Venezuela

Venezuela is the country where the organised Basque community was founded not by emigrants but by exiles. There were Basques there from the sixteenth century, and a Basque trading company controlled the country’s commerce for half a century, but when the Basque Government opened a Delegation in Caracas, in 1940, there was hardly any Basque presence already in place: the centres were built by the refugees of the Spanish Civil War, and behind them came, in the fifties, an emigration that was by then economic, drawn by Venezuela’s growth. That community, which by the middle of the century numbered between eight and ten thousand Basques, has since watched the country’s crisis sweep away a good part of its associational life and turn return into a frequent request.

They are, in fact, three different arrivals, centuries apart, and that is how the researcher Xabier Iñaki Amezaga Iribarren tells them. The first was that of the conquest, in the sixteenth century, with governors, officials and settlers of the colony. The second, between 1730 and 1785, brought the merchants, sailors and employees of a Basque company. The third, that of the exile, began in 1939 with the refugees of the Spanish Civil War and continued, after them, with the emigrants of the fifties.¹

The first left names behind. In 1546 Juan Pérez de Tolosa arrived to restore order in Coro and El Tocuyo.¹ Simón de Bolívar, born in 1532 in Bolibar (Bizkaia), settled in Caracas in 1589 and was its procurator general and alderman; he is the Biscayan ancestor of Simón Bolívar, and his story is told in Basques in Venezuelan history.⁵

The second was brought by the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas, which for more than half a century controlled trade between Venezuela and Spain and which has a chapter of its own here.¹²

The third is the one that gave rise to today’s Basque community, and it started almost from nothing. When the Basque Government opened its Delegation in Caracas, in 1940, there was in Venezuela, as was acknowledged at the time, no Basque presence beyond a few hundred missionaries who had arrived not long before.¹⁰ In Argentina or Uruguay, the exiles had found Basque centres founded decades earlier by emigrants; in Venezuela, the organised community was founded by the exiles themselves.¹⁰

The refugees of 1939 were followed by more Basques, who came from France between 1945 and 1947, and in the fifties by an emigration that was by then economic, drawn by the country’s growth.¹ Amezaga estimates that in 1956 between 8,000 and 10,000 Basques were living in Venezuela.¹