Antonio Guzmán Blanco, the most sophisticated Venezuelan…

Antonio Guzmán Blanco, the most sophisticated Venezuelan president of the nineteenth century, is also the most charismatic of the caudillos.

In office three times between 1870 and 1887, he has adeptly contracted loans for Venezuela, from which he has amassed a small fortune.

Guzmán Blanco has ambitious goals for Venezuela.

He wants to make Caracas a mini-Paris and he has built some theaters and a capitol, but these projects are on a very minor scale.

He is also good at progressive legislation, having declared education free and obligatory for all Venezuelans.

He has built the railroad from Caracas to Valencia and tried in other ways to modernize the country, but the facts are stacked against him in a country of over one million square kilometers with a wild and inhospitable topography and its some one million two hundred thousand inhabitants living mostly in rural areas.

The political stability of Venezuela is principally the doing of his principal lieutenant.

Guzmán Blanco decides in 1887, at the age of fifty-nine, to retire to Paris, where he will die in 1899, leaving behind statues of himself and other reminders of his prolonged direct and indirect rule.

Also, he leaves the country in relative peace.

His appointed successor, Hermógenes López, is a colorless caudillo, who inaugurates some of the projects Guzmán Blanco had planned, among them a submarine cable to Curaçao, which links Venezuela to the rest of the world, and the Valencia-Puerto Cabello railroad.