Packaging Capital in Venezuela

Abstract

Darlene Rivas has provided diplomatic historians, among others, with the most comprehensive study yet of Nelson Rockefeller's Latin American ventures. As a private capitalist, he launched a series of enterprises in Venezuela that combined his vision of entrepreneurship with corporate social responsibility. As a public figure he served as the energetic coordinator for Inter-American Affairs during World War II and later served a year-long stint as assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs. His postwar government activities were centered around the shaping of a new foreign economic policy for developing nations, especially in Latin America. After suffering frustrations and setbacks in that arena he gradually distanced himself from Latin American development issues and gravitated toward electoral politics, eventually becoming an activist governor of New York and vice president under Gerald Ford. The major contribution of this book—and the focus of this review—is, however, a richly detailed account of Rockefeller's “missionary-capitalist” role in Venezuela from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Nelson's minority interest in Venezuela's Jersey Standard affiliate, Creole Petroleum, led him to the land of Bolívar, where he first became exposed to the shortcomings of American industrial enterprise operating in a poverty-stricken country that was just emerging from decades of dictatorship. Early on, the author recounts two entwined stories that left a strong impression on Nelson: they involved a drunken, misbehaving U.S. ambassador and an American business executive's wife who had spent a total of eighteen years in Mexico and Venezuela and had not learned a word of Spanish. In contrast, he came to believe that Americans abroad, especially in less developed countries, should take missionaries as their exemplars, not aloof diplomats and profit-driven businessmen. This also fit into his idea that person-to-person contacts were vitally important to U.S.-Latin American relations, whereas American imperiousness abroad ill-served our country's interests.