Aruba's history: a long campaign to stop answering to Curaçao

Who lived on Aruba before Europeans arrived

The earliest people on Aruba belong to what archaeologists call the Archaic or Pre-Ceramic period. They fished, hunted and gathered, leaned heavily on the sea, made their tools from stone and had neither pottery nor farming. Thirty-three Archaic sites have been identified on the island. A tool from Sero Muskita resembles one found at Arikok and suggests a date before about 2000 BC, and the National Archaeological Museum Aruba describes its subject as more than 3,500 years of Aruban culture.

Two burial grounds give most of what is known about these people. At Canashito the graves date from between 100 BC and AD 100, and isotope work showed that one of the five individuals buried there had grown up somewhere other than Aruba, on a different diet. At Malmok, used between AD 450 and 1000, the burial pattern suggests clans of 15 to 30 people, each grouped around an adult man whose grave was marked with stones.

The Archaic population drops out of the record around AD 950. By then the Caquetío had arrived from western Venezuela, probably from the Paraguaná and Guajira peninsulas, in a migration dated to between 850 and 1000. They spoke an Arawakan language, made pottery and farmed, and Aruba lay less than 30 kilometres from their communities on Paraguaná. The island was an outlying part of a chiefdom led by a hereditary figure called the diao, whose authority also reached Curaçao and Bonaire.

Aruba held five Caquetío villages over time, though not all at once: Ceri Noca at Santa Cruz, Tanki Flip at Noord and Savaneta, with two smaller sites near Tanki Leendert and Parkietenbos. They sat where several rooi, the island's dry gullies, came together and water collected. The dead were buried in large pots with a smaller pot turned upside down over the head, a practice the French explorer Alphonse Pinart heard described by an old islander at Savaneta in 1882. Oral tradition names Nicolaas Pyclas, who died around 1840, as the last Aruban to speak the island's original language.

Why Spain called Aruba a useless island

Spain claimed Aruba in 1499, according to Britannica, and in June 1501 Alonso de Ojeda received the right to exploit the coast of present-day Venezuela together with Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire. Neither Ojeda nor Amerigo Vespucci is thought to have landed on Aruba itself. The Spanish found no minerals worth mining on the three islands and listed them as islas inútiles, useless islands.

Between 1513 and 1515 the islands were emptied. An expedition under Captain Diego Salazar took an estimated 2,000 inhabitants of Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire, most of them to Hispaniola as forced labour, where many died in the gold mines or in the smallpox epidemic of 1518. People from the mainland later moved to Aruba again, and the indigenous population that remained was held under the encomienda, the Spanish grant of tribute and labour.

What Spain left behind was livestock. The conquistadors brought cattle, goats, sheep, donkeys, pigs and horses, and Aruba became in effect a Spanish ranch, with animals roaming free across the island. A Spanish royal decree of 1569 banned settlement on the Caribbean islands, a measure that did not cover the three leased islands off Venezuela. The Dutch geographer Joannes de Laet recorded in 1630 that Aruba held a few Indians and some Spaniards.

How the West India Company ran a horse island

The Dutch came to the southern Caribbean for salt, which their herring fleets needed and which the war with Spain had cut off. The West India Company captured Curaçao in June 1634, and the Dutch in Curaçao occupied Aruba and Bonaire in 1636. For the next two centuries Aruba was a dependency of Curaçao in every practical sense. After 1648 Peter Stuyvesant's plan to link the Caribbean islands with New Netherland assigned each island a product, and Aruba's was horses.

Britannica records that the colonial authorities used the island for horse breeding until the end of the eighteenth century, with local and mainland Indians working as herdsmen, and that land was sold to individual settlers only from the early nineteenth century. Its seven salt pans, counted in 1816, produced salt of poor quality in amounts that met local demand and little more.

Who was enslaved on Aruba

Aruba had few slave-based plantations, which Britannica gives as the reason few Arubans are of predominantly African descent. Slavery was nonetheless present, and a feature of it that sets the island apart is how many of the enslaved were indigenous. Dutch law generally prohibited the enslavement of indigenous people. In 1827 Commander Simon Plats found 51 Amerindians being held as pseudo-slaves by Aruban families and had their masters sign declarations recognising their freedom.

The population reports put about half of the enslaved in each group. By 1862, 15% of Aruba's population was enslaved, against 27% on Bonaire.

Britain held the island during the Napoleonic Wars, from 1806 to 1816 by the account Wikipedia gives and from 1805 by the account of the United States State Department, and returned it to the Dutch under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. It was then folded into the Colony of Curaçao and Dependencies.

What gold and aloe did for the island

In 1824 a 12-year-old herder named Willem Rasmijn found gold on Aruba, and the island had a gold rush. Mills were built to process the ore: the Bushiribana ruins on the north coast and the Balashi mill at the tip of the Spanish Lagoon survive, and the remains of mines lie at Miralamar in what is now Arikok National Park. Britannica dates the start of gold mining to 1824 and its end to the early twentieth century.

Aloe arrived in 1840 and took until 1890 to become a large export. Cornelius Eman founded Aruba Aloe Balm, and at one point two-thirds of the island was planted with it. The Aruba Phosphate Company worked a third resource, and its wharf and railway at San Nicolaas were still standing in 1924. None of the three made Aruba prosperous. Wikipedia describes the island as underdeveloped and economically disadvantaged through the nineteenth century, and Britannica says the economy stayed weak until oil.

How the Lago refinery remade Aruba

Oil had been found under Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, but the channel into the lake was too shallow for ocean tankers, so the crude had to be carried out in shallow lake tankers and moved to larger ships somewhere nearby. On 14 August 1924 a Scottish agent for the Lago Petroleum Company surveyed the old phosphate harbour at San Nicolaas, and work on a transshipment depot was under way by November. Construction of a refinery began on 24 February 1928. Standard Oil of New Jersey, later Exxon, bought the operation, and in 1927 a second and smaller refinery, the Arend Petroleum Company, opened for Royal Dutch Shell at Druif, west of Oranjestad. Arend closed in 1953.

Lago grew fast once war came. A contract to supply Britain with aviation fuel in 1938 had to be filled outside the United States, and after 1942 the refinery was expanded again. On 16 February 1942 the German submarine U-156 attacked it. The deck gun blew up through a gunner's error and the refinery was not damaged, but three of the lake tankers were torpedoed. The Dutch government in exile had taken the Aruban oil installations under its administration in 1940.

After the war Lago ran at full capacity and employed more than 10,000 people. About a thousand were foreign staff in supervisory posts. Most of the rest were Arubans and workers brought in chiefly from the British West Indies, and the foreign staff, mostly Americans, lived in Lago Colony, a company town east of the refinery with about 700 homes, a school, a hospital and a church, according to the Lago Colony collection at the University of Texas. Britannica attributes a large rise in population to immigration from the Caribbean, the United States, Venezuela and Europe in these decades.

Why Aruba wanted to leave the Netherlands Antilles

The wealth did not bring political weight. Aruba stayed subordinate to Curaçao, the seat of the Dutch administration in the western islands, and the call for autonomy that appeared in the 1930s was, in the account published by Aruba Today, a call to answer less to Willemstad and not a call to leave the Kingdom. Between September 1947 and January 1948, 2,147 Arubans signed a petition asking Queen Wilhelmina for financial, economic and administrative separation from Curaçao, and Albert Eman presented it on 18 March 1948.

The Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands, signed by Queen Juliana on 15 December 1954, made the Netherlands Antilles a country within the Kingdom with Aruba inside it. Aruba held 8 seats in the Antillean legislature, Curaçao 12, Bonaire 1, and Saba, Sint Eustatius and Sint Maarten shared one between them. Many Arubans saw the arrangement as dominated by Curaçao.

How Betico Croes turned the campaign into a movement

Gilberto François Croes, known as Betico, left the Aruban People's Party and founded the Movimiento Electoral di Pueblo in February 1971. His campaign put Aruban identity, folklore and the island's Indigenous and Latin American heritage at its centre, and by 1973 the party held 5 of Aruba's 8 seats in the Antillean legislature. In 1972, at a conference in Suriname, Croes proposed a Dutch commonwealth of four states, each with its own nationality. On 18 March 1976 Aruba adopted its own flag and anthem.

A referendum in March 1977 went overwhelmingly for independence, though the sources differ on the margin: the Wikipedia article on Aruba gives 82%, and the one on Croes gives 95%. The government of the Netherlands Antilles had declared the vote illegal in advance, and the Aruban Patriotic Party boycotted it. A general strike shut the island on 11 August 1977 until its union leaders were arrested on 18 August, and the Dutch prime minister, Joop den Uyl, opened talks. On 24 April 1983 Croes was shot in the stomach by a police officer, who was not prosecuted because it could not be shown that he had aimed at Croes.

How status aparte came about and what it deferred

A round table conference in March 1983 agreed that Aruba would become a separate country within the Kingdom on 1 January 1986, with independence to follow in 1996. The Dutch condition, as Aruba Today describes it, was meant to stop Curaçao and Bonaire following Aruba out and dissolving the Antilles. The island council approved the agreement unanimously in July 1985, with the Aruban Patriotic Party boycotting the vote, and a constitution was drafted that August.

Croes did not see it take effect. His party lost the election of November 1985, and on 31 December 1985, the night before status aparte, he was badly injured in a traffic accident. He died in Utrecht on 26 November 1986 without regaining consciousness. An estimated 40,000 people attended his funeral, on an island of about 65,000 in 1985, and he is remembered as the Libertador. His birthday, 25 January, is a national holiday. Henny Eman of the Aruban People's Party became Aruba's first prime minister.

The sources disagree on when independence was dropped. The Wikipedia article on Aruba says a convention in The Hague postponed it indefinitely in 1990 and that the article scheduling it was rescinded in 1995, with the process open to revival by referendum. The State Department dated the halt to 1990, at Aruba's own request. Britannica dates the decision to postpone to 1994. In 2010 the Netherlands Antilles itself was dissolved, and Curaçao and Sint Maarten became countries on the terms Aruba had held since 1986.

What became of the refinery after Lago

Exxon closed the Lago refinery on 31 March 1985 and began dismantling the plant and the colony. It had supplied 30% of Aruba's real income and 50% of government revenue, and unemployment rose to almost 20%. Croes had argued in the 1980s that the island should turn to tourism, and it did.

The refinery itself kept returning. The Aruban government took it over and sold it to the Coastal Corporation, and Britannica records that it reopened in 1990, reached full production in 1993 and closed again in 2012 after years of losses. Valero Energy owned it in between. In 2016 the government signed a deal with Citgo, the American subsidiary of Venezuela's state oil company, to restart it. That deal ended in 2019 after United States sanctions on the parent company, and on 9 October 2019 the government signed a memorandum taking back the 235,000 barrel a day plant and terminal. The government has since decided to close the oil industry for good and set the San Nicolaas site aside for other uses.