The supporters of Generals Eleazar López Contreras and Isaías Medina Angarita, who governed Venezuela between 1935 and 1945, argue that these governments preserved a “constitutional thread” whereby democratic practices and freedoms were gradually expanded. It is ironic that Venezuelan Communists defended this evolutionary notion, whereas the less radical Acción Democrática (AD) supported an abrupt “revolutionary” change in the form of the military coup of October 1945, which sought to implant a democratic regime once and for all. The secretary-general of the Communist party (PCV) during these years was Juan Bautista Fuenmayor. Historia de la Venezuela política contemporánea, which Fuenmayor wrote while he was rector of the Universidad Santa María, relies heavily on PCV and AD documents from his personal archive. Fuenmayor attempts to justify the PCV’s mild praise of President López Contreras and active support for President Medina Angarita. In doing so, he lashes out at dissident Communists of those years (who later took control of the party) as well as at AD and its standard-bearer, Rómulo Betancourt.
In one sense, history has left Fuenmayor behind. Fuenmayor continues to extol Stalin, even though the Soviet dictator has long since fallen from the pedestal of international Communism. Similarly, Fuenmayor defends his party’s World War II policies, which the Communist movement subsequently denounced as “Browderist” (after United States Communist chief Earl Browder). Thus Fuenmayor hails President Medina Angarita’s trip to the United States where he sought to encourage United States investments in Venezuela at a time when that nation suffered from a dire lack of capital and industrial equipment. At the same time, he heaps praise on President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who represented the “anti-Fascist export bourgeoisie” (Vol. 3, p. 94) as opposed to the pro-Fascist financial sector. These and other opinions regarding the positive role of the United States and private capital in the development of Latin America were in vogue during World War II, but are no longer accepted by the adherents of orthodox Marxism, which serves as Fuenmayor’s basic guide.
While his ideological positions are outmoded, Fuenmayor is in good company when he avidly defends the government of Medina Angarita. As current opinion polls indicate, Medina Angarita is one of Venezuela’s most highly regarded former heads of state. Fuenmayor scoffs at the charge that Medina Angarita failed to modernize the armed forces and provide opportunities for junior officers, as even writers who are sympathetic to Medina Angarita have acknowledged. According to Fuenmayor, Medina Angarita’s real shortcoming was his political naïveté in that he failed to take seriously the possibility of a military coup, a foreseeable reaction to his progressive stands and his electoral pact with the Communists.
The author maintains that in adopting a position of hardened opposition to President Medina Angarita, AD made common cause with right-wing forces led by López Contreras. Fuenmayor shows that AD leaders were not totally in agreement in their attitude toward the Medina Angarita administration. He quotes an internal document concerning the expulsion of AD labor leader Cirilo Brea, who claimed that his party’s intransigent position toward Medina Angarita was encour aging López Contreras to launch his candidacy for the 1946 presidential elections. According to Fuenmayor, AD’s hostile stand stemmed from Betancourt’s fear that Medina Angarita’s reformism cut into AD’s political strength by depriving the party of its political banners.
In 1945, AD and Medina Angarita reached an agreement in favor of endorsement of Venezuela’s ambassador to the United States, Diogenes Escalante, in the upcoming presidential elections, but because of the latter’s sudden illness, Medina Angarita unilaterally threw his support behind his Minister of Agriculture, Angel Biaggini. AD refused to go along with this decision and instead conspired with junior military officers to overthrow Medina Angarita. Medina Angarita, in his posthumous Cuatro años de democracia, as do pro-Medina Angarita writers, points out that AD’s positions were inconsistent in that there was little difference between Escalante and Biaggini. Indeed, AD’s criticisms of Biaggini were also applicable to Escalante, namely, that he continued a tradition of presidents from the state of Táchira, who were imposed by the outgoing head of state, and who had previously served under the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez.
Fuenmayor actually goes one step farther than these writers in his denunciations of AD’s position. Fuenmayor claims that Escalante, unlike Biaggini, was a reactionary with links to the United States State Department. Furthermore, he had secretly promised Betancourt that once in power he would turn his back on Medina Angarita and open up his administration to AD leaders and the conspiratorial junior officers. Fuenmayor fails to provide documentation for this charge, which would seem particularly important, given the fact that AD denied that it was interested in ministerial positions in the Escalante government.
Fuenmayor’s criticism of Medina Angarita for having failed to take decisive measures against those who threatened his regime is also leveled against the AD trienio government of 1945-48. The PCV, to its credit, drew public attention to subversive activities against the trienio regime and supported efforts to mobilize the population in its defense. The official PCV policy toward both the Medina Angarita and trienio administrations was one of critical support, but in practice the Communists came down harder on the AD government than on its predecessor. Fuenmayor does not attempt to hide his preference for Medina Angarita even though AD’s reforms were as far-reaching—if not more so—as those of Medina Angarita.
Following the overthrow of the AD government in 1948, Fuenmayor argued that the PCV should view opposition to the military government and denunciation of AD opportunism as equally important tasks. He criticized the PCV for working with AD in its efforts to spark a military coup. Unable to get the PCV to open up an internal debate over these issues, Fuenmayor left the party in 1951 and soon thereafter retired completely from political activism.
The main value of these volumes is in the numerous documents Fuenmayor cites that deal with factionalism in the Communist movement and AD-PCV relations. In addition, given the pro-AD bent of much writing on the period in English, Fuenmayor’s polemics against that party should help provide a new focus for future works.
