Long before the pandemic was declared, I heard a young university student say to one of her classmates at the next table: “give me the keywords of the abstract from your paper”.
It happened on a Sunday afternoon, in the cafeteria of the Virgilio Barco Library in Bogotá. It seemed to me an atrocity, another sign of the defeat and withdrawal of the Humanities. One more proof that the paper graduate school killed the noble essay and that the evanescent Twitter thread will liquidate the paper.
However, while marinating the subject of this article, I found myself making the mental list of keywords of the abstract of an imaginary paper about the Venezuelan opposition … from a century ago. They are: Obregón, Calles, Mexican Revolution, Vasconcelos, exile, dictatorship, Juan Vicente Gómez, El Americano.
My interest in this little stretch of our stories arose almost half a century ago, when a Venezuelan filmmaker of Mexican origin, a great guy very loved by everyone in my country, the late Mauricio Walerstein, wanted to shoot a film whose plot would woo both audiences by telling what the Chimba historiography of our twentieth century calls “Urbina’s stop”.
In the Spanish of Venezuela, a stop is any crazy action taken precisely because it is. Counting blindly on good luck.
As I was the youngest of all, they named me a so-called historical researcher of the project who died at birth. But not before I found out – working ad honorem, of course— about things that now, confronted with brain death, with the dismal flat encephalogram of the Venezuelan opposition leadership, explode in my brain without enlightening me.
The truth is that with them a series could well be nurtured around how Obregón and, later, his successor Plutarco Elías Calles, provided help to the Venezuelans conspired in exile against the disgrace of Gómez.
The first episode, the founding chapter of the series based, why not ?, in my imaginary paper, narrates the outrage to which a Mexican theater company was subjected that played in the port of La Guaira in 1923. Pending task, in view of the footnotes, is to find out the name of the company, get an idea of its repertoire, find out in which steamer they were traveling.
The alleged reason for deporting them, after harassing them and depriving them of their belongings, was that the theater company was covering up a cell of communist agitators. General Álvaro Obregón, president of Mexico, then broke diplomatic relations with Venezuela and these remained broken for a whole decade.
Shortly after the deportation of the theater company, Obregón ordered to hand over to a group of Venezuelan exiles the weapons that his government had seized from a group of rebels who supported former president Adolfo de la Huerta.
Mexican aid was maintained, almost without fluctuations, during a decade during which the Venezuelan armed forces varied constantly. The list of conspirators assisted by Mexico ranges from the former dictator Cipriano Castro to the legendary communist leader Gustavo Machado, who fought alongside Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua.
Each of the successive casts can be associated with the name of a ship acquired or chartered for an invasion of Venezuela. Thus, for example, there is an account of the failed expedition of the Gloucester, a yacht that displaced 1,000 tons on paper, renamed by Leopoldo Baptista in 1924 as Angelita.
He never got anywhere near the Venezuelan coast: he went from shipyard to shipyard, for repairs, from New York to Key West (Florida), where nothing more could be done for him. The promoters received generous advances that were each around $ 25,000 at the time.
Each of the expeditions managed to get a mysterious donor, referred to as El Americano in the coded correspondence of the conspirators, to make an important contribution. The American was none other than the richest man in Venezuela: Antonio Aranguren, the Monomers of the opposition at that time.
A businessman, Aranguren had been favored at the beginning of the century with the most profitable oil concession in the Lake Maracaibo basin.
El Americano knew how to secure privileged positions in the directives of the oil companies to which it sold its blocks for exploration. Eventually, he fell out with the dictator Gomez and expatriated. He then became a very judicious oil man, although when it came to invasions he continued to be a gambler.
From London, where he lived, if not from a suite at the Grand Hotel Lutecia, in Paris, El Americano sent money from expeditions. He trusted, to the surprise of everyone in Venezuela, Rafael Simón Urbina, one of the most erratic and bloodthirsty adventurers that Venezuela has ever given birth to.
However, General Joaquín Amaro, Secretary of War, would see something in Urbina, who in 1931 facilitated the purchase of a ship with silver from Aranguren. The ship had been part of a flotilla sent to Nicaragua by President Calles in 1926, in support of the Juan Bautista Sacasa rebellion.
Urbina set sail from Puerto Morelos in September with a hundred chicle braceros, apparently recruited under deception in Payo Obispo, Quintana Roo. The weapons were provided by Bartolomé García Correa, governor of Yucatán. After a bumpy journey, the expedition, betrayed before setting sail, was shot at at La Vela de Coro.
On the eve of the landing, the boastful head of the garrison telephoned Gómez: “Tomorrow the zamuros – our buzzards – will eat Mexican meat.” The massacre did not reach Urbina who fled to the mountains to inexplicably reappear weeks later in Nice !, where El Americano had a villa.
The Mexican survivors were re-embarked with a bonus of $ 300 per head. Relations between Mexico and Venezuela resumed in July 1933. Gómez died in his bed in December 1935.
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