5 Oil and the Democratic Caesar, 1912-1935 The advent of great numbers of Americans connected with the oil industry has had a decided effect and Venezuela looks towards the United States much more than ever before. —Jordan H. Stabler The troubled first decade of the twentieth century marked a major change in United States-Venezuelan relations. Venezuelan af- fairs had served as an impetus to the formulation of the new U.S. doc- trines toward the Caribbean and Latin America; the Olney Corollary and the Roosevelt Corollary. The United States fully intended to be the policeman of the Western Hemisphere and to squash would-be nation- alists like Cipriano Castro and José Santos Zelaya. Issues of national se- curity, including the first glimmers of anticommunism, and commer- cial advantage drove USS. policy toward hegemony. Venezuelans had a more defensive, but critical, objective: to preserve Venezuelan sover- eignty and autonomy. By 1913 Juan Vicente Gomez had already outlasted two US. presi- dents. He would survive four more and live into the era of Franklin Del- ano Roosevelt. Despite evidence of the brutality and corruption of his de facto regime, with every year official U.S. views of this democratic caesar grew more mellow. The dictator with “blundering cunning” (1913) became a “scoundrel” (1918) during World War I, but by 1927 his “kindliness of manner and benignity of countenance” accompanied a “bold and sagacious leadership” (1928). From a necessary evil Gomez had evolved into a positive good in official U.S. opinion. Some unoffi- cial views were less sanguine about Gémez and what he represented. Gémez was both the last of the caudillos on the Porfirio Diaz model and the first of the 1930s policemen like Rafael Trujillo and Anastasio Somoza. Yet he was not simply a puppet of the yanquis and their oil 117118 VENEZUELA AND THE UNITED STATES companies. Like César Zumeta, Gomez wanted to guard Venezuelan sovereignty, to avoid invasion by the United States, and, within those strictures, to construct a new Venezuela whose order and prosperity would make it less vulnerable to attack. He employed a number of tac- tics, some old and some new, to achieve his goal and remain in power. If he usually acceded to the yanquis’ “suggestions,” Gomez still re- tained the power to grant or refuse those requests. The United States treated Gomez with a certain wariness. Venezuela's increasing prosperity and the economic elite’s support of the dictator gave little pretext to intercede. Moreover, Gémez allowed no political parties to operate and no contested elections from his accession in 1908 to his death in 1935. During the same era, disputed elections in Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti sometimes gave Wash- ington a reason to intervene. A government that effectively intimidated any viable opposition could survive indefinitely, especially after Theo- dore Roosevelt's and Woodrow Wilson’s Caribbean activism gave way to the more pragmatic policies of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Relations between the two nations became more complex during the quarter of a century of Gémez’s rule, for there were more players to lobby the State Department and the Venezuelan government: oil com- panies, missionary boards, human rights groups, labor organizations, chambers of commerce, universities, scholars, adventurers, scientists, and businessmen. The advent of the United Press and the Associated Press, radio, and the aviation age brought new experiences with other cultures. Most of the “Americanization” that occured during this pe- riod was confined to Caracas and the oil zones, principally Maracaibo. Still, increased contact with U.S. citizens and businesses, added to Go6mez’s authoritarian centralization, contributed to a stronger sense of Venezuelan national identity. Washington Embraces a Dictator, 1912-1935 Woodrow Wilson's most critical problem in Latin America was deal- ing with the chaos that followed the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz and119 — Oil and the Democratic Caesar the murder of Francisco Madero in Mexico. His 1913 Mobile address, which warned that illegal seizure of power would be interpreted as “chronic wrongdoing,” encouraged Gomez's enemies. Gomez's presi- dential term was due to expire in 1914, and there was a constitutional prohibition on reelection, but Chargé Jefferson Caffrey chose not to press Gémez to hold an authentic election. In 1914, Gomez illegally ex- tended his presidential term, but then cautiously refused to take office until 1922. How could the U.S. Marines come in and overthrow some- one who was not in office? Dr. Victorino Marquez Bustillos served as provisional president, but U.S. diplomats and businessmen complained that he could not or would not act on their requests. Wilson’s State Department clung to the view that “a moderate soft-shell despotism” was necessary in Venezuela, and Minister Preston McGoodwin re- ceived instructions in April 1914 to refrain from encouraging Gomez's enemies. The andino survived round 1 of the campaign against de facto govern- ments. In 1917, round 2 began because Venezuela was feared to be a wartime security threat. Gomez had maintained Venezuela's neutrality during the war, but he was known to favor Germany.' Rumors flew that he planned to transfer Margarita Island to the Germans for a submarine base and that the funds he had deposited in German banks gave him a stake in a German victory. In a cockamamy story reminiscent of the Zimmerman telegraph hoax, one U.S. consul reported that Gomez had secretly agreed to help the kaiser re-create the sixteenth-century Haps- burg empire in exchange for a promise that Gémez should be king of the tributary state of Venezuela.’ Gomez, like Castro before him, bene- fited from Washington's judgment that the effort to remove him and keep peace over an outraged population would require too great a di- version of military resources. The State Department's Division of Latin American Affairs even decided to suppress news of Gémez’s crimes so that the American public would not demand his removal.” If Gomez and many of the andinos favored Germany, most of Ven- ezuela’s intellectuals favored France and the Allies. Minister McGood- win reported widespread appreciation for the United States and demo- cratic values. As the war drew to a close in 1918, Gémez’s enemies hoped the United States would seize the democratic moment to assist