Venezuela’s forgotten Armenian community
Political turmoil, socioeconomic woes, massive emigration, and high crime rates have lately dominated media coverage of Venezuela. But beyond recent headlines about the country’s political earthquake, a potential recalibration of its alignment with Russia, and speculation over the retraction of its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia lies a far lesser-known but no less intriguing story: Venezuela’s small but vibrant and entrepreneurial Armenian community. Numerically modest compared to South America’s larger Armenian diasporas in Brazil and the Southern Cone, the Armenians of Venezuela have nonetheless maintained remarkable cohesion and made persistent efforts to preserve their culture, identity and collective memory amid the country’s broader upheavals.
Decades before the first wave of Armenian immigration to Venezuela, a Venezuelan with no Armenian roots became one of the most important eyewitnesses to the greatest catastrophe to befall the Armenian people: the Armenian Genocide. Rafael de Nogales Méndez, known to his erstwhile Ottoman comrades as Nogales bey, is often remembered in the Spanish-speaking world as “nuestro Lawrence de Arabia hispano” (“our Hispanic Lawrence of Arabia”). Yet his brief and largely inconsequential encounter with T. E. Lawrence during an Ottoman campaign in the Levant was far from the most significant episode of his wartime experience.
A self-described soldier of fortune — Memorias de un soldado de fortuna (Memories of a Soldier of Fortune) is the title of one of his two memoirs — de Nogales fought in no fewer than half a dozen wars across several continents over a military career spanning four decades. Born in 1877 into an affluent family in San Cristóbal, on Venezuela’s border with Colombia, he was educated in Western Europe and reportedly spoke eight languages. Having participated in the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, the early stages of the Mexican Revolution, and a failed coup in his native Venezuela, de Nogales traveled back to Europe following the outbreak of the First World War. After failing to enlist in the French army after refusing to renounce his Venezuelan citizenship, he ultimately joined the Ottoman army, serving under German commanders and later being dispatched to the Caucasus front. A practicing Christian, he was tasked with leading tens of thousands of Muslim Ottoman troops against Armenian insurgents in Armenian-populated regions, including Erzurum, Van, and Diyarbakir (Dikranagert/Tigranakert), where, as he later wrote, he witnessed firsthand the systematic mass murder of Armenian civilians carried out under orders from the Ottoman high command. Distinguished and decorated, de Nogales continued to serve in the Ottoman gendarmerie until the empire’s defeat, rising to the rank of general. A decade later, he published Cuatro años bajo la media luna (Four Years beneath the Crescent), a memoir that documented the massacres and deportations he had witnessed and remains one of the rare first-hand accounts of the Armenian Genocide by a non-Armenian officer in Ottoman service.
In the first half of the 1930s, more than a decade after the dispersal of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, the first wave of Armenian immigration to Venezuela began during the third and final presidency of Juan Vicente Gómez, whose fiscal policies had largely insulated the country from the worst effects of the Great Depression. In subsequent decades, more Armenian migrants arrived from the Middle East alongside much larger numbers of Arab Christian and Druze immigrants from Iraq and the Levant, drawn by Venezuela’s expanding oil economy. Like many Arab Christian newcomers, Armenians settled across cities along Venezuela’s densely populated Caribbean coastline, with smaller numbers reaching hinterland cities such as San Cristóbal.
Beyond major urban centers like Caracas, Valencia, and Maracay, Armenian families also established themselves in oil-linked cities such as Puerto La Cruz and Lechería. Many became business owners, while others worked in the service sector. As with Arab Venezuelans, Armenians developed a visible presence in jewelry retail, small-scale import and export of consumer goods, construction, and hotels and hospitality.
