The leftist orientation of the young Rómulo Betancourt and his membership in the Communist party of Costa Rica are widely known, but the specifics of his differences with orthodox communism during these early years were never thoroughly dealt with until the publication of this work. The authors divide Betancourt’s seven-year exile following the student disturbances of 1928 into two periods. Initially Betancourt established close contact with the caudillo enemies of dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. These wealthy insurgents plotted armed invasions of Venezuela and stood behind vague promises of democracy in the style of nineteenth-century liberalism. Betancourt and his youthful followers, anxious to return to their homeland as soon as possible, embraced this Garibaldi-type approach without giving consideration to the need for socioeconomic change or mass participation in the anti-Gomecista movement.
The founding of the Agrupación Revolucionaria de Izquierda (ARDI) in Barranquilla, Colombia, in March 1931 marked the beginning of Betancourt’s radicalized second stage. Betancourt now accepted Marxism, although he warned against the drafting of a revolutionary program in the immediate future. His Plan de Barranquilla was severely criticized by Venezuelan followers of the Comintern for its timid reformism. From Betancourt’s correspondence, which the authors extensively cite, the reader can grasp three reasons for his preference for the type of “minimum” program embodied in the Plan, as opposed to a “maximum” program. The convocation of a constituent assembly, the confiscation of Gómez’s properties, and other moderate reforms enumerated in the Plan were in tune with the mentality of the general populace. Furthermore, far-reaching demands would have created unnecessary alarm in the ruling class and would have resulted in fierce repression against any movement advocating them. In addition to these two pragmatic arguments, Betancourt felt that the elaboration of a maximum program should await the return of the political exiles to Venezuela since only then would they really be able to grasp the particularities of the Venezuelan reality. The alternative was to impose a foreign model on Venezuela as the followers of the Comintern had done.
Betancourt’s plea for a Venezuelan road to socialism echoed a similar call made by Haya de la Torre, maximum leader of Peru’s APRA. Venezuelan journalist and historian Jesús Sanoja Hernández, in the prolog to this volume, makes reference to Betancourt’s private insistence that the Mexican revolution, but not APRA, represented for him an important intellectual inspiration during these years. Sanoja is somewhat skeptical of this assertion regarding Haya’s negligible influence on the early Betancourt. Sosa and Lengrand, on the other hand, demonstrate that there were fundamental areas of disagreement between the two leaders. Thus Betancourt, after being accused of Aprismo by fellow ARDI members, went on to reject Haya’s concept of the “united front” on grounds that it was so “liberally interpreted as to include within its ranks social sectors which hold back an efficaciously revolutionary policy” (p. 202).
The authors refute the thesis, which historian Manuel Caballero put forward in Rómulo Betancourt (1977), that Betancourt adhered to a typically “bourgeois democratic” line. Obviously, Betancourt stood far to the left of such a position. He accepted the Marxist notion of the incompatibility between pure democracy and class rule, but warned that “the exploited masses do not realize … that parliamentarianism and universal suffrage and other liberal democratic nonsense are a simple subterfuge of the bourgeois dictatorship” (p. 184). Betancourt, the realist, argued that Venezuelan leftists should put on a democratic mask until such a time as the pace of unfolding events allowed them to effect a more radical solution. His willingness to conceal long-range goals in order to project a desired image distinguished Betancourt from Marx’s followers. Indeed, the authors overstate their argument regarding Trotsky’s influence on Betancourt, who, unlike the Russian revolutionary, was first and foremost a pragmatist. It is true that Betancourt admired Trotsky, but this was due to their common predicament of being at war with orthodox Marxism as defined by the Comintern. As revolutionary as Betancourt sounded, he never lost his sense of realism, which would dictate increasingly conservative stands in future years. It is this underlying consistency that makes for interesting reading of both his writings and the interpretations of them as put forward in this book.
