Donna Crespo, who besides being the greatest smuggler in the country was a shrewd judge of men, had taken a pronounced dislike to Andrade and advised strongly against his selection. Without knowing how truly she spoke she predicted that if Andrade were made President, Crespo would be dead within six months. I added my advice to the Donna’s, for I knew Andrade was a weak man and one who could not be trusted to hold the country with the tight rein which his agreement required. Powerful friends of Crespo in Trinidad also urged him to select a stronger man, but he could not be moved. He credited Andrade with having saved his life, on the occasion when I sent a galloping warning of the plot to murder him, and, as a monument to him and an evidence of his friendship, he planned that he should be made President by the first “popular election” in the history of Venezuela. The peons idolized Crespo because they felt that he was more nearly one of their own class, as compared with aristocrats of the Guzman Blanco type. He was so well liked by the common people and had such a strong grip on the country that he was able to carry out the idea which his loyal friendship inspired, but with disastrous results in the end, to himself, to Andrade, and to Venezuela.
On election day the soldiers at Guatira, Guarenas, and Petare, surrounding towns which I visited from Caracas to get a close view of the unique proceeding, doffed their uniforms and donned blouses, with their revolvers strapped on underneath, marched to the polls and voted as often as was required. Other towns throughout the country witnessed the same performance. The peons also voted for Andrade, either because they knew Crespo wanted them to or because the soldiers so instructed them, and they kept at it until the designated number of votes had been deposited. For a popular election it was the weirdest thing that could be imagined, yet it was so proclaimed. As though to disprove this boast it was immediately followed by mutterings of discontent from the better class of citizens, and on the night of Andrade’s inauguration General Hernandez, the famed “El Mocho,” who was Minister of Public Improvements in Crespo’s Cabinet but an opponent of the new President, took to the hills at the head of three thousand troops and raised the standard of revolt. Crespo really was responsible for the curse of Castro, for had he selected a strong man as his successor the mountain brigand never could have commanded a force sufficiently powerful to overthrow him.
Within a month Andrade went through the form of appointing Crespo Commander-in-Chief of the Army, in order that he might clinch his dictatorship. For a while Crespo contented himself with enjoying his new title and directing operations from the capital, but the Hernandez revolution finally assumed such proportions that he took the field in person to stamp it out. The two armies met in the mountains near Victoria on June 12, 1898. Hernandez was led into a trap, given a drubbing, and captured. After the battle Crespo walked across the field and was leaning over a wounded man when he was shot from behind and instantly killed. It was claimed that the shot was fired from the bush by one of the escaped rebels, and it was so reported, but no one who was at all on the inside accepted this explanation. The bullet that killed Crespo was of a peculiar pattern and exactly fitted the pistol of one of his own officers, who was not a Venezuelano. I doubt if there was another weapon exactly like it in the whole country. The responsibility for the murder, for such it undoubtedly was, could easily have been fixed, but the cowardly Andrade refused to order a real investigation and, of course, there was no prosecution. Crespo’s body was packed in a barrel of rum and brought to Caracas for burial.
The capture of “El Mocho” checked the spirit of revolt, but not for long. Andrade had nothing to commend him but his honesty, which quality was so little understood in Venezuela that it counted for nothing, and he became more and more unpopular. He was surrounded by plotters, even within his official family, and only their inability to agree on his successor prevented his speedy overthrow. Some few months after Crespo’s death, Castro, who had made himself Governor of the State of Los Andes, visited Caracas and called on Andrade with the demand that he be appointed to an important position in the new administration as the price of peace. Andrade, to his credit be it said, not only refused to appoint him to any office but flouted him, and Castro left the Yellow House in a rage. He sought the councils of Andrade’s enemies and, after many conferences, it was arranged that there should be a general insurrection early in the following Summer. The question of filling the presidency was left open, with the understanding that it should go to the leader who developed the greatest strength during the campaign.
Castro went back to his mountain home, to discover that his cattle had been seized and a warrant issued for his arrest, at the instance of Andrade’s friends, for cattle stealing. He resorted to his old trick of dodging across the border, but a similar warrant was secured from the Colombian Government, which had no more love for the Indian upstart than had the one at Caracas. In fact, Castro at one time seriously had considered starting a revolt in Colombia in the hope of gaining the presidency. With officers of both countries searching for him he went into hiding and remained under cover until May 23, 1899, when he invaded Venezuela with a force of sixty peinilleros, so called from the fact that they were armed with the peinilla, a sword shaped like a scimitar. They were of the lowest type of Indian, but brave and hard fighters. His old cattle-rustling neighbors hailed him with joy, for until then they never had dreamed that any man from the mountains could become a really important factor in Venezuelan affairs, and more than a thousand of them flocked to his standard.
Supposing that the other parties to the revolutionary agreement would carry out their part of the programme, and that he would join forces with them as he neared the capital, Castro set out on his march toward Caracas. Andrade had become so unpopular by this time that he encountered little opposition, and as he captured successive towns he opened the prisons and the freed convicts fell in behind him. When he reached Valencia, less than one hundred miles from Caracas, he had an undisciplined but effective force of three thousand bloodthirsty brigands. General Ferrer was stationed there with six thousand well-equipped regulars, and though he was by no means enthusiastic in his loyalty to Andrade he did his duty as a soldier, according to the quaint standards of the country. He marched his men out and surrounded Castro, with the exception of a conspicuous hole through which the latter could escape, and then went into camp for the night. This proceeding was in strict accord with the ethics of that strange land. Except in extreme cases it is the unwritten law that when a rebel leader is encountered by a superior government force, the regulars must surround him with a great show, but be careful to leave a wide hole in their line through which he can run away during the night. Invariably he takes advantage of his opportunity and it is officially announced that he “escaped.” Of course, after a rebel chieftain has made several escapes of this kind and still continues in revolt he is surrounded in earnest, but harsh measures are not resorted to until he has had ample opportunity to escape or come into camp and be good.
Castro violated all the precedents of his plundering profession by failing to run through the hole that had been left for him. When Ferrer saw him the next morning, in the middle of the ring calmly waiting for the fight to begin, he was nonplussed. He could not understand that method of warfare and, concluding that Castro must be a real hero and perhaps, as he even then claimed to be, a genuine “man of destiny,” he solved the problem by joining forces with him, for which he was subsequently rewarded by being made Minister of War. Castro learned from Ferrer that he was alone in the revolution, his promised partners having failed to take the field on account of bickerings and jealousies among themselves. This discovery and the addition of Ferrer’s forces gave him his first really serious notion that he might become President, and he marched forward in a frenzy of bombastic joy. He picked out a star as his own and ceremoniously worshipped it. Clearly his star was in the ascendant, figuratively at least, for at Victoria, only thirty-five miles outside of the capital, he made terms with General Mendoza, who was disgruntled with Andrade, and picked up another army. When the tottering President heard of this final evidence of disloyalty he boarded a gunboat at La Guaira, taking with him a well-filled treasure chest, and went to Trinidad. The alleged warship leaked badly and Andrade, who had a sense of humor, sent word back to Castro by her commander to have her repaired at once so that she might be in better shape for a hurried departure when it should come his turn to be deposed.
By this time the people of Venezuela, ripe for a change of administration and believing that no one could be worse than Andrade, had begun to find out, as had Castro himself, what a powerful person he really was, and they accepted him as their master. He entered Caracas without opposition on October 21, 1900, and, rejecting the modest title of Provisional President, which his predecessors had used, proclaimed himself “Jefe Supremo” or “Supreme Military Leader.” He filled all important posts with men from the mountains, on whose loyalty he could rely, and as they were able to secure plenty of graft, not one penny of which was overlooked, he very soon had a tight hold on the country. One of his first acts was to release Gen. Hernandez. He soon found that the old warrior was too patriotic and too dangerous to be at large, so he slapped him back into San Carlos, on the pretence that he was planning an insurrection, and kept him there for years. On March 30, 1901, Castro was elected by Congress to fill out the unexpired part of Andrade’s term and in the following February he was elected Constitutional President. Then began in earnest his reign of robbery, through the establishment of monopolies whose profits went to his private purse, and his vicious anti-foreign policy which, through the murders and injustices that were committed in its name, made the Boxer uprising in China look like a soft-spoken protest.
I was not in Caracas to witness the advent of Castro, as I had returned to Catalina more than two years before, immediately after Crespo’s funeral. During my stay at the capital I had come into possession of a block of stock in the Orinoco Company which made it better worth my while to stay with it, and I had become infected with the idea that if we were let alone the concession could be developed into a very valuable property. It was soon apparent, however, that we were not to remain undisturbed. So long as Crespo was alive I was all-powerful at Catalina, but with his death my influence began to wane and the rights of the company to be trespassed upon. The natives could not see how our concession, an integral part of Venezuela, could ever be anything but their own property; they could not, or would not, understand that the government had given away territory from which they could be debarred. It was only the influence of the Jefe Civile that had kept them in bounds before and with the death of my friend Crespo, that official suddenly became at least lukewarm in his loyalty to the law and to me. It naturally followed that the natives overran the concession and did more and more as they pleased. They refused to pay royalty on the balata gum, which they carried off in enormous quantities, and stole everything except the headquarters building and the iron ore, which was too heavy and not worth while. The Jefe Civile himself violated the terms of our concession and extortions of all sorts were winked at or openly approved. As Andrade’s unpopularity increased my troubles grew, for the natives took sides and began to spy on each other, with the result that false and malicious reports were sent to Caracas as to the company’s attitude.
When the threatened revolution became a fact and Castro took the field, Andrade assumed a much more friendly air, but it was too late to be of any value. He sent General Marina up the Orinoco to try to arouse enthusiasm for his cause in the east, which section furnishes the only soldiers that can cope with the hardy mountaineers of the west. Marina came to Catalina and asked me to do my best to hold my district in line for Andrade, and gave me his word that if I did so the President would grant me anything I asked for as soon as the revolt was suppressed. At just about the moment this request was made Andrade was fleeing from La Guaira and Castro was assuming full control at Caracas.