Staying the Course

• Date: 01 March 2005
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X04273875
• Author: Miguel Tinker Salas
• Published date: 01 March 2005
• Subject Matter: Articles

10.1177/0094582X04273875LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES Tinker Salas / U.S. OIL COMPANIES IN VENEZUELA

Staying the Course

United States Oil Companies in Venezuela,

1945–1958

by

Miguel Tinker Salas

For proponents of the exceptionalism thesis, the so-called October Revo-

lution of 1945, led by Rómulo Betancourt and the Acción Democrática (AD)

party, and the ouster of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958 are tradition-

ally presented as important watersheds, producing changes that U.S. oil

interests purportedly opposed (Alexander, 1964: 22). According to Edwin

Lieuwen, the events of October 1945 were “the most fundamental in Vene-

zuelan history” (1963: 64). Robert Alexander likewise argued that 1945 had

produced “a profound revolutionary change in the country” (1982: 195). For

his part, John Martz contended that the 1945 Trienio “marked a structural

transformation that . . . provided the basis for future national development”

(1966: 62). A handful of Venezuelan leftist critics, including Salvador dela

Plaza, Juan Bautista Fuenmayor, and the members of the group Ruptura dis-

agreed with these assessments, asserting that AD policy amounted to a capit-

ulation to U.S. interests. They maintained that middle-class nationalist rheto-

ric served to obscure the fact that AD did not fundamentally challenge the

power relations that existed between the state and the foreign corporations.

Within the mainstream academy,these critical voices were largely dismissed

as partisan polemics and silenced by the prevailing triumphalism that greeted

the return of AD and the Betancourt presidency (de la Plaza, 1999; Bautista

Fuenmayor, 1981: Marquez and Bravo, 1977).

While the earlier critics focused on AD and its leadership, thiswork draws

special attention to the adaptive role of the oil companies during this period.

It underscores how the three big oil companies that operated in Venezuela,

147

Miguel TinkerSalas is an associate professor of history and Latin American and Chicano/a stud-

ies at Pomona College and a coordinating edi tor of Latin American Perspectives.He ha s pub-

lished on the Mexico-U.S. border, including In the Shadow of Eagles: Sonora and the Trans-

formation of the Border during the Porfiriato, and is currently finishing a manuscript that

analyzes the political transformation, social relations, and cultural interaction thatresulted

from contact between Venezuelans,North Americans, and otherforeigners working in the oil

camps of Venezuela.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 141, Vol. 32 No. 2, March 2005 147-170

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X04273875

© 2005 Latin American Perspectives

Creole (Standard Oil of New Jersey), Shell, and Mene Grande (Gulf), com-

pelled political leaders to moderate their views in order to consolidate politi-

cal power and achieve U.S. recognition. In particular it demonstrates how

Creole adapted to political changes in Venezuelaand sought to influence the

course of these reforms before they threatened the company’s fundamental

economic interests. This experience also explains why in some cases Creole

opted for negotiation rather than confrontation with the Venezuelan govern-

ment, political parties, and labor unions. It also shows that the oil companies

constituted important allies of U.S. government policy inthe region. In 1953

the U.S. National Security Council asserted, “Oil operations are, for all prac-

tical purposes, instruments of our foreign policy toward these countries.” 1

Analyzing the oil companies’ internal documents and industry publications,

this work offers an alternative interpretation to the exceptionalism thesis and

provides a more complex view of how theoil companies developed policy in

Venezuela.

Efforts to analyze the eventsof the early and middle twentieth century join

a growing body of work that questions some of the assumptions that have tra-

ditionally framed our understanding of Venezuelan history (Valero, 2001;

López Maya, 1996; Vivas Gallardo, 1993). Since 1980, as Steve Ellner

(1995) points out, Venezuelan scholars havebeen critically reexamining his-

torical events and the individuals involved in them. Rather than a legacy

marked by profound ruptures with an immediate past, a new perspective is

emerging that stresses a greater degree of continuity in the country’s history.

This reevaluationhas been driven by the presence of a new generation of pro-

fessional historians, but by no means, as E. H. Carr (1961) warns, does this

mean the rise of a new and disengaged objective history. The other critical

factor propelling this reexamination has been the demise of the traditional

political parties that dominated Venezuela since 1958 and the election of

Hugo Chávez Frías, whose rise to power breaks with the exceptionalist

framework and compels a new reading of the past.

Despite efforts to provide a more complex view of contemporary Vene-

zuelan history, the U.S. oil firmshave not been the object of critical reassess-

ment, in part because of the difficulty in gaining access to corporate archives.

According to the traditional interpretation, foreign corporations benefited

from the policies of Venezuelan dictators such as Juan Vicente Gómez

(1907–1935), opposed the reforms initiated by Acción Democrática (AD)

during the Trienio (1945–1948), and resumed their cozy relationship with

Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948–1958). Not only is this interpretation simplistic

but it fails to consider the central role of Venezuela in the formulation of U.S.

foreign policy. Venezuela assumed new importance for the United States

after the nationalization of Mexican oil in 1938, during the course of World

148 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES