Venezuela in the bad old days when Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil propped up one of the world’s most murderous dictators, General Juan Vicente Gómez.

‘Gomez: The Greatest Living Criminal’ by Guillermo Meir from New Masses. Vol. 4 No. 5. October, 1928.

I will tell of my country: Venezuela, whose present regime of unthinkable cruelties and ingenious tortures has a parallel only in the Darkest Ages, in the Spain of Torquemada’s Inquisition, in the bloody steppes of the Siberias of Nicholas.

First let me remind those who have forgotten their geography that the Republic of Venezuela, with an area of 393,000 square miles, lies at the nethermost part of South America. Universal history mentions her as the cradle of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and founder of the Republic of Bolivia, whose statue now stands in the Central Park of Sweat Shop New York. The territory Bolivar liberated from the Royal Crown of Spain is now coveted by the Royal Dutch Shell, the Standard Oil Co. and all its magnanimous associates, for “uplifting and civilizing purposes,” no doubt. This longing has rapidly increased, and is unbounded today: Venezuela ranks high in oil production in the world.

And now enters General Juan Vicente Gomez, the greatest living criminal. In 1908, President Cipriano Castro went to Berlin to have something superfluous removed from his anatomy. He left his lieutenant, General Gomez, in charge of Venezuela, as Provisional President. Having been a successful butcher in his little native town, perched in the Andes Mountains, Gomez accepted the task, and as soon as Castro was at a safe distance declared himself President, outlawing Castro. Thus began his reign. He enjoyed it, his friends and accomplices liked it, the people did not openly protest, and, since those who attempted to bring the country back to some semblance of order, peace and prosperity, were promptly removed to the world-famous dungeons of the ROTUNDA at Caracas, the Capital, or to the redoubtable Castles of PUERTO CABELLO and SAN CARLOS, Gomez has been undisputed autocrat for twenty years.

And, what is worse, since the great resources of oil were discovered around Lake Maracaibo, the hope has dwindled of removing Gomez. Through him, in auction-like bidding, the Oil Emperors, “for a certain consideration” have secured control of all the land they wanted, and the memory of man does not register the overthrow, in Spanish America, of the renegades who are under the protection of the American captains of Big Business.

The crimes and atrocities of Gomez and his hordes are unbelievable, except to those who lived under the benign and loving rule of the late czar. More than four hundred men who rank high in military and civil life, doctors, professors, writers, cartoonists have been arrested and without trial, accusation, or any legal procedure, thrown in the cells of the ROTUNDA and the two Castles already mentioned. There those who were not poisoned outright, were DELIBERATELY starved to death by the gaolers, tortured until the light of their minds left them. The majority of the survivors, with but scanty and rotten food, without medicine, light, or water to wash their seared and mangled bodies slowly found release in Death…

When I state that hundreds were poisoned, starved or beaten to death, I swear by all that I hold dear, that it is the stark, unrelenting truth. I have the names, date, hour and manner of death of over eighty men, whose bodies, in serried ranks, grimly clamor for justice, and point towards their murderer: the present Government of Venezuela.

The imprisoning and assassination of these men was not always a political measure. Gomez’s greediness and avarice is insatiable. He now owns or controls EIGHTY PER CENT of the industries of the country; the railroads, the steamship lines are his; factories, houses, ranches, the charcoal, bread, and dairy trusts, all are under his hand. There is no limit to his possessions, since his ambition and rapacity are unbounded, and no one dares to oppose the will of the Master. Death, lingering death, preceded by Dantesque tortures, the sequestration of his properties, and immediate persecution of all members of his family, is the only result of such a hopeless opposition. Through this humane and profitable method.

President Gomez has gathered over TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS—and there is no bootlegging in Venezuela.

Of those who enter the ROTUNDA, few, very few have been able to survive. One of them, General ROMAN DELGADO CHALBAUD, was recently liberated after living fourteen years in a cell only large enough to lie down in. That he managed to keep alive is a proof of the power of endurance of the human body. A few others still exist in their dungeons, after numberless years of dragging a SEVENTY-FIVE pound iron bar clamped around their legs, in the sea-moist cells, where neither sunshine nor human pity ever enter to dispel the blackness of their everlasting tortures.

Gomez’s hypocritical treatment of the organized labor movement should be especially noted. The A. F. of L. recognizes Gomez as “a powerful pillar of Unionism.” Yet the fact remains that in Venezuela there is no Labor Party (nor even of liberal tendency—they are not allowed); that workers’ associations of any kind have been deprived of even the last vestige of freedom; that wages are pitiful and living conditions intolerable: The Colorado miners are Croesus next to our laborers.

Not even the army that timorously upholds Gomez is safe from his rapacity: entire regiments of the line toil daily in his haciendas, or break their backs building connecting roads, which will increase the profits of that boa constrictor…

And as finale, here is another demonstration of his despotism: a few months ago several students in a festival sang an ode to Liberty, that sacred right about which we, of modern Venezuela, have heard, but whose blessings it has never been ours to enjoy. Thereupon FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-EIGHT boys, 16 to 20 years of age, were marched down, from early morning to nightfall, to the distant Castle at Puerto Cabello, to endure prison life with criminals of the worst species, while in Caracas, the Capital of the Republic, the protesting crowds of mingled people and the so-called aristocracy were terrorized with machine guns and trampled by cavalryman. Thus “the velvet hand of the wise ruler,” as seen and reported by the diplomatic menials to whom the righteous gesture of the populace was only “the senseless and unimportant pranks of a few schoolboys…”

I repeat: I have spoken but the truth, a sad but necessary truth. Should anyone doubt my statements I gladly challenge him to prove me guilty of even a pardonable exaggeration. The veracity of my words is known wherever Spanish is spoken.

And the smoke of sacrifice MUST ascend, even though Gomez still be the blood-fed monster of Venezuela because of the unspeakable, of the criminal indolence of the governments of our brother nations who, unlike virile Mexico, maintain their friendly relations with the modem Attila, whose gory hands have clutched for two decades the reins of ruthless power in our fair and unhappy land of Venezuela.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1928/v04n05-oct-1928-New-Masses.pdf