Corruption looms large in studies of twenty-first-century global governance, where scholars show it erodes trust in institutions and the state. Venezuela has drawn investigative reporting that traces how current elites entrench control, from military monopolies to petroleum marketed by commodity traders, often beyond meaningful oversight. Yet these networks have deeper roots, reaching back to the founding of the modern state under dictator Juan Vicente Gómez (1908–35). Doug Yarrington’s book reconstructs the patrimonial and bureaucratic practices that made corruption central to state building.
Drawing on his broader work on Latin American corruption and state formation, Yarrington examines early twentieth-century Venezuela under one of the hemisphere’s most brutal dictatorships. He argues that using public office for private gain was integral to Gómez’s style of rule and to the creation of the “most powerful national state Venezuela had ever known” (5). Using an emic approach, he defines corruption as the “use of public office and other public resources for private benefit” condemned by contemporaries (7–8). He distinguishes predatory corruption (direct extraction) from ambiguous/financial corruption (manipulating public assets such as funds or contracts) and applies these categories throughout (9).
The first four chapters map the web of public servants, governors, and military commanders that comprised the regime. Gómez sustained this coalition through a tacit bargain: officials could use office for private profit, often in coordination with one another and with the dictator himself (47). Predatory corruption operated through monopolies and selective taxation, most notably cattle monopolies after 1908 that forced municipal slaughterhouses to buy only from Gómez’s circle and squeezed competitors (60–63). Their national reach burdened businessmen without political ties and consumers compelled to buy the dictator’s beef regardless of price or quality (72). Federal tax farming supplied another lever: collectors paid a fixed sum for liquor taxes to the state and pocketed any surplus (98). Throughout, Yarrington shows how supporters and opponents justified or denounced this patrimonial order in the language of masculine honor and patriarchal respect (112–125).
Reforms that supposedly strengthened the state, ending tax farming and centralizing the military, did not dismantle patrimonialism; they sharpened it. The army modernized even as Gómez used soldiers as unpaid labor on his estates (38). Better tax collection expanded the revenue he could divert for private ends (43). Political prisoners and their families bore the brunt, facing constant extortion for money, labor, and resources (114). Coerced labor also built “public” goods, including highways that extended the autocrat’s reach nationwide. Still, greed had its limits: periodic anticorruption crusades targeted officials whose profiteering provoked outrage and threatened stability (47).
If predatory corruption drew broad condemnation, financial corruption was more ambiguous. In the final chapters, Yarrington examines the oil concession system that launched Venezuela’s petroleum industry. Because oil formally belonged to the state, concession trading drew into the governing coalition civilians from the professional classes, along with more precarious groups such as junior officers and hard-pressed civil servants (136). A discretionary fund in the Ministry of Interior Relations’ budget (chapter 7) became a key mechanism for distributing oil-derived public revenue to meet private needs (147). Though Gómez and his entourage used it to enrich themselves, it also met broader social needs, functioning as an early safety net (147–149). Economic insecurity thus pulled many citizens into financial-corruption networks, even as they denounced predatory abuses.
Yarrington then follows the post-Gómez period, showing how Eleazar López Contreras (1936–41) and Isaías Medina Angarita (1941–45) curtailed monopolies, tightened oversight of discretionary funds, and liberalized politics, enabling parties that made anticorruption a pathway to a modern state (185–212). The book closes with the corruption trials after Acción Democrática (AD) helped depose Medina Angarita in October 1945. Popular support soon waned because the prosecutions emphasized financial corruption, especially chapter 7, from which many Venezuelans had benefited, while critics cast the trials as partisan score-settling and affronts to private honor. The loss of middle-class backing deepened polarization and contributed to AD’s overthrow by a military junta in November 1948.
Overall, Yarrington offers a compelling account of corruption and anticorruption as engines of state formation, grounded in official correspondence, diplomatic dispatches, newspapers, and congressional debates. It deepens our understanding of the Venezuelan state’s inner workings and sits alongside the scholarship of Terry Lynn Karl, Brian S. McBeth, Jonathan Di John, Fernando Coronil, and Francisco Rodríguez, among others. More importantly, within the broader petro-state literature and Venezuela’s political economy scholarship, Yarrington shows that rent-seeking did not begin with oil’s discovery: it was already embedded in monopolies over everyday commodities like beef and booze (98). The book will interest historians of twentieth-century state formation as well as sociologists, political scientists, and economists.
