Bluesky

The Nation has been covering Venezuela for a long time—since before Trump and Maduro, before Chavismo, before the drug war. Spread across three centuries, the coverage is most remarkable for the consistency of its themes: struggles between autocracy and democracy, debates over foreign intervention and national self-determination, dispatches about the corrupting role of oil in enriching the ruling class and attracting predatory foreign powers.

The Nation’s first notable story is from 1895, when a conflict over Venezuela’s border with the British territory of Guiana (now Guyana)—where gold had recently been found—provoked President Grover Cleveland to invoke the decades-old Monroe Doctrine: European powers had no right to intervene in the Western Hemisphere. Cleveland’s statement heralded a new era of US chest-thumping that culminated three years later with the Spanish-American War. Alarmed by the president’s rhetoric, The Nation ridiculed the idea that “we are going, in the name of the Monroe doctrine, to assert such ownership of the American hemisphere as will enable us to trace all the boundary lines on it to our own satisfaction in defiance of the rest of the world.”

Regrettably, that is just what the US government did, repeatedly meddling in Latin America to prop up rulers who preyed on their own people and served corporate interests. From 1908 to 1935, Venezuela was ruled by Juan Vicente Gómez, a dictator who governed “by terror and corruption,” as the great Puerto Rican journalist and politician Luis Muñoz Marín wrote in these pages in 1925. Gómez invoked martial law, replaced the constitution, and tortured and imprisoned his critics. “The picture is lurid and grotesque,” Muñoz Marín concluded.

Venezuela had begun pumping oil in 1914. But the profits went not to the people but to foreign companies and local elites. “Gomez has left nothing undone to make foreign capital at home in Venezuela,” The Nation’s Mauritz A. Hallgren noted in 1928. US companies returned the favor with their unqualified support for his regime.

In 1951, with yet another dictator leading Venezuela, The Nation published “Suicide by Oil,” in which the journalist Marcelle Michelin reported, “Venezuela appears extravagantly wealthy. But the Venezuelans to whom black gold has meant a better way of life are the fortunate minority of the cities and oil camps—landowners, business men, factory hands, government employees, corporation bureaucrats. The people of the pueblos and fishing villages go on laboriously wresting what sustenance they can from earth and water.”

Again and again, in reading The Nation’s coverage, one encounters a similar story: malevolent actors, inside and outside the country, conspiring to separate the people from their land and resources—and, with them, the fulfillment of their fiercely held hopes and dreams.