“Disputed El Dorado”: The Venezuelan Imbroglio and the Nature of the New Monroe Doctrine, 1890-1904

• In Event: Ecological Imaginaries and the Making of Trans-regional Landscapes

Abstract

The border separating the independent Republic of Venezuela from the British colony of Guiana had been contested for generations. By the 1890s, however, the issue reached a boiling point when British colonial authorities claimed the Orinoco River, long assumed to sit entirely within Venezuela, as the new border. This not only threatened to project British territory westward over hundreds of miles of the Venezuelan jungle but also seemed to open up to European colonization and capitalist development of the river’s lush delta region. For observers in the United States, both for the government and cultural critics, the “Venezuelan imbroglio” triggered deep-seated anxieties of a Scramble for the Americas – a competitive re-colonization of the Western Hemisphere similar to the recent carving up of the African continent. The significance of the Venezuelan borderland, and especially the framing of the Orinoco delta as a pristine and vulnerable “El Dorado,” gave policymakers in the United States a now-or-never test case for the Monroe Doctrine, a seventy-year-old statement of US policy that seemed tailor-made for exactly such a scenario.
This paper examines the contested borderlands and the transnational and trans-imperial crisis involving Venezuela, the United States, and Great Britain that resulted through the lens of environmental history and the ecological imaginary. Using the rhetoric of critics in the United States in particular, I argue that the imagined landscape of the Orinoco Delta was used to justify the extension of US power over the region. The border dispute has exemplified the rise of the United States as a world power. Still, historians have too often focused on official exchanges between great statesmen, overlooking how culture, non-state actors, and especially nature – both physical and imagined – have supported the extension of that power.

Author

• Mark Lewis Reynolds, University of California Riverside