Among Venezuela’s elder statesmen, Dr. Simón Planas-Suárez ranks high. His life and career span more than eighty years during which he served his country with distinction in numerous diplomatic posts and earned a reputation as a scholar and expert in international law. Unfortunately, his Disertaciones y escritos does not do justice to his wisdom and experience. It consists mainly of speeches which he delivered upon his initiation into learned bodies. These were pleasant occasions, when the speaker either praised the work of his fellow academicians or expressed his gratitude at being included in their number. The closest that this collection comes to controversy is an address to the Venezuelan Academy of Language in which Dr. Planas-Suárez complained that English was corrupting the Spanish language in the New World. Hence, he raised the issue of a kind of Yankee linguistic imperialism.
The real significance of this book is Dr. Planas-Suárez himself, and he is revealed as a warm-hearted and sensitive man, who consistently demonstrates strong patriotism and deep religious conviction.
The scholarship and versatility of Dr. Planas-Suárez is more apparent in his Cuestiones internacionales y políticas, although it, too, is a collection of previously published works. Like a Venezuelan Churchill, the writings of Dr. Planas-Suárez are history themselves, for he begins with an essay published in 1900 defining arbitration, and concludes with an article reprinted from El Universal of Caracas of April 8, 1961, in which he deplores the Castro regime of Cuba. Over the years he contributed frequently to “letters to the editor” wherein he discussed various points of international law, including pacific settlement of disputes (during The Hague Conference of 1907), neutral rights (during World War I), diplomatic asylum (the Haya de la Torre case), and disarmament (with reference to the 1960 presidential election in the United States).
In his scholarly writings Dr. Planas-Suárez would have to be classified as a realist. He seems to admire the idea of the rule of law, but he is more devoted to the idea of national sovereignty. He places sovereignty of the nation before all interests, to the point where he ridicules the concept of diplomatic asylum and supports the right of a nation at war to take what measures it deems necessary to defeat its enemy. On the other hand, he is still the man of compassion, as he shows in a eulogy of Franklin Roosevelt in 1946 and in a plea in the same year for a just peace for the Italian people.
Dr. Planas-Suárez is an interesting statesman-scholar, who has seen a lot and has commented upon it in a most articulate manner.
