Curaçao

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Curaçao

The Netherlands Antilles, consisting of three Leeward (Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire) and three Windward islands (Saint Maarten, Statia, and Saba), were before 1954 officially known as "Curaçao and its dependencies." After they acquired autonomy within the Kingdom of the Netherlands in that year, Curaçao remained the administrative center, with 50 percent of its total population. The official language is Dutch; however, most of the people speak Papiamento, a Portuguese-based Creole language familiar to the Criolo of Cabo Verde. The people on the Windward Islands speak English; the population of those islands is largely Protestant, whereas those in the Leeward Islands are predominantly Catholic with a (mostly white) Protestant minority.

Curaçao was a trade post in colonial times, slaves, sugar and salt being its principal commodities. Slavery was common to all islands, with the exception of Aruba. Curaçao had a large slave population; in 1780 there were 13,000 slaves, 70 percent of the island's population. When slavery was abolished in 1863, a third of the population of the Netherlands Antilles was officially registered as having that status. For all the Antillean islands, but especially for Curaçao, the basis of the subsequent "segmented society," with its fascination and fixation on color and race relations, was laid out. The most obvious characteristic of the Curaçaoan social structure up to the 1970s (and perhaps into the early twenty-first century) was the powerful dividing line between "white" and "colored."

After the discovery of huge oil reserves in Venezuela, Shell built a refinery on Curaçao in 1916; Standard Oil was established on Aruba. In 1958 the per capita income of the Antilleans was almost one and one-half times as much as in the motherland. But when Venezuela built its own refineries, the Antillean ones were forced to cut back and rationalize. In 1966 between 15 and 20 percent of Curaçao's workforce was unemployed. The result was a transgenerational poverty underclass of from 20 to 25 percent of the population, concentrated in from ten to fifteen squatter neighborhoods.

Curaçao sought the solution to its economic woes in offshore banking, maintaining a certain standard of prosperity until the mid-1980s, when the U.S. government restricted access to Caribbean banks and tax havens. In the 1990s the island government tried, in a lukewarm way, to promote external tourism, an endeavor that had only a limited success. The island, together with the other remaining Antillean islands, became gradually more dependent on development aid from the Netherlands, thereby accumulating huge internal debts.

The political structure of the Netherlands Antilles—with six, and later five, islands—was established in 1954 with the perspective of incorporating Indonesia with the Antilles into a kind of commonwealth, with dual levels of "national (i.e., Antillean)" and "island" governments with overlapping powers and conflicting loyalties. In 1986 Aruba left the political structure of the Netherlands Antilles, considering Curaçao as a kind of colonizer. Aruba received a status aparte as the third "country" within the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba]. Political splits between the island governments and between the islands and the central Antillean government in Curaçao produced and produces ill-feeling towards what was called the "colonization by Curaçao." After several efforts at restructuring the complicated political relation between the European and the Caribbean parts of the kingdom, the Dutch in 2006 succeeded in convincing the government of the Antilles to dissolve the political structure of Antillean "country." The Dutch offered in return a privileged status of municipality in the case of Bonaire, Saba, and Statia and a status aparte like Aruba's for Curaçao and Saint Maarten. If the island populations would agree, the Dutch would exonerate the Antillean internal debt of around € 3 billion (US$ 4.2 billion) in exchange for remission of the internal debt. The island government of Curaçao initially refused to agree and announced a renegotiation of the internal debt. After elections in mid-2007, however, Curaçao's island government also agreed with the new status aparte.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Oostindie, Gert. Paradise Overseas; the Dutch Caribbean: Colonialism and Its Transatlantic Legacies. Oxford: Macmillan, 2005.

Jong, Lammert de, and Dirk Kruijt, eds. Extended Statehood in the Caribbean: Paradoxes of Quasicolonialism, Local Autonomy and Extended Statehood in the USA, French, Dutch and British Caribbean. Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 2006.

Dirk Kruijt

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture