ABSTRACT
The Venezuelan people will not forget the Gómez period, not only because of his cruelty towards his opponents who were faithful to their love of liberty and democracy which is a vital part of our national ethos, but also because of the way in which he hawked the country’s wares to the foreign companies which exploited us. Competition between the oil companies to get concessions in our country grew more intense after the end of the First World War. As a result of the war liquid fuels acquired a supreme importance which they had not previously enjoyed. In Venezuela the British arrived first. Royal Dutch Shell, in an operation which Sir Henry Deterding once described as the greatest financial adventure of his life, bought up 51 per cent of the shares of the Caribbean Petroleum Company. The Venezuelan government may have no foreign creditors, but our country’s subsoil has been divided up among the great oil trusts.
