indigenous peoples; in 1580 an epidemic in the Caracas valley killed an estimated two-thirds of the local Indian population.

Missionaries were also instrumental in pacifying indigenous communities, and nomadic peoples were often forced into supervised settlements. Others were even less fortunate and were subjected to the encomienda system, a form of forced labour. As Venezuela's colonial system developed, its first inhabitants were pushed aside, destroyed or forced to survive in the country's most inaccessible regions.

The Fight for Land

The struggle for land and legal land titles is the main issue now affecting Venezuela's Indian population. CONIVE claims that 83 per cent of indigenous communities lack title deeds to their own lands, making them vulnerable to harassment from companies, wildcat miners and ranchers. Communities around Lake Maracaibo have gradually seen their territories taken over by oil companies, while the Cuiva people have faced violence from cattle barons in the Apure region.

Disease also continues to take its toll. Indian communities suffer disproportionately from dysentery, tuberculosis, malaria and, more recently, cholera. Experts blame a lack of primary healthcare as well as poverty and abandonment of traditional medicine. Despite the Venezuelan constitution's commitment to bilingual education, indigenous groups receive little special assistance and their culture is generally ignored or derided by the majority of Venezuelans. The first census of Venezuela's indigenous population in 1992 found that 40 per cent of Indian workers earned less than a third of the statutory minimum wage and that 65 per cent of communities had no access to schools.

Despite five centuries of marginalisation, Venezuela's Indians are now reviving their tradition of resistance and have made some important advances. During the 1970s indigenous groups became more active politically, leading in 1989 to the first national indigenous congress and the founding of CONIVE, made up of twenty indigenous organisations from around the country.

Because of growing pressure from CONIVE and international agencies, the Venezuelan government announced in 1991 that it would set aside 83,000 sq km as permanent territory for the Yanomami. Even so, doubts remain as to whether the authorities are willing or able to protect this territory from outside interests.

European Migrants

In early 1992 the Venezuelan government launched an immigration programme, aimed at encouraging 50,000 east Europeans to the country over a five-year period. The successful applicants, said the minister of planning, should have qualifications and skills of interest to private Venezuelan companies. In return, the government would provide airline tickets and a cash relocation package.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Venezuela in Focus by James Ferguson. Copyright © 1994 Royal Tropical Institute/Novib and James Ferguson. Excerpted by permission of Practical Action Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Latin Amer Bureau
• Data di pubblicazione: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0906156920
• ISBN 13: 9780906156926
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 76
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile