This is a meticulously researched and well-written study of the first Monagas administration, 1847-51. Monagas is a vital figure in nineteenth-century Venezuelan history, as he marks the rupture of the political control exercised by José Antonio Páez since 1830. Based primarily on the diplomatic archives of France, Spain, England, and the United States, as well as the papers of Antonio Leocadio Guzmán held in the Biblioteca Nacional and other personal archives held in the Academia Nacional de la Historia, Castillo has provided a wealth of detail which does not, curiously enough, change in any fundamental way that which Francisco González Guinán wrote concerning this period in his monumental Historia contemporánea de Venezuela (1909-25). The major thrust of the book is to show how Monagas broke away from Páez’s tutelage after the latter arranged his election as president. This involved taking up with the Liberals, a confrontation with the Paecista Congress in 1848 which was accompanied by bloodshed, nearly two years of intermittent warfare against Páez and his followers, and the revocation of the credit laws popularly associated with the Conservative Oligarchy’s interests.
Castillo states in the introduction that Monagas’s image has been distorted due to his opposition to Páez and the interests of the traditional ruling class. This, a basic premise of the book, is not quite the case. By treating only the first administration of Monagas (he and his brother José Gregorio ruled between them until 1858), Castillo has evaded the real reasons for the opprobrium: continualism and excessive financial fraud. José Tadeo may have started as a breath of fresh air, and is generally recognized as such in liberal and Marxist historiography, which predominate in Venezuela, but he finished in the same old way. Not for nothing were the Monagas regimes termed the Liberal Oligarchy, to distinguish them from their predecessor, the Conservative Oligarchy. For many contemporaries, as well as present-day historians, the nineteenth century was marked by oligarchic rule, whatever its political orientation or the origins of its ruling class. Monagas’s cynicism with regard to the constitution (“sirve para todo”) was not an isolated expression of contempt for political ideologies. If Castillo had conceptualized his work, to deal with the broader issues of political power, this otherwise excellent study would have been greatly enriched.
