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Venezuela SPANISH COLONIAL LIFE
Colonial Venezuela's primary value to Spain was
geographic:
its long Caribbean coastline provided security from
foreign
enemies and pirates for the Spanish bullion fleet during
its
annual journey between Portobelo, in present-day Panama,
and
Cuba. Venezuela's own form of mineral wealth, petroleum,
was
noticed as early as 1500, but after being hastily
scrutinized,
its vast deposits were ignored for nearly four centuries.
Venezuela lacked political unity for the first two and
a half
centuries of colonial rule, in part because it was of no
economic
importance to the Spanish officials. Before 1777, what we
today
label Venezuela consisted of a varying number of provinces
that
were governed quite independently of one another. These
provinces
were administered from neighboring colonies that the
Spanish
considered more important. Beginning in 1526, they were
under the
jurisdiction of the Audiencia de Santo Domingo. Then in
1550
their colonial administrative seat moved to the Audiencia
de
Santa Fé de Bogotá, which in 1718 was upgraded to become
the
Viceroyalty of New Granada. During most of the remainder
of the
eighteenth century, what is today Venezuela consisted of
five
provinces: Caracas, Cumaná, Mérida de Maracaibo, Barinas,
and
Guyana. Because these provinces were far from each other
and from
the centers of Spanish colonial rule, their municipal
officials
enjoyed a degree of local autonomy unknown in most of
Spanish
America.
By the late sixteenth century, agriculture had become
Venezuela's chief economic activity. The rich farmlands of
the
Andean region, the western llanos, and especially the
fertile
valleys surrounding Caracas made Venezuela agriculturally
selfsufficient , and also provided a surplus of a number of
products
for exportation. Wheat, tobacco, and leather were among
the early
products exported from colonial Venezuela. The Spanish
crown,
however, showed little interest in Venezuela's
agriculture. Spain
was obsessed with extracting precious metals from its
other
territories to finance a seemingly endless series of
foreign
wars. As a result, as late as the early eighteenth
century,
Venezuela sold the bulk of its considerable surplus of
agricultural goods to British, French, or Dutch traders
who,
under the Spanish crown's medieval notions of commerce
based on
bureaucratic control and mercantilism, were labeled as
smugglers.
Starting in the 1620s, cocoa became Venezuela's
principal
export for the next two centuries. Cocoa was a
quasi-narcotic
bean used in the processing of chocolate, a native product
of
Venezuela's coastal valleys. Its impact on colonial
Venezuelan
society was immense. Its sizable profits attracted, for
the first
time, significant immigration of Spaniards, including
relatively
poor Canary Islanders, and its plantation culture created
a great
demand for African slaves during the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. These two population groups would
complete
a social hierarchy that became virtually a caste system.
On top
was a small elite of white peninsulares (those born
in
Spain) and criollos (those born in America of Spanish
parentage);
they were followed by the white Canary Islanders, who
typically
worked as wage laborers; then came a large group of
racially
mixed
pardos (see Glossary), who by the late
eighteenth
century made up more than half the total; they were
followed by
African slaves, who constituted about 20 percent of the
population; and, lastly, by the Indians. The native
population,
decimated by slavery and disease throughout the colonial
period,
constituted less than 10 percent of the total at
independence.
Enormous profits obtained from the triangular trade of
African slaves for Venezuelan cocoa, which was then
shipped
across the Caribbean and sold in Veracruz for consumption
in New
Spain (Mexico), made the Venezuelan coast a regular port
of call
for Dutch and British merchants. In an effort to eliminate
this
illegal intercolonial trade and capture these profits for
itself,
the Spanish crown in 1728 granted exclusive trading rights
in
Venezuela to a Basque corporation called the Real Compaña
Guipuzcoana de Caracas, or simply the Caracas Company.
The Caracas Company proved quite successful, initially
at
least, in achieving the crown's goal of ending the
contraband
trade. Venezuela's cocoa growers, however, became
increasingly
dissatisfied. The Basque monopoly not only paid them
significantly lower prices but received favored treatment
from
the province's Basque governors. This discontent was
evidenced in
the growing number of disputes between the company and the
growers and other Venezuelans of more humble status. In
1749 the
discontent erupted into a first insurrectionary effort, a
rebellion led by a poor immigrant cocoa grower from the
Canary
Islands named Juan Francisco de León. The rebellion was
openly
joined by the Venezuelan lower classes and quietly
encouraged by
the elite in Caracas. Troops from Santo Domingo and from
Spain
quickly crushed the revolt, and its leadership was
severely
repressed by forces headed by Brigadier General Felipe
Ricardos,
who was named governor of Caracas in 1751.
The growth of the cocoa trade, the success of the
Caracas
Company, and the assertion of the royal will manifested by
the
suppression of the 1749 revolt all helped to centralize
the
Venezuelan economy around the city of Caracas. In
recognition of
this growth, Caracas was given political-military
authority as
the seat of the Captaincy General of Venezuela in 1777,
marking
the first instance of recognition of Venezuela as a
political
entity. Nine years later, its designation was changed to
the
Audiencia de Venezuela, thus granting Venezuela judicialadministrative authority as well.
Barely three decades later, however, Venezuela would
suddenly--after almost three centuries on the periphery of
the
Spanish American empire--find itself at the hub of the
independence movement sweeping Latin America. Present-day
Venezuelans continue to take pride in having produced not
only
Francisco de Miranda, the best known of the precursors of
the
Spanish American revolution, but also the first successful
revolt
against Spanish rule in America and, of course, the
leading hero
of the entire epic of Latin America's struggle for
independence,
Simón Bolívar Palacios.
Data as of December 1990
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