238 CHAPTER 10 RACE, NATION, AND THE MEANING OF FREEDOM, 1821–1888
royalist estates and public lands by a small group
of military caudillos. A decree of October 15, 1830,
compelling the sale of so-called uncultivated indig-
enous lands, gave the latifundists more opportuni-
ties to expand their landholdings. Labor relations
in the countryside continued to be based on slavery,
peonage, and various forms of tenancy, including
sharecropping and obligatory personal service.
Slavery in Venezuela, as in other parts of Latin
America, had long been in decline. Enslaved Af-
ricans’ defi ant opposition to enslavement, either
through passive forms of resistance, rebellions, or
escape to cumbes (runaway slave settlements),
had made slavery socially destabilizing and less
economically effi cient. Nonetheless, slave owners
continued to insist on the protection of their prop-
erty rights, which, under the terms of the 1821
law, would have required manumission of the
fi rst generation of free-born blacks in 1839. So the
Venezuelan Constituent Congress of 1830 adopted
a manumission law that extended their masters’
control until the age of twenty-one. Thereafter,
another decree established a mandatory “ap-
prenticeship” program that prolonged the age of
manumission from twenty-one to twenty-fi ve and
secured the patrón’s control over his labor force.
Continuing a tendency that began in the late co-
lonial period, however, many slave owners found
it more profi table to free their slaves voluntarily,
because they generally remained on their former
masters’ land as tenants or peons bound by debts
and other obligations. By 1841, 14,000 had been
freed in this manner—150 of them only because
they had reached the age of manumission—but
some 40,000 slaves remained in 1844.
The long revolutionary war had caused im-
mense material damage and loss of life—the
pop ulation had been reduced by 262,000—and
destroyed the fragile economic links between the
country’s different regions. By the 1830s, how-
ever, Venezuela experienced an economic boom,
based on the switch from cacao to coffee as its
principal export and the country’s integration into
the capitalist world market, which henceforth ab-
sorbed about 80 percent of Venezuela’s exports of
coffee, cacao, indigo, tobacco, and hides.
The high coffee prices that accompanied the
1830s boom made planters hungry for credit to
expand production by obtaining new land. For-
eign merchant capitalists, the Venezuelan export-
import merchants who were their agents, and
native moneylenders were happy to oblige, using
coffee crops and the planters’ estates as security,
but colonial legislation that regulated interest
rates and punished usury posed an obstacle. The
Venezuelan congress removed this impediment
by passing a credit law in 1834 that abolished all
traditional Spanish controls on contracts; the state
then enforced legally executed contracts, no mat-
ter how exorbitant the interest rates. By the late
1830s, with the world price of coffee in decline,
the Venezuelan economy was in serious trouble.
Creditors refused to refi nance their debtors, plung-
ing Venezuela into a severe depression.
The economic crisis caused a rift in the elite,
with the emergence of factions that turned into
political parties in the 1840s. One called itself
Conservative, but opponents dubbed its members
godos (Goths) to identify them with the unpopular
Spanish colonial rule. Páez was its acknowledged
leader, and it represented the views and interests
of the export-import merchants and their foreign
partners, the moneylenders, the high civil and
military bureaucracy, and some great landown-
ers. The Liberal Party was led by Antonio Leocadio
Guzmán and was a loose coalition of debt-ridden
planters, the urban middle class, artisans, intellec-
tuals seeking reform, and disaffected caudillos who
resented Páez’s long reign.
Guzmán’s rhetorical press attacks on Conser-
vative economic policies contributed to the grow-
ing social tension. A series of popular uprisings and
slave revolts between 1839 and 1852, which Páez
described as open warfare against private property,
terrifi ed the Conservatives, who raised the specter
of a general social race war waged by pardos and
slaves. Although Conservatives blamed Guzmán’s
infl ammatory propaganda, in fact, the Liberals
feared social revolution as much as their oppo-
nents and had no links to these popular revolts.
But the government, determined to crush them at
their supposed source, brought Guzmán to trial,