This book is a revisionist assessment of the transitional period in Venezuelan history from Juan Vicente Gómez’s death in 1935 to the 1945 military-Acción Democrática golpe. The author’s purpose is to provide an “objective” antidote to what he regards as distortions of the “official” historians who represent political elites who have been in power most of the period since 1945. Such historians castigate the Eleazar López Contreras (1936-41) and Isaías Medina Angarita (1941-45) regimes as being little more than a continuation of the brutal, antinational Gómez tyranny. To the contrary, Dávila, a Venezuelan trained in political sociology, contends that the crucial period in the modern political and economic transformation of Venezuela was precisely the 1936-45 decade, and that 1936, not 1945, represents the true watershed in twentieth-century Venezuelan history.
The book examines the development of modern institutions by the leaders of what Dávila calls the “Democracia Evolutiva.” These moderate reformers are given considerable credit for consciously placing modern Venezuela on a democratic capitalist path. Dávila claims, correctly in my opinion, that the institutions they brought into being, such as a national bank, government credit banks, an income tax, and a nationalistic oil policy, became a permanent and unchallenged fixture of Venezuelan life.
The fatal problem for the “Democracia Evolutiva,” however, was that it stressed the development of a progressive and dynamic capitalist society at the expense of a fully functioning representative democracy. This enabled the leftist opposition to win over the masses on, interestingly enough, mainly political, rather than economic, grounds.
Dávila is careful about defining his terms but less careful in mining the available sources for this period. His bibliography is very slim and fails to include works by the “official” historians, such as Rómulo Betancourt, of whom he is so critical. Nevertheless, he offers a stimulating and, in my view, convincing argument that López and Medina were effective institution builders and statesmen.
