Caracas Chronicles

One of the many problems with the concept of mandatory readings is that one ignores or forgets that some books they force us to read at school can actually be good. The problem get worse when, as  it tends to happen often, literature teachers can’t appreciate those books and are unable to help students see their virtues, beyond what the thesaurus establishes.

This is what happened, at least to my generation, with historical Venezuelan novels like Las lanzas coloradas, by Arturo Uslar Pietri. You have to wait years until you can go back to it with the tools of an adult reader and the perspective of a Venezuelan in 2025, and decide how you really feel about the first and most famous novel of the quintessential intellectual of the 20th century in Venezuela. You may struggle a bit at the beginning, but keep reading, because once the action begins, you may be surprised by its vitality and crudeness.

The film that never was

As in Doña Bárbara, there is an indigenous witch in the service of evil; a murderous neighbor who steals land; and white people going mad in the jungle. As in País portátil, political violence is the center of the story. Las lanzas coloradas (a title related to a quote from José Antonio Páez) is set on a sugar farm in the Aragua valleys, El Altar, and what happens to three main characters: the owners, an irresolute man and his sister, a maiden kept away from the reality surrounding her; and the foreman, Presentación Campos, a mixed-race thug about whom we know, from the start, that despises both the slaves he rules over and his masters, who he can’t wait to replace through violence, thanks to the war that exploded in the region.

Action develops between 1812 and 1814, the collapse of the First Republic and the height of the Guerra a Muerte ethnic cleansing, which topples the Second Republic through the hordes of loyalist caudillos like the psychopath José Tomás Boves. Uslar Pietri, who had made contact with Europe’s literary vanguards, had introduced new resources to Venezuelan literature with his previous book, the short story collection Barrabás y otros relatos. However, the novel has storytelling faults you won’t find in the efficient Doña Bárbara. For me at least, Uslar Pietri was an historian and an essayist more than a novelist, and one can feel this when we see how he tried to show landlord Fernando debating with the patriotic society in Caracas the shock between the old catholic ideas and the concepts coming from the French Revolution. It is useful to inform you a bit about what those pioneers of independence were thinking, but it has the feel of dramatized scenes in a National Geographic TV documentary. In a few pages, Uslar Pietri shows how that idealism degenerated in the Guerra a Muerte, which is fine if you know nothing of that period, but in storytelling terms means to waste a very rich material.

Its first readers must have felt is as a tornado of modernity and creative freedom in the country that followed the Gómez dictatorship, and the Bolivarian cult since the Guzmán Blanco regime before that.

While Fernando is this romantic hero that can spend a night awake because a sort of mysticism crisis, Presentación Campos seems to be moved by an automatic evil coming from the fact he belongs to the caste of pardos, the brown people above the slaves and indigenous that in the novel are victims barely capable of speaking, and under the susceptible whites who fall under religious and political fanaticism. However, Presentación is more verosimile than Fernando, as are those other landlords who resist the republicans, who expect from the former to gamble on the heritage they still have for a lost cause. One can almost imagine the business people of the 21st century trying to decide whether to fund chavismo or the opposition before an election.

When Presentación sets everything on fire and takes with him the slaves to the Boves army, the novel gets better, and gives us what we want from historical fiction: to be transported to another time and place. Uslar Pietri triumphs at making us see how things were in that horrible year of 1814. How the rich saw that, since the earthquake of 1812, the counterattack of the Spanish general Monteverde and the massacres by Boves, that the revolution was finished for good. How the looting and killing squads were formed in the times when Boves was the main actor of the conflict.

This is not a patriotic novel. It is the opposite of that pamphlet they made us read as a history book, Eduardo Blanco’s Venezuela heroica. I wonder how the initial readers of Las lanzas coloradas reacted; they must have felt it as a tornado of modernity and creative freedom in the country that followed the Gómez dictatorship, fed with decades of Bolivarian cult since the Guzmán Blanco regime in the 1870s. Someone from today, who hasn’t read Las lanzas coloradas, might feel something similar, after decades where chavismo preached about the Independence Wars and even Boves.

Uslar Pietri was one of those who insisted, until the end, that our salvation was in education, not fanaticism, and work, not devastation.

This must have been the first novel that, besides the chronicles it’s based on (like those of loyalist José Domingo Díaz), jumped into the violence and unraveling of that society during Guerra a Muerte, when colonial order was dismantled across the General Captaincy of Venezuela. Uslar Pietri was bringing something new to the great national story, and not only because he used some influence from the literary vanguard of the 1920s. As he told many years later to historian Rafael Arráiz Lucca, what he initially wanted was to make a new history of Independence, around the first centenary of Simon Bolívar’s death in 1830. Uslar Pietri wanted to write an epic film like those that the Soviets were making, such as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. The project failed, but the script he wrote was the draft for this novel that offers great scenes, and that continues to be interesting almost a century after.

The foundation of a discourse

Las lanzas coloradas was written in Paris between 1929 and 1930. It’s a novel about the Venezuelan past written from long distance, in that place so politically tense and culturally rich that was France between the world wars, where Uslar Pietri lived several years as the culture attaché in the Venezuelan embassy, before coming back to Caracas in 1934. It wouldn’t be the only time that this prolific, restless writer would embark on a novel when he was spending time abroad, far from his Venezuelan public. In 1947, exiled in New York because of the 1945 coup against the Medina administration where he worked, he wrote El camino de El Dorado.

He penned two other novels in the 1960s, Un retrato en la geografía and Estación de máscaras; in 1976, living again in Paris as the ambassador to Unesco, he returned to the genre with Oficio de difuntos, his successful participation in the Latin American tradition of the dictatorship novel. In Paris he also wrote La isla de Robinson, about the revolutionary thinker Simón Rodríguez. Then he won the Rómulo Gallegos prize with a last historical novel, written in Venezuela but with a non-Venezuelan character, the Spanish aristocrat Juan de Austria: La visita en el tiempo.

In 1931, when Las lanzas coloradas was published (as with Doña Bárbara, first in Madrid, but with another house, Zeus), Uslar Pietri was 25. Five years later, he wrote the most important op-ed in Venezuelan history, not because it influenced things, but because it’s been quoted as a dismissed prophecy: “Sembrar el petróleo”. In this novel we won’t find the “devil’s excrement”, but one of Uslar Pietri’s obsessions, El Dorado, the metaphor of the vice of seeking instant wealth, even if it means to use violence, instead of building a working, productive society from the land to the industry. The same preoccupation we still have in 2025, which Uslar Pietri did not invent; we might say it goes back to those conquistadors in the early 1600s that depleted the pearl reserves in Margarita island.

In this brief, irregular novel that remains essential we find the violence, the ignorance, the beauty of the land, the vastness of the wasted country.

In this sense, this historical fiction is connected with the thinking of its author, a thinking that translated into a mountain of content and that had real influence at some moments, across a long life of extraordinary productivity. To speak about what Uslar Pietri did as a politician, professor, TV host, Education minister, senator, editor, ambassador and even presidential candidate would need many more posts; it’s already demanding trying to resume his literary legacy, for which he was awarded the Príncipe de Asturias prize. He was one of the most hard-working public figures of 20th century Venezuela, people who did several things across their lives. And one of those who insisted, until the end, that our salvation was in education, not fanaticism, and work, not devastation. He passed away just when a new wave of fanaticism and devastation was rising over the horizon of the country he loved; nothing of what happened next would have surprised him

The first of the Uslars was a soldier of fortune, a German veteran who fought for England in the Napoleonic Wars and joined the mercenary army recruited by Venezuelan patriots in Europe. Johannes von Usseler ended up as a close friend of Páez and a member of the 1830 elite, married a girl from Valencia, Dolores Hernández, and owning a hacienda close to the site of the Carabobo battle. The country he knew was the one described by his great grandchildren: the writer Arturo and the historian Juan, whose Historia de la rebelión popular de 1814 is one of the classics supporting the thesis that the Independence War was a civil war rather than an international war, defended by the old left and chavismo… and also by the right that is today vindicating the link with Spain. 

History is complicated and has a knack for irony. Las lanzas coloradas, the first relevant book of the great liberal intellectual that the left always distrusted, was re-published in the Colección Bicentenario of Centro Nacional del Libro, with the same prologue of a Nicolás Maduro Moros that all those books have, available for everyone in the internet. There, in that brief, irregular novel that is still essential (which is not the same as mandatory), we find the violence, the ignorance, the beauty of the land, the vastness of the wasted country. All our pending matters, our traumas. It makes us remember that past is not as remote as we think. And gives us some hours of fine reading.