One afternoon —soon it will be 40 years—, lying on a beach in Golfo Triste, I slammed a book by Marco Palacios from Bogota and asked myself: “Why the hell has no one in Venezuela written a book comparable to
El café en Colombia?
A book of seminal and canonical vocation that, properly and without making concessions, can be called
Oil in Venezuela?
I frequented that Editorial Presencia book until it fell apart, full of underlining and stickers.
Palacios's book made me see clearly that, contrary to what the patriotic Bolivarian trickery that has bedeviled us since 1870, we were not a nation called to be great and that meanness and fratricidal discord undid after gain their independence, but two contiguous tropical countries on the map of the nascent Spanish-American republics.
The way in which a country makes a living does not fully explain its meanness, its mythologies and its occasional greatness.
Palacios's book helped me understand that oil did not have to have been a curse in itself.
However, it is one thing to celebrate the First Centenary of Independence by auctioning in London and New York the geological registry of 700,000 square miles of oil sedimentary basins and another to try to make a place for ourselves on the planet, counting from the second half of the 19th century as only with coffee, an impassable orography, a great river only navigable in stretches and the venatic cycle of the trade winds.
We Venezuelans have not done much to write something even comparable to
El café en Colombia,
but we have taken pains to revile oil, making it guilty of all, or almost all, of our misadventures.
One of our founding myths maintains that for a long time, before the First World War, Venezuela was the world's leading exporter of coffee, above Brazil.
And that the overwhelming oil industry ended in a short time with that primacy.
Where did it come from, I always wondered, that enormity repeated blatantly in all the country history manuals for a century?
The answer was given to me by the book by Marco Palacios and a work on retrospective econometrics, goofily titled
The Mickey Mouse numbers in world history,
whose author was DCM Platt, a great historian of British foreign trade of the 19th century.
The Mickey Mouse etc…
is a study of the calculation errors incurred by historians who abuse statistics.
Certainly, when the first British General Asphalt geologists arrived in Venezuela in 1911, the country had long since completely failed in the purpose of establishing an agricultural economy, primarily coffee, oriented to the so-called "outward growth", a very important objective. typical of the nineteenth-century liberal project in our America.
A Swiss botanist, Henri Pittier, an expert from the United States Secretary of Agriculture and himself a coffee grower in Costa Rica, hired by the Venezuelan Government to evaluate our agricultural activity, ruled in 1913 that "phytogenetic degeneration and low productivity of Venezuelan coffee plantations are the result of more than 60 years of negligence”.
He was unknowingly talking about the almost perennial civil war and the massive destruction of property that was the Venezuelan nineteenth century.
The coffee produced in the region of the Colombian Santanderes in the second half of the 19th century went to the Caribbean and then to Europe from the port of Maracaibo, in Venezuela, after paying a transit tax through the border state of Táchira.
It was recorded, naturally, in the import accounts of London and Hamburg as coffee from Venezuela.
When the coffee activity of Colombia took hold in the Colombian Western Cordillera, already in the 1870s, the economic series, carefully elaborated by the late Venezuelan economist Asdrúbal Baptista, cease to record the colossal export of that only illusory Venezuelan coffee.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
50% off
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber