VENEZUELA: Gomez the Meritorious

A large ungainly motorbus, powdered white with dust, drew up before the hacienda Las Delices at Maracay, last week, and disgorged a party of journalists. They had come 50 odd miles from the capital city of Caracas to pay their respects to piratical old Dictator-President Juan Vicente Gómez on the eve of Venezuela’s Presidential election. Once more he was the only candidate, would receive all the votes, they presumed, unless there should be a revolution on election day. Almost a generation before Benito Mussolini was heard of, Juan Vicente Gómez was dictating in Venezuela. He has made a habit of confiscating the property of those who oppose him, sending them into exile or imprisonment. Excellent roads are constantly under construction by sweated gangs of “political prisoners.” The comic opera sequence of petty-grafter Presidents who preceded him has been definitely terminated. He has given Venezuela the blessings of a stable regime on his own extremely harsh terms. He dominates the National Congress which elects the President of Venezuela. Alighting from their dusty bus, the cor respondents looked about for Grandpa Gómez, who is by act of the Venezuelan Congress, “Gómez the Meritorious.” They saw an old man, his eyes shielded by thick-lensed blue glasses, seated in a wicker rocking chair beneath a spreading rubber tree. Armed guards stood on either side of the Dictator, ministers of state andimportant guests sat on other wicker chairs in a respectful circle. Innumerable hand some, big-hipped, black-eyed wenches wandered about the patio and the modern cafeteria-dancehall directly opposite, which “Gómez the Meritorious” has provided for their use. Buxom girls (many of them Indians), the President’s lemans are as famed as he. Respectfully the correspondents approached the rubber tree, were courteously welcomed. The old man in the blue glasses suggested that they might enjoy viewing his fine new concrete cowshed, containing nearly 1,000 Indian humped cattle. After that they ought to visit his private zoo, see his pet cockatoos, peafowl, chimpanzees; watch the big-eared African elephant blowing dust through his trunk, see the semi-submerged hippopotamus snorting ecstatically and wiggling his little ears.

But when an indiscreet U. S. correspondent asked Dictator Gómez about the coming election, the eyes of “The Meritorious One” flashed behind their thick-lensed glasses. Snapped he:

“The conversation, gentlemen, will be limited to livestock!”

The conversation might much more profitably have been limited to oil. It is less than seven years since the first Venezuelan bonanza gusher, “La Rosa,” was brought in, but last year Gómez Land gushed 85 million barrels, or slightly less than one-twelfth of the world’s production. It costs less to carry Venezuelan oil by tramp steamer to Manhattan, than to carry the oil of Oklahoma by rail to the same place. Thus every U. S. motorist on the Atlantic seaboard has a dollars-and-cents interest in Venezuela and in her Government. Law-abiding motorists must have viewed with alarm last week the fact that “Gómez the Meritorious” seemed about to succeed himself, in flat violation of the Venezuelan Constitution which provides that no man while President of the Republic can stand for reelection.

Right up to the hour of voting, no other candidate was mentioned in despatches. But when ballots were counted the Congress was found to have elected Supreme Court Justice Juan Bautista Perez to be President of Venezuela for 15 days. After that, one Juan Vicente Gómez, just a private citizen though Dictator, will be elected President, unless all prognostications fail. The 15-day President is of course one of Dictator Gómez’s little jokes, enabling him to circumvent the Constitution.