Domingo Alberto Rangel attempts in this volume to combine a psychohistory of President Juan Vicente Gómez with an account of the origin of Venezuela’s petroleum-based international dependency. The study, which concentrates on Gómez’ career from 1899 to his death in 1935, is uneven, perhaps suggesting the difficulty of combining these two modes of analysis.
Gómez is portrayed as a shrewd and suspicious but successful rancher who was reared on the Andean values of hard work and material accumulation, but a deeper analysis of his complex personality and motivation is missing. Rangel does, however, avoid the historical Manichaeism (as he calls it) of previous historical writing about Gómez. He does not praise Gómez as a “democratic Caesar” as did Laureano Vallenilla Lanz nor does he condemn him as a stupid tyrant as have many subsequent historians. Rather, Gómez appears as a fairly capable person who succumbed (perhaps inevitably?) to the manipulation and bribery of the emissaries of the international oil companies. Rangel’s Gómez did not fail Venezeula because he was evil or unintelligent, but because he simplistically defined power, wealth, and personal worth.
If the psychohistory is superficial, so too is the account of Venezuela’s entry into the international oil empires. Rangel adds little here to the dependency analysis he made in his three volume Capital y desarrollo, although some of his personality sketches of the Shell and Standard Oil representatives are intriguing.
Designed for the Venezuelan popular market, the book relies heavily on oral sources and introduces much dialogue which Rangel claims as the “essence” of the speaker’s thoughts, if not the exact words. The lack of citation of sources has prompted a heated debate among Venezuelan scholars as to the reliability of Rangel’s interpretations; one of the most controversial points is the assertion that Gómez’ brother, Juancho, was both a homosexual and a valiant soldier. Eduardo Michelena (El Nacional, 6 July 1975, p. 4) found both allegations to be beyond belief.
In sum, Gómez el amo del poder, although flawed, provides fascinating reading, represents a new turn in Venezuelan historiography, and may serve as a starting point for a more careful study of Juan Vicente Gómez and his dealings with the oil companies.
