Timeline (Perez Jimenez's Venezuela)

History of Venezuela

Pre-Perez Jimenez
Human habitation of Venezuela could have commenced at least 15,000 years ago from which period leaf-shaped tools, together with chopping and plano-convex scraping implements, have been found exposed on the high riverine terraces of the Rio Pedregal in western Venezuela. Late Pleistocene hunting artifacts, including spear tips, have been found at a similar series of sites in northwestern Venezuela known as "El Jobo"; according to radiocarbon dating, these date from 13,000 to 7,000 BC.

Venezuela was first colonized by Spain in 1522 in what is now Cumaná. These portions of eastern Venezuela were incorporated into New Andalusia. Administered by the Audienciaof Santo Domingo since the early 16th century, most of Venezuela became part of theViceroyalty of New Granada in the early 18th century, and was then reorganized as an autonomous Captaincy General starting in 1776.

In the 16th century, during the Spanish colonization, indigenous peoples such as many of the Mariches, themselves descendants of the Caribs rejected paganism and embraced Roman Catholicism. Some Spaniards treated the natives harshly. Indian caciques(leaders) such as Guaicaipuro and Tamanaco attempted to resist Spanish incursions, but were ultimately defeated; Tamanaco was put to death by order of Caracas' founder Diego de Losada.

After a series of unsuccessful uprisings, Venezuela—under the leadership of Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan marshal who had fought in the American Revolution and the French Revolution—declared independence on 5 July 1811. This began the Venezuelan War of Independence. However, a devastating earthquake that struck Caracas in 1812, together with the rebellion of the Venezuelan llaneros, helped bring down the first Venezuelan republic. A second Venezuelan republic, proclaimed on 7 August 1813, lasted several months before being crushed as well.

Sovereignty was only attained after Simón Bolívar, aided by José Antonio Páez and Antonio José de Sucre, won the Battle of Carabobo on 24 June 1821.José Prudencio Padilla and Rafael Urdaneta's victory in the Battle of Lake Maracaibo on 24 July 1823, helped seal Venezuelan independence. New Granada's congress gave Bolívar control of the Granadian army; leading it, he liberated several countries and foundedGran Colombia.

Sucre, who won many battles for Bolívar, went on to liberate Ecuador and later become the second president of Bolivia. Venezuela remained part of Gran Colombia until 1830, when a rebellion led by Páez allowed the proclamation of a newly independent Venezuela; Páez became the first president of the new republic. Two decades of warfare had cost the lives of between a quarter and a third of the Venezuelan population, which in 1830 numbered no more than 800,000.

Much of Venezuela's nineteenth century history was characterized by political turmoil and dictatorial rule. During the first half of the 20th century, caudillos (military strongmen) continued to dominate, though they generally allowed for mild social reforms and promoted economic growth. Following the death of Juan Vicente Gómez in 1935 and the demise of caudillismo (authoritarian rule), pro-democracy movements eventually forced the military to withdraw from direct involvement in national politics in 1958. Since that year, Venezuela has had a series of democratically elected governments.

The discovery of massive oil deposits during World War I prompted an economic boom that lasted into the 1980s; by 1935, Venezuela's per capita gross domestic product was Latin America's highest. After World War II the globalization and heavy immigration from Southern Europe (mainly from Spain, Italy, Portugal) and poorer Latin American countries markedly diversified Venezuelan society.

Pérez Jiménez dictatorship
Delgado had formed a triumvirate with Pérez Jiménez and Luis Felipe Llovera Páez. With his death the remaining triumvirs chose a civilian president, Luis Germán Suárez Flamerich, who was dismissed by the military in 1952, and the ambitious Pérez Jiménez became dictator with the consent of Llovera Páez, who was an obscene non-entity. The former majors, who had risen to colonels in the democracy, were now generals. Pérez Jiménez himself was physically not very impressive. He was short, balding, and tubby, and read speeches monotonously, although surely on the personal level he must have had some magnetism. He was a megalomaniac of much character that when a Time magazine interviewer asked him what Rome’s greatest legacy was, he said, : “Its ruins”, apparently wanting to give the impression that while the ruins of Rome were all that remained of its greatness, his own will surpass them with his grand-scale building projects. In some ways, this is understandable. Pérez Jiménez, unlike most Venezuelans at the time, received a thorough education from the military academies he had attended and graduated from with highest honors. By the time he came to power, Pérez Jiménez had developed a flair for fascist opulence and boasting about his projects in making Venezuela the major power of South America. The greatest of Venezuelan writers at the time (and for a long time after that) was Arturo Uslar Pietri and he became famous on television with analytical biographies of great historical figures. Uslar Pietri had a felicitous phrase: “Sow the oil”, which became a national slogan meaning that the state’s oil income should be productively invested. But in Venezuela “sowing the oil” implied “sowers” and the country did not have too many of these. In fact, it was the undeclared understanding that “sowing the oil” really meant “give Venezuelans employment by creating government jobs”.

The other reason for Pérez Jiménez’s "ruins revelation" was that what he intended to do as president, apart from becoming rich, which he did, like Gomez, with his own military and civilian cronies, was to build and build and build, and here too he was undeniably successful. It is only fair to point out here that while Gomez did become immensely rich, he never had in his life a foreign bank account (as ignorant as he was, not to mention the time in which he was living), and even though Pérez Jiménez in relative terms was not as rich as Gomez, all the dollars he accumulated went offshore. Pérez Jiménez also had an efficient secret police, but the stories about tortures and killings were, like those about Gomez, mainly inventions by the frustrated adecos, although whoever in Venezuela tried to be active clandestinely was sure to be either imprisoned or shot if he resisted. Also like Gomez, Pérez Jiménez had a theoretician, Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, who happened to be the son of Gomez’s own historian and had his father’s persuasions. Like his father, this Vallenilla was also a racist. It was he who authored the immigration policy of the regime. By the time Pérez Jiménez had all the power in his hands, which despite his uninspiring qualities he did manage to do, Venezuela had around five million inhabitants. Depending on which measures you apply, the country can be said to have been under-populated. If you consider, for instance, that population density is not necessarily good, then it could be argued that Venezuela was not under-populated but under-educated. The idea that Vallenilla Lanz and Pérez Jiménez had was to open the doors of the country to as many Europeans as wanted to come, with which they, and many non-pardo Venezuelans, believed that two flies would be killed with one swat: the country’s population would grow, but not with more ignorant pardos: with Europeans who brought with them, however lowly they might have been in their own countries, a higher average education than Venezuelans had.

Up to a point, this kind of social engineering might have been defensible, but the immigrants, who came from Spain, Portugal, and Italy on the rationale that they would adapt better to Venezuela and Venezuelans would adapt better to them (than, say, to Swedes), did not emigrate from their countries to give Venezuelans lessons in civics. They came for a better income and probably the majority of the some two million who did come started returning as soon as they had made enough to live better in their own lands. It is possible that the proportion of the white population in Venezuela might have increased slightly. Many of the emigrants did make a lot of money and chose Venezuela as their country, but as to industrializing or increasing agricultural production, their effect was not and is not noticeable; and this for the simple reason that the Venezuelan government considered that diversified industrial development was its responsibility and private citizens of any nationality—in this sense, it can be said that Venezuela is perhaps the most un-discriminatory country in the world—were given ample rights in the areas of commerce, of services, and of other ancillary activities. Despite this insidious racism, it was under Pérez Jiménez that the mythification of the Amerindian caciques, who supposedly had resisted the conquistadors everywhere in Venezuela, was given a big boost, especially when an exchange house founded by an Italian immigrant brought out a series of souvenir gold coins in which each cacique was depicted with facial traits that were invented out of whole cloth by Pérez Jiménez’s laureate painter, Pedro Francisco Vallenilla. Despite his rigorous Catholic upbringing, Pérez Jiménez also encouraged the underlying animism of Venezuelans when he erected in the middle of Caracas’ first speedway a statue of Maria Lionza, a sort of Amerindian goddess who sits atop a tapir and is much worshipped in a jungle sanctuary in Yaracuy in central Venezuela.

Pérez Jiménez, confident that he had done good work as dictator, scheduled elections for 1952 with his official party against COPEI and URD, which had only managed puny showings against AD in the presidential election of 1947. When the time came to vote, Venezuela’s pardos wanted their adecos back and the exiled leadership of the party let it be known that it wanted URD to win. As the results started coming in showing that AD was still the political top dog in Venezuela, Pérez Jiménez shut down the polls, and the country, and after a few days, during which he probably was making sure that he counted with the loyalty of his generals, he published results that were so lopsidedly in his favor as to seem ludicrous. Pérez Jiménez thus inaugurated himself for another five years as president, and just as he had intended from the beginning. he went on spending on infrastructure and way beyond this to gigantic industrial, agricultural, and power-generating projects. In foreign affairs, Venezuela was a faithful ally of the American government, although servile would probably be more to the point. When the government of the socialist Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala was implementing real social reforms in a country that badly needed them, Venezuela was host to a conference of the OAS (Organization of American States) in which Guatemala was ostracized. Shortly afterwards the CIA sponsored a coup in which Arbenz was overthrown. Pérez Jiménez also changed entirely the face of Caracas with a building program such as the city had not seen since Guzman Blanco, and compared to what Pérez Jiménez built, Guzman’s buildings, one of which Pérez Jiménez had cut at the nose, were dwarfs.Caraqueños, incidentally, have never complained about the legacy of Perez Jimenez.

The next presidential election fell due by the end of 1957. Pérez Jiménez thought he had learned from the 1952 political debacle and instead of an election he decreed a plebiscite on his government. He probably knew he wasn’t going to win this one either, so the results were rigged. The people who queued to vote were civil servants and indirect employees of the government and its subordinate companies and institutions, who were instructed to show some proof that they had voted for the regime, usually by presenting the “no” card, although this was a silly ploy. All the government needed was a turnout, and that is what it got. Economically, Venezuela was not bad, they even didn't have external debt, but the signs of prosperity were mostly in the cities, and the countryside, where half of Venezuelans still lived, had social indexes way below what would have been expected from such a fiscally rich country.

Pérez Jiménez’s illegitimacy was so patent that some officers conspired to overthrow him. There was also some cautious civilian clandestine agitation. On the last day of 1957, a military uprising coordinated by officers of air and tank forces struck, but the coordination was not that good. The air force rebels flew over Caracas and dropped randomly some bombs while a commander started out from Maracay with a column of tanks. Somehow the signals got crossed, the tanks turned back, and the pilots fled the country. These officers probably thought that Pérez Jiménez would turn tail in the face of this demonstration, but the bulk of the armed forces remained loyal. However, this show of defiance did set off a sequence of events which eventually made Pérez Jiménez fear for his political survival. This make that Perez Jimenez created a sub-division of the Seguridad Nacional which was in charge of eliminating people who want to make a coup. The underground civilian opponents started goading the people in Caracas, where they needed little goading and were out in the streets whenever and wherever they could. The repressive secret police rounded up all civilian suspects. No coup happened in the 1950's.

During the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s, a number of liberal organisations in Venezuela declared their support for Fidel Castro's guerrilla operations against Batista. The Venezuelan government arrested this liberals and declared "The USSR want to stablish a puppet goverment in Cuba and then all Latin America".

In 1960, Caracas had a World Expo in which the theme was flora and fauna of Venezuela.

''' He was also unrealistic in reviving Venezuela’s claim on British Guiana to the Essequibo river and he had all maps of Venezuela show this large territory as part of the country albeit as disputed. In 1961 The Helicoide, the biggest Mall in Latin America was opened in Caracas. The British allowed free elections in their dependency in 1961, but when a Marxist, Cheddi Jagan, won them, it annulled the results and after three years permitted new ones which were won by a man, Forbes Burnham, who turned out to be at least as leftist as Jagan, and a monumental bungler to boot. The point is that when British Guiana became independent Guyana in 1966, the Venezuelan claim became an undecipherable legal tangle. That the Venezuelan claim was bogus populism had its most perplexing demonstration when the Guyanese allowed Californian cult leader Jim Jones, to establish a religious community right next to the Venezuelan border in 1977. The Venezuelan minister of foreign affairs at the time, only found about the Guyanese sleight-of-hand when California representative Leo Ryan went to Jonestown to investigate complaints from constituents about missing relatives. When the congressman got there in November 1978, the suicidal followers of Jones, many of them blacks, first shot him dead and then 917 of them, including 276 children, committed suicide with cyanide-laced Kool Aid. Jones too killed himself.'''

'''In other things, Betancourt demonstrated a realistic approach. He respected the virtual autonomy of the armed forces and he did all he could to keep on the good side of Washington. Pérez Jiménez had left in place the basic plans and projects for the further modernization and for the heavy industrialization of Venezuela. Guyana had large iron deposits. The infrastructure for exploiting them was laid as well as the complementary huge steelworks. Communications had been a priority and Venezuela was endowed with a network of roads and bridges that covered the territory where over 90% of the population lived. Half or more of these were improved surface and all they lacked was the asphalt paving. This system linked with the many blacktops that the oil companies had built in eastern and western Venezuela. These had been traced for exploration and exploitation, but they also served for the use of the general population and were now linked to the national highway system. Pérez Jiménez had built motorways from Caracas to Valencia and from Caracas to the port at La Guaira. By 1955, you could drive from one end to the other of Venezuela in a matter of days where before it would have taken weeks, months if the rainy season hampered travel. In addition, Pérez Jiménez had begun the construction of a coherent railway system, although he had not had time to go further than the railroad from Puerto Cabello to Barquisimeto. Pérez Jiménez had also created government subsidiaries, called “institutos autónomos” (autonomous institutes)—the “autonomous” was supposed to mean non-political, but its real function was to allow them to negotiate foreign loans—that were to build waterworks and electric power plants in all important urban centers. To this end he had started the construction the huge Caroni river dam which in time was to provide the entire country with a reliable electric grid.'''

In 1968 Venezuela have the 1968 Olympic Games, and the Caracas metro which was started at 1962 was finished.

'''In February 1992 Hugo Chávez, an army paratrooper, staged a coup d'état attempt seeking to overthrow the government of Perez Jimenez. Chávez failed and was placed in jail were he was executed. In November 1992, another unsuccessful coup attempt occurred, organized by groups loyal to Chávez remaining in the armed forces.'''