My last visit to Venezuela was in 2005 during which my cousins took me to visit the massive Las Macaguas Dam in Ciudad Guayana. As we walked the site, we eventually entered, in the “innards” of the structure, a small museum dedicated to the creatures encountered during the years of study and construction of Las Macaguas and also the even greater Guri Dam, the second or third largest in the world — sadly saddled with colossal incompetence resulting in far reaching failures for the entire country.
Corporate media reports, including Wikipedia, blame droughts for these life-threatening failures. However, to put it as diplomatically as possible, droughts did not suddenly show up with Chavez and Maduro. For further reading on the deterioration of Venezuelas electrical grid, refer to my posts on the Cuba-Venezuela nexus, such as here.
As we walked the museum we were awed by the variety and gigantic sizes of the insects on display. Childhood memories flooded back as I recalled seeing many of those or similar specimens live-and-in-color as we tramped about El Pao or fished in the Caroní or Orinoco rivers.
A recent email exchange with George and Richard Scheipe, the sons of a gentleman who taught school in El Pao in the 1950s, brought those memories back. George tells of John Tuohy, one of the “older kids” in El Pao, who had come to visit his brother, Ted Heron, Jr., in Pennsylvania, and had brought a dead giant centipede in his suitcase. The mischievous ones hid the critter in aluminum foil in the backyard and “would torment the local kids, including me, with it.”
These centipedes are the Scolopendra gigantea and are found almost exclusively in South America (but also southern Mexico) with many in Venezuela. They are venomous and their bite can be fatal to small children. In 2014 a 4-year-old in Venezuela died from a bite he incurred when he picked up an empty soda can into which a Scolopendra had hid. In 2015 a 19-year-old man was hospitalized in San Tomé and when he worsened he was taken to a major city for better care. He recovered.
These centipedes can grow as large as 12 inches and are very quick. They are carnivores who feed on any other animal it can overpower and kill, including other arthropods, insects, small birds, lizards, frogs, and snakes. Students have investigated their feeding on bats, something which was not known until relatively recently.
They “climb cave dwellings and hold or manipulate their heavier prey with only a few legs attached to the ceiling.” A study done in southern Mexico discovered that, contrary to earlier belief, bats were killed by these giants pursuant to clever hunting tactics.
It had been believed that the centipedes killed the bats in reaction to being disturbed by the latter when flying in or out of their caves. Careful observation disclosed that the hunters attach themselves to the high walls or ceilings waiting for their prey to fly close, upon which the Scolopendra pounce. “We have observed that, during the trajectory taken by the bats, some perch momentarily. It is during such brief stops that the giant centipede attacks and kills [he who hesitates is lost!].” Also, it is probable that as a bat flies very close to the walls it is also attacked and killed.
I appreciate the recollections of folks who lived in or who have some connection with mid-20th-Century El Pao. Truly we were blessed and had memorable — sometimes frightening — encounters with a unique flora and fauna which so fascinated great explorers such as Alexander Humboldt and others.
The image below gives us an idea of the massive migrations from Venezuela:
Unlike other parts of the world, Venezuelan migrants are usually family units or women with young children, as opposed to young men traveling on their own or in groups as has been seen in other recent mass migrations from other parts of the world. This is significant but is not the focus of today’s post, which is an update to comments posted recently (here).
When asked, many refugees cite the economic reality gripping the country, but in the same breath they also cite “crime” as a major concern to them and their families.
Of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world, based on murder rates, five are located in Mexico, and those rates are principally due to the drug wars. Of the remaining five, three are in Venezuela, and two in Brazil. Only one capital city has the dubious distinction of being on the list: Caracas, Venezuela, earns the bronze at third place.
The other two Venezuelan cities in the top ten are Ciudad Bolivar and Ciudad Guayana, both of which readers will recognize as I’ve mentioned each frequently in these posts. My father used to pick up the company payroll in Ciudad Bolivar and sleep under the stars on the long drive back in the 1940’s. Ciudad Guayana is the new metropolis composed of the old town of San Félix and the U.S. Steel mining town of Puerto Ordaz. By the time I left the land of my birth, Ciudad Guayana was a 40 to 50 minute drive and Ciudad Bolivar, about 2 hours from home.
In 1978, during a 3-week visit there, I had the doubtful honor to be present in Ciudad Guayana when it witnessed a shoot out worthy of Hollywood’s Gunfight at the OK Corral. A gang of armed thieves cased, broke in, and robbed a major jewelry shop while holding the owners and customers hostage. As they exited the store, they were met with a hail of bullets from the National Guard. Two slipped back into the store, tended their wounds, and discussed their escape. One ran out the back and was stopped cold in a volley of gunshots. The other ran out the front and he too was met by a broadside but somehow managed to crawl and limp into another store. Then he came out firing away, à la Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, before being cut down for good.
But most crimes do not end so spectacularly as they devastate homes and businesses, leaving a wake of innocents of all ages and sexes dead or physically and/or mentally maimed for life.
Venezuela has been struggling with violent crime for more than a generation but it is now experiencing widespread crime not seen since the devastations of the Caribs (if you don’t count the massive bloodletting during its early 19th century revolutions). We should not be surprised that Venezuela, a 20th-century immigration magnet for much of the world, is now a massive source of emigration whose numbers in the 21st-century have exceeded 4 Million, over 10% of its population. Just to give an idea of the scale, comparable number in the United States would be over 30 Million.
Those who point to Socialism as the cause of this desolation and havoc will get no argument from me. I would only suggest that the elephant in the room is not Socialism — everyone can see Socialism and its history of failure and death. What few see or are willing to acknowledge is the wreckage of the home in Venezuela (here).
And, going a bit deeper, seeing that the home is a divine institution established by the Triune God, that elephant also points the need for a return to Christianity.
Not only in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan refugee crisis is the largest ever recorded in the Americas. Sadly, there is precious little reporting thereon in the United States media. Ciudad Bolivar, on the Orinoco River, the 10th most dangerous city in the world. Ciudad Guayana, the world’s 7th most dangerous city, on the Caroní River (background) near its confluence with the Orinoco River (not pictured). Caracas, one of the most beautifully situated cities in the world and the third most dangerous. The only capital city in the top ten. The Elephant in the Room: the need for healthy homes and families
The following is a post by Rafael Marrón González which is making the rounds in Venezuela. For a refresher on Puerto Ordaz (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Ciudad Guayana) refer to posts, Life in an American Camp and Mining II and Guayana: The Reverse Miracle.
I came to Puerto Ordaz in December, 1963, and here I stayed.
I have witnessed the rise and the fall of one of the greatest cities of Venezuela. In the era when I arrived, Puerto Ordaz was beginning to “see the world” and, in its intimacy, due to it’s noble call to lead the development of great swathes of the country, it generated the 20th century’s last harmonious, multi-racial community on the planet.
I saw, day after day, the wonder of its architectural growth, both commercial and industrial. In her bosom, arose the most significant and complex metallurgical industry of Latin America. In those days, to go to America from Europe was to board a ship or plane to Puerto Ordaz to seek one’s fortune. She was sort of a modern Babel, that wonderful Puerto Ordaz, composed of an adolescent population that persists in the memories of those of us who populated its streets with the dizzying dynamic of youth. How it hurts to see her today, prematurely aged, poorly bathed, and worstly dressed, with her depressed facades and her sidewalks burst through by unpruned trees with abandoned coronas infested with guatepajarito [parasitic bush: untranslatable].
Walking about the lonely streets, empty joints, closed malls, centers, and streets abandoned for fear as soon as the sun begins to set, I do not recognize that city that never used to sleep but rather led a loud and long night until sunrise. Her best views have been invaded by the misery severely imposed by demagogic powers. A city now disrespected in her privileged spaces. There is no limit to the degradation of her expected end. Chaos is her daily bread.
Begging for food is now ubiquitous and neighbors on street corners despair for any transportation. Ignorance imposes preferences of poor taste; long held cultural practices now abandoned; ancient crafts are gone; and foolishness is now dressed up, crowned with titles on the anemic social pages. The cretinism of the newly (and suspiciously) rich, is heard by their loud applause at trashy performances, as they demand another grilled meat with cassava in the flea market of gastronomic decadence.
Her once florid freeway gardens have withered and a swarm of bars shout out the uncertainty that life has now become. A city that in her day, not so long ago, gathered the best in thought and technical expertise, both national and international, now displays its toothless ruins in Matanzas [the site of the city’s teeming, massive industrial works], its enthusiasm now overwhelmed, shut down, and known by the flapping of bats’ wings in its giant industrial sheds.
The ancient stacks that once announced prosperity, today herald diseases of the skin and lungs. Their toxic excretions poison the waters of the Orinoco. Children are born with aluminum inside their skulls; neurological effects camp nearby.
Her basic enterprises, Venezuela’s pride, undulate — like a canoe in rough waters — between the impact of intermittently paid salaries, technological obsolescence, and dashed productivity. Her laboring class now become engrossed in parasitic sadness in the service of an empowered ignominy which has emptied it of any conscience. Her history hides that tab that once she ostentatiously paid for suits and parties but now cowers with the embarrassment of being a have been. A swarm of damnable, protected thieves imposes sentences against dignity and permeates what’s left of the night life with their nauseating presence, while those who labor and have labored for lifetimes, stand aside.
I am not sure if I have succeeded in manifesting my indignation.
What intolerable infamy! What ugliness! What filth! Dirt, grime, and grease are now the identity cards of “equality.” Mold is now the strident patina of false brotherhood.
Alas! Alas! Puerto Ordaz! Now a mere gibberish of yellow pages and abandonment. A site of processions of thugs and murderers; of rude and gross speculators and carpetbaggers all looking for quick and easy money, of misery rooted in deplorable suburbs. A city of late awakening and shortened evenings. Of crime imposed for any posible error of interpretation. Of dead traffic lights, announcing at top volume the irresponsibility of brutish governors who accuse those who challenge them for their strident ineptitude. Like the underworld, they cannot be called out. There is no real authority. Only a payroll that demands paid vacations.
Alas! Alas! Puerto Ordaz!
I have lived 53 years in her and refuse to exile myself. But when I drive its desolate streets, as I pass each corner or enter a long forgotten passageway, I oft recall the intensity of it’s snatched life. She did not deserve this assault of inmoral and inept rulers. This violent aggression of barbarians and savages in taxis, motorcycles, and trucks, all dubiously acquired.
How much they hated a city that was on its way to being another Germany! Now reduced to a solitary shack, run over by caretakers focused on the furious selling and transportation of gems on gondolas carrying riches from the proud north of Brazil. Not only isolated, but dependent!
Alas! Alas! Puerto Ordaz!
One of the bridges crossing the Caroní River from San Félix (foreground) to Puerto Ordaz (background)
One of the many commercial/residential centers that began to dot Puerto Ordaz in the 1970’s and beyond.
Puerto Ordaz is in background, across the Caroní River, the “blueish”, darker color waters. San Félix is in the foreground, with Palúa, the Bethlehem Steel port, ships awaiting loading, in center of photo. The Orinoco is the “muddy” colored river. It runs about 200 miles from here to the Atlantic Ocean.
Through the early 1960’s, the Caroni was crossed to Puerto Ordaz via ferry. Photo shows Caroni River crossing from San Félix to the Puerto Ordaz site. Puerto Ordaz was, in effect, founded by the US Steel Corporation in 1952 for shipping ore from it’s operations in Cerro Bolivar to the United States. San Félix was founded in 1724. Both were “united” in 1961 to form Ciudad Guayana. Puerto Ordaz began to rise in the 1960’s. The owners of the jewelry store (with Omega signage) were very kind to us. I do not know who this is. But I include the photo as an example of the type housing that US Steel built in the Puerto Ordaz area. Similar to 1950’s United States suburbs. Above photo is from the mid-1960’s.
In the initial euforia of concessions by the Venezuelan government to American oil and iron ore companies, was any thought given to where these companies’ employees, many of whom would come from countries other than Venezuela, would live?
As it turns out, President Marcos Pérez Jimenez had given it much thought and had requested such companies establish “open cities” wherever possible. Puerto Ordaz, the crown jewel of Ciudad Guayana, whose impetus was The US Steel Company, was one result of the open city policy.
El Pao, where I was born, was more of what most folks think of when they conjure up images of an “American Camp.”
Jimenez understood that not all camps could be open cities. El Pao was deep in the Venezuelan jungle, relatively shut off from potential commercial centers, such as a major river, highway, airport, railway, etc.
On the other hand, the future Puerto Ordaz was situated at the confluence of two major rivers, one of which is the mighty Orinoco, the third or fourth largest in the world, measured by average discharge, meaning the river’s flow rate. I had to look this up and, from a layman’s perspective, this is probably the best illustration: “The volume of an Olympic-size swimming pool is 2,500 cubic meters. So the flow rate at the mouth of the Amazon [the world’s largest] is sufficient to fill more than 83 such pools each second.”
The flow rate at the mouth of the Congo and the Orinoco (second and third largest rivers) would each fill 16 such pools per second.
By the way, of the 10 largest rivers in the world, 5 are in South America.
As for El Pao, this area was explored by the Spanish 5 centuries ago. The Indians told them about a mountain which, when struck by lightning, would give off bright flashes. The Spanish investigated for themselves and confirmed the tales. They named the mountain, El Florero, meaning, Flower Pot, since the flashes looked like flowers on the mountain peak.
Actually, the area was rich in orchids and also an abundance of “purguo”, a tree which yielded very high quality rubber. In fact, the era in which the ore was discovered, was known as “la fiebre del balatá” (the balatá fever). Balatá refers to a natural gum of high quality found in the purguo. Mr. Aturo Vera, whom, years later, my father would often contract to drive us to fishing spots on the Caroní River, explored that area with his own father in the 1920’s. On one such journey, father and son espied a splendid ore specimen and took it with them to their home near the Caroní.
Word spread quickly and a miner, Simón Piñero, accompanied by his boss, entrepreneur Eduardo Boccardo, also explored and contracted an engineer, Frank Paglucci, to stake a claim. Mr. Vera, seeing all the excitement, also staked his claim, and rightfully so.
The ore was analyzed by American laboratories, found to be of extraordinary quality, and the Bethlehem Steel Company assigned their geologist, Earl H. Nixon, to the site.
On June 3, 1944 (3 days before D Day) , The New York Times reported, “The Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s big Venezuelan iron ore development, first disclosed as a prospect a few weeks ago, is now under way. Twenty American engineers and technicians are in charge, with some 600 native Venezuelans, skilled and unskilled, at work on the big project.” This project represented capital investments of $50 million ($1 billion in today’s money) and more in Puerto de Hierro (Iron Port), their deep sea port on the Atlantic.
By July, 1950, the first train load of ore was transported from El Pao to Palúa, the company’s river port on the Orinoco for transshipment to Puerto de Hierro. And in 1951, the seaport yielded its first shipment to the United States. The March 23 New York Times headline read: “First Cargo of Venezuela Iron Ore Arrives for Bethlehem Steel Plant; Sparrows Point Pier in Maryland Is Scene of Significant Ceremony Marking Start of 3,000,000-Ton-a-Year Shipments.” The article’s lead sentence read, “Vessels laden with iron ore have docked here for decades, but special significance attached to the arrival of an ore boat this morning.”
We’ll speak more of life in an American camp in future posts. For now, I’ll end this post by quoting some recent comments by folks who, when children, lived in Puerto de Hierro. This will give an idea of life in an American camp in Venezuela and also the pull of the land.
“That is the place of enchantment and he who has lived or even visited it will remember it for all of life. And I had the fortune of having been born there. Those good years of the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s…. The best …?”
“My! All those wonderful people who worked there are beautiful I tell you! I salute that wonderful and dear place and people!”
“The best town and the most beautiful place in Venezuela; the only beach with a diving board in the ocean. I developed my life there along with my parents and siblings. Eternal memories and the best times of my childhood and my youth. My best friends of my life were from there.”
“My beautiful town. I can never forget you, although all is different now.”
“What wonderful memories of my childhood, of my parents, of my siblings, of my neighbors who once lived and those who still live. I embrace you all!”
“My beautiful town. Now, it is not even the shadow of what it once was. How much sadness it brings me to see the ruin that it is now!”
“My town! I was born there in 1961. How I long to go and run there again. My adored land. Venezuela, how much sadness you bring me now! My dear Lord!”
“I could not have asked for a better childhood.”
Neither could I.
Puerto de Hierro on the Atlantic coast, in the state of Sucre. The Bethlehem Steel ceded this to the Venezuelan government and it is now a Venezuelan navy base.
The loading bridge over the Orinoco in the company port of Palúa. My father used to dive off that into the river. Folks called him Tarzan. El Pao under construction in the 1940’s. Men carved a modern road and railroad out of this jungle. Above is a 1940’s map. You’ll not see Puerto Ordaz thereon. It would grow across the Caroní from San Félix, at the spot between the Caroní and the Orinoco (the Caroní is that river which runs into the Orinoco at San Félix). El Pao is the spot denoted as “Iron Mining Area”. The confluence of the Caroní and the Orinoco rivers. Yes, at this point, the Orinoco is carrying much soil as it continues its journey to the Atlantic. It clears up again miles downriver. Puerto Ordaz grew on the right. Notice the ore ships on the right. Before the bridges were built, we’d cross by ferry. As the Caroní approaches the Orinoco the change in topography yields several series of rapids and falls. Above are the Cachamay Falls. An Intercontinental hotel was built here in the 1970’s. Ciudad Guayana. Foreground is San Felix (Old Town); background, across the Caroní, is Puerto Ordaz (New Town). Arturo Vera, second from right, accompanies Bethlehem Steel engineers arriving in 1934, in Ciudad Bolivar, the closest major city. Photo source: El Pao Yacimiento Pionero.
Arturo Vera. Died in 1990, age 88. I vividly remember him. As a child, I used to think he was a great driver as he’d drive us over seemingly impassable paths to places I could never find again, even if my life depended on it. My father would often remind me that Mr. Vera owned part of the area which became El Pao. He was an unassuming and kindly man. And a great driver!
Santiago Smith: The camp had many men like him: unusual backgrounds, hard workers, colorful, sometimes mysterious. I was privileged to know them in my childhood. Mr. Smith was born of English parents in the gold mining area. In the late 40’s that area began to be shut down and he and some companions had to look elsewhere for work. They came to El Pao. He worked and lived there until his death in 2010. He was close to a century by most estimates. Photo Source: El Pao Yacimiento Pionero.
