The history of Venezuela is often reduced to a cautionary tale of a single charismatic leader or a sudden economic collapse, yet the reality is a far more harrowing chronicle of structural extraction and imperial oversight. For over a century, the nation has served as a primary laboratory for a specific kind of Western imperialism – one where the democratic aspirations of a people are routinely sacrificed at the altar of energy security and corporate profit. In his meticulously researched volume, Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know, the author provides an evidentiary excavation of this history, revealing how the machinery of international finance and foreign military attaches have historically dictated the boundaries of Venezuelan sovereignty.
Miguel Tinker Salas is a Venezuelan-born historian and professor of history at Pomona College who is a leading authority on modern Latin American history and the historical impact of the oil industry in Venezuela. The book functions not only as a political primer, but also as a moral investigation into how a nation’s subterranean wealth became its geopolitical curse. While the volume was published in late 2015 and thus concludes before the most acute stages of the current economic downfall and the consolidation of the Maduro presidency, its value lies in its ability to show that the current crisis is not a sudden deviation, but the predictable result of a century of foreign interference and conflicts over the massive oil wealth.
To understand the modern Venezuelan state, one must first confront the ghost of Simón Bolívar and the fractured legacy of the independence struggle. The liberation of Venezuela from Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century was not a clean break into modernity but the beginning of a long, bloody search for identity. Following the 1811 declaration of independence, the country was consumed by a series of civil wars that decimated the population and left the economy in ruins. The dream of Gran Colombia – a unified Andean superstate – collapsed under the weight of regionalism and the ambitions of local caudillos. Throughout the 1800s, Venezuela was defined by instability, undergoing more than twenty changes in its constitution as various military strongmen competed for control of the agrarian economy. Yet, even in this era of internal chaos, the hand of the West was present. The fledgling republic was born into a debt trap, owing massive sums to British creditors who had financed the wars of liberation. This financial leverage became the primary tool of Western influence long before the first drop of oil was discovered.
The transition from a fractured agrarian society to a modern “petro-state” began in earnest under the long, dark tenure of Juan Vicente Gómez. Ruling from 1908 to 1935, Gómez was the archetype of the Western-backed autocrat. He understood with cynical clarity that his domestic survival depended entirely on his utility to foreign interests. In the early 1900s, Venezuela was still recovering from the 1902 naval blockade, where Britain, Germany, and Italy had used gunboats to collect debts. Gómez realized that by opening the country’s newly discovered oil reserves to Western firms, he could secure the diplomatic and military support needed to crush his internal rivals. Under his watch, the modern architecture of the state was built for the convenience of extraction. He granted staggering concessions to companies like Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil, often handing over thousands of square miles of territory under terms that allowed the firms to operate as sovereign entities. By 1928, Venezuela had become the world’s leading oil exporter, but the wealth never reached the population. Instead, it funded a sophisticated secret police and a military that was increasingly trained and equipped by the US.
US support for the Gómez dictatorship was an active and essential component of his rule. Gómez represented “stability”—a word that in the lexicon of imperialism serves as a euphemism for the uninterrupted flow of resources. As long as the oil camps remained open and the labor force was suppressed, the West was willing to ignore the torture chambers and the total absence of civil liberties. This established a recurring pattern where the moral character of a regime was irrelevant so long as its economic policy remained submissive. The oil companies became the primary financiers of the Venezuelan state, and in doing so, they ensured that the government would never be accountable to its own citizens, only to its foreign patrons. This “Great Wall of Foreigners” created a state within a state, where oil enclaves became islands of Western luxury surrounded by a sea of rural poverty.
The first genuine attempt to reclaim the nation’s resources occurred during the brief democratic opening known as the Trienio between 1945 and 1948. For three years, a government led by the novelist Rómulo Gallegos attempted to implement a “fifty-fifty” profit-sharing plan, insisting that at least half of all oil revenues remain within Venezuela to fund education and infrastructure. This was a radical departure from the Gómez era, and it was met with immediate hostility from the oil majors and their domestic allies. In 1948, a military coup brought this democratic experiment to a violent end. Tinker Salas highlights the presence of US military attaches in the very circles where the coup was being planned, signaling to the conspirators that a return to military rule would not only be tolerated but welcomed by Washington.
The decade of dictatorship that followed under Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s served as the ultimate proof of Western priorities. Pérez Jiménez was a man who spoke the language of “modernization,” using oil wealth to build grand highways and modernist architecture in Caracas while brutally suppressing the democratic opposition. The United States rewarded this behavior with the Legion of Merit, one of its highest honors for foreign leaders. To the Eisenhower administration, Pérez Jiménez was the model ally: he was fiercely anti-communist, he welcomed foreign investment without reservation, and he maintained “order.” The fact that his regime was built on a foundation of political killings and systematic corruption was treated as a domestic detail of no concern to the international community. The importance of this Western support cannot be overstated; it provided the regime with the international legitimacy and the military hardware necessary to sustain itself against the will of its own people for nearly a decade. Tinker Salas summarizes the results: “Increasingly, two Venezuelas took shape: one that benefitted from the oil economy, and the other that lived in the shadow of the industry, for which conditions had not fundamentally changed. One was a modern oil-producing nation closely allied to the United States, and the other a Latin American country where exports, even one as strategic as oil, had failed to solve the persistent problems of poverty and inequality for a large majority of the population.”
When democracy finally returned in 1958, it was a managed and curated version. The “Pacto de Punto Fijo” was an agreement between the country’s three main political parties to share power and oil revenues while banning parties of the left. For forty years, the West pointed to Venezuela as a “model democracy” in a region plagued by coups, but this stability was purchased through the marginalization of the poor and often brutal repression. The state became a patronage machine, and as oil prices fluctuated, the cracks in this model became apparent. Tinker Salas describes the social consequences: “A significant percentage of the population had slowly experienced an improved standard of living and, as of 1974, Venezuela boasted the highest per capita income in Latin America. However, distribution of income was one of the most lopsided in the continent. According to a study in 1974, while campesinos, the rural population, survived on five hundred bolívares a year, professional sectors earned 72,000 bolívares a year, or 144 times what the poor earned”. The book explains that when Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976, the government utilized a “generous formula” to ensure that foreign firms were “fully compensated,” a process that was criticized by many domestic observers as a “watered-down” measure that left significant loopholes for continued exploitation.
By the late 1980s, the myth of the “model democracy” collapsed under the weight of a massive debt crisis. In February 1989, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund to implement a series of “shock therapy” austerity measures, the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez turned its guns on its own people. The social explosion, known as the Caracazo, remains one of the most significant and under-reported massacres in modern Latin American history. When the price of basic transportation and fuel spiked overnight, the poor neighborhoods of Caracas rose in protest. The military responded with live ammunition. While official figures placed the death toll in the hundreds, human rights organizations and subsequent forensic investigations suggested that thousands of people were killed in a matter of days. Many were shot during a state-mandated curfew. The silence of the Western democratic community during this massacre was a damning testament to its hierarchy of values. Because the Pérez government was implementing the neoliberal reforms demanded by the IMF and Washington, its slaughter of thousands of civilians was treated as a regrettable necessity for “fiscal responsibility.”
The rise of Hugo Chávez in the late 1990s must be understood as the direct consequence of the Caracazo and the decades of exclusion that preceded it. However, the book focuses our attention on the reaction of the international order to his attempts to reclaim national sovereignty. The most contemporary and perhaps most revealing case of this imperial impulse is the failed coup of April 2002. It was orchestrated by the traditional business elite, the military high command, and most importantly, the private media conglomerates. Tinker Salas provides a granular account of how television stations like RCTV and Venevisión became operational hubs for the opposition, broadcasting carefully edited footage to make it appear as though the government was firing on unarmed protesters.
When the coup briefly succeeded and installed Pedro Carmona, the head of the nation’s largest business federation, the masks of “democracy promotion” fell away in the West. The US State Department immediately signaled its support for the “transitional” government, blaming the elected president for his own ouster and ignoring the fact that the Carmona decree had dissolved the National Assembly and the Supreme Court in a single afternoon. This endorsement of a military takeover against a constitutional democracy revealed that for the architects of the regional order, the primary sin of the Venezuelan government was not authoritarianism, but its attempts to reclaim oversight of its national oil company and redirect those profits toward social “missions” for the poor.
Between 1998 and 2013, Hugo Chávez and his movement participated over a dozen different elections and referendums—including the 2004 recall election that was audited and validated by international observers such as the Carter Center and the Organization of American States – consistently maintaining a democratic mandate through high levels of audited civic participation. This never stopped the US and its allies in their regime change attempts.
The scale of the human stakes is captured in the statistical shift that followed the government’s successful assertion of control over the national oil conglomerate, PdVSA. In the decade after 2003, social spending as a percentage of GDP rose dramatically. Millions of people who had been invisible to the state for a century were suddenly given access to primary health care, literacy programs, subsidized food and housing. Poverty rates were cut in half, and extreme poverty dropped by over seventy percent. These “missions” addressed the very structural inequalities that the previous century of Western-backed regimes had ignored. Yet, this shift was treated as a threat to international security. The pursuit of regional integration was interpreted by Washington as an act of hostility rather than an exercise in sovereign diplomacy.
It is important to note that because this book was published in 2015, it captures the Venezuelan state at a pivot point. It documents the height of the social gains but can only foreshadow the catastrophic economic decline that would follow. However, the history Tinker Salas provides makes the subsequent downfall more intelligible. It shows how the reliance on a single commodity, a structure imposed by foreign firms a century ago, left the country uniquely vulnerable to the collapse of oil prices and the subsequent imposition of a draconian sanctions regime. The economic warfare of the late 2010s was built upon the foundations of the 1902 blockade and the 1989 IMF mandates.
From the gunboats of the early twentieth century to the media-driven coups of the twenty-first, the tools of intervention have evolved, but the objective has remained remarkably consistent: the preservation of a system where Venezuelan sovereignty is always conditional. The review of this history forces us to confront the moral complicity of Western democracies that have consistently favored the “stability” of a profitable status quo over the messy, often confrontational process of genuine national self-determination. We are left with the resonant insight that as long as the international order views the Global South as an archive of resources to be managed rather than as societies with the inherent right to rule themselves, the Venezuelan people will remain trapped in a cycle where their sovereignty is always conditional and their future is never truly their own.
You can find Michael’s interviews with Jeffrey Sachs, Trita Parsi, Scott Horton, and other antiwar voices on his author’s page for NachDenkSeiten — the videos are in English!
Michael Holmes is a German-American freelance journalist specializing in global conflicts and modern history. His work has appeared in Neue Zürcher Zeitung – the Swiss newspaper of record – Responsible Statecraft, Psychologie Heute, taz, Welt, and other outlets. He regularly conducts interviews for NachDenkSeiten. He has reported on and travelled to over 70 countries, including Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine, Kashmir, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Uganda. He is based in Potsdam, Germany.
