These four books reveal the continuing interest of Venezuelan scholars in the independence period of their country’s history, as well as the diverse forms taken by that interest. La mentalidad venezolana de la emancipación (1810-1812) was originally prepared as a doctoral thesis at the Colegio de México, under the direction of José Gaos. Concentrating on periodicals and other publications of the First Republic, Pino Iturrieta examines the ideas associated with the introduction of “modernity” by Venezuela’s mantuano elite. Although the book is valuable for its discussion of the contents of the Gazeta de Caracas and other periodicals, a serious weakness is the author’s failure to refine and clarify his conception of modernity, which he seems to equate with all ideas emanating from the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, which ran counter to an equally vague traditionalism. He comes to the unsurprising conclusion that while a new mentality was evident in Venezuela by 1810-1812, it was marked as much by adherence to traditional beliefs as by the espousal of modernity.
The prolific Germán Carrera Damas, of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, was also trained at the Colegio de México. His Boves: Aspectos socioeconómicos de la guerra de independencia is the third edition of a work published in 1964 under a slightly different title and conceived as part of a larger study on Boves in Venezuelan historiography. The text remains unchanged, but this volume contains a prologue prepared for the second edition. With meticulous documentation, Carrera Damas shows that the seemingly ruthless and rapacious financial practices, for which royalist chief José Tomás Boves has so long been condemned, were employed also by other Spanish leaders and by the patriots as well, and these were primarily a result of the war and the economic devastation of Venezuela. While exonerating Boves of charges of unparalleled criminality, Carrera Damas disagrees with those who would convert him into a champion of social change and agrarian reform, for he also shows that such conclusions rest on the feeblest of factual bases. In this connection Carrera Damas advances the hypothesis that what led llaneros to follow Boves was not the promise of land but well-justified fears that their traditional right to unbranded cattle and free access to the ranges would be destroyed by the triumph of the republican cause.
Even more iconoclastic is Carrera Damas’s Culto a Bolívar, first published in 1969, though he disclaims such an intention. The author’s purpose is to examine Venezuela’s “second religion,” that is, to trace the development of the various roles assigned to the Liberator by Venezuelan society. At the heart of the book is an analysis of the attitudes of Venezuelans toward their country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the prevailing feelings were of dissatisfaction and discouragement at the state of the nation, the possibility of improvement was also seen. Carrera Damas attempts to show, though with only middling success, that it was in the context of the search for solutions to Venezuela’s plight that the cult of Bolívar took root, for the possibility of a glorious future was strengthened by the memory of the glorious independence era with which Bolívar had been intimately linked; indeed, in the minds of some, it was his absence that had produced the evils of which everyone complained. Using a variety of printed sources, Carrera Damas goes on to describe how Bolívar became the touchstone of all aspects of Venezuelan thought and discusses the manipulation of his cult by political groups, beginning with the repatriation of his remains in 1842.
J. L. Salcedo-Bastardo, a veteran student of the Liberator, agrees that Bolívar has been exploited for political reasons, but otherwise his Bolívar: Un continente y un destino, which does not list El culto a Bolívar in its bibliography, might serve as an illustration of Carrera Damas’s text. Winner of an OAS contest in honor of the 150th anniversary of Bolívar’s campaigns, Salcedo-Bastardo’s book is devoted mainly to a depiction of the Liberator as a genuinely revolutionary figure whose aims were continental in scope and relevance, and who was firmly committed to political democracy, economic reform, and equality, as well as to the unity of the Spanish-speaking nations. According to the author, Bolívar’s enlightened programs were frustrated by caudillos and oligarchic elites, who used localism to preserve their own privileges. The result for Venezuela (and the other Spanish-American nations) was a century of counterrevolution characterized by autocracy and militarism, moral corruption, and oppression of the masses, while the region was balkanized into squabbling republics that were an easy prey to imperialism. Because of the way in which Salcedo-Bastardo has organized his book—the exposition of Bolívar’s aspirations is followed by the account of their “negation”—he has spared himself the task of providing a detailed consideration of the subject, which, however, might have lent greater authority to his assertions.
