El Pao – Page 10 – The Pull Of The Land

Breakdowns In The Fringe

October 11, 2019October 11, 2019 Richard Barnes

In El Pao in 1958, we children did not know that, back in the States a horrible drama was unfolding, which, as I saw decades later, confirmed a comment I had heard. Something about breakdowns in the fringes of society, if left unaddressed, would take center stage.

This was an era when, for the most part, certain subjects were not discussed in the presence of children. I recall sitting in the El Pao bar with WWII veterans and never hearing a single curse or blasphemy. So much was the care to not offend children, that when Hollywood profanity was unleashed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s my shock at the language suddenly present in films was genuine and guileless.

So it does not surprise me that I only heard about the Starkweather murder spree decades later, when movies and at least one rock song were based thereon or alluded thereto.

We children did hear conversations about movies like East of Eden and Rebel Without A Cause. Films which, according to the general tenor of the discussions, reflected disaffected, conflicted, alienated, and mutinous youth. You might call them Jean-Paul Sartre’s offspring. Furthermore, when families were portrayed, the depiction was not flattering.

I remember seeing Rebel Without A Cause during a movie night in the camp. Several things struck me: the father walking around wearing a girly apron; the absence or diminishment of God; an utter incomprehension as to what exactly was bothering the James Dean character; and revulsion at the Dean character’s drinking the family milk directly from the bottle and placing it back in the refrigerator. As usual, I assumed these themes were too profound for children; hence my distaste was probably unwarranted. However, I wasn’t alone in the confusion, as I heard adults talking about it and also expressing less than full admiration.

The series of aforementioned events took place in Nebraska. The protagonists were a nineteen-year-old young man who dressed, combed his reddish hair, and acted like the Rebel’s James Dean; and a thirteen-year-old girl who dressed and acted as much as possible as her Dean-like boyfriend, except her hair was dark brown.

These two could be Exhibit A for those Americans who “knew”, in a guts-knowledge sort of way, that the theatre, of all other arts, had perhaps the greatest influence or effect on behavior. But most did not know the men across the Atlantic who worked obsessively to use the stage and the theatre precisely to influence the society in which they were reared. Men such as Bertolt Brecht and, of even more influence in America, Kenneth Tynan, and a few others, who were transparent in their purpose: to promote hedonism and permissiveness, including the unrestrained use of coarse, blasphemous, profane language on the stage and in public: some, because they believed there was a link between the utter denial of self-denial and their socialistic political agenda; others, because they simply were compelled to tear down whatever Christian pillars remained in what they considered to be a stifling, boring, bourgeois society.

So we should not be surprised that Brecht fervently worked to use art “not as a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” He also said, “Don’t expect the theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them.”

Kenneth Tynan’s oeuvre can probably best be summed up with his, “I hope I never have to believe in God, it would be an awful confession of failure.” Well, he succeeded wildly in coarsening our culture. It is sad to think that, despite his ugly outlook, he did admire C.S. Lewis, who had been his tutor at Oxford. After having read Lewis’s The Hideous Strength, he said, “How thrilling he makes goodness seem — how tangible and radiant!”. It is unfortunate that he did not follow through with this admiration.

I will readily concede that by the time of these men’s work, there was already a demand, however inchoate, in western audiences for the excreta they would put out. But their impact is undeniable, nevertheless.

Of course, it is much easier to tear down than to build up. And the two Nebraska murderers certainly destroyed: a masterful vindication of Brecht, who died a mere 3 years before the events related here, and Tynan, whose influence was greatest in the America of the late 1950’s through the 1960’s. Not to mention the existentialist tenor pervading society, especially youth.

The girl’s parents (mother and stepfather) were opposed to her relationship with the young man and acted to stop it. In addition, the youth’s parents were also opposed, a position which enraged him to the point of physically attacking his father, an event resulting in his expulsion from home.

One night, the angry youth stopped by a gas station in the town where they lived. He pulled a shotgun on the attendant, a young man of twenty-one, married and soon to have been a father. Before long he lay dead, his head blown beyond recognition.

The youth then went to his girlfriend’s house where they killed the girl’s mother, step-father, and two-year-old sister with rifle butt, kitchen knife, and bullets. They stuffed the mother’s body down the outhouse toilet opening; crammed the baby sister’s body in the box that had been used as a garbage can and placed it in the outhouse; dragged the step-father’s body to the chicken coup and left it there.

They then cleaned up the blood in the house and drank pop and ate chips that evening. For almost a week, they remained there, buying food and milk on credit from the milkman, as her family’s corpses rotted nearby. When folks would come by to visit or inquire, they were scooted away by the girl who would tell all that everybody was very sick with a highly contagious flu, an excuse which soon began to wear thin.

They realized they’d have to skip town and decided to go to an old friend of the young man’s family: a seventy-two-year old farmer who often let the boy and his siblings play and hunt on his farm some twenty miles from town.

The murderous couple’s intention was to steal the farmer’s car. And kill him.

After shooting him in the head, wounding his dog as it ran away, and dragging his body to an out building, they spent the night in his house eating and drinking pop.

The next day they drove off but got stuck in mud and had to abandon the car and walk, with the old man’s 22 rifle and handgun. They were befriended by a teenage couple, childhood sweethearts, who offered them a ride. The killers asked them to drive back to the dead man’s farm; this they did, in innocent ignorance.

The seventeen-year-old young man was shot six times in the head; his sixteen-year-old sweetheart was shot once in the head and stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen and pubic area.

Their bodies were hauled to the storm cellar and abandoned there. The killers took their car and drove off, back to town.

There they invaded an industrialist’s home which the youth had often seen during his days as a garbage collector. They repeatedly stabbed the wife in the neck and chest, while finding a moment to break the family poodle’s neck to keep it from barking.

When the man of the house arrived, he was met with the barrel of a gun, but he quickly deflected and began a fight to the death with the killer, who excelled in only one class in school: gym. The fight dragged on but finally the youth got the upper hand and shot the forty-seven-year-old man dead.

The killer couple remembered the maid they had locked up in a bedroom closet. The maid, who was hard of hearing, meekly allowed the degenerate teens to tie her to the bed where she was repeatedly stabbed. They then drove off in the family Packard.

This time they drove west, towards Wyoming. They had car trouble. Seeing a car parked alongside a road, they thought it’d be a good one to steal. Its owner, a middle-aged shoe salesman was sleeping and the youth woke him, only to shoot him nine times in the head. That was to be their last murder victim, Mr. Merle Collison, husband and father. The murderer pushed the body to the passenger’s side and tried to drive off, only to have trouble releasing the emergency brake.

A young geologist saw them and, thinking they were having car trouble, walked up to the driver’s window only to have a gun pointed at him as his eyes glanced at the corpse in the front passenger’s side. He figured he had to fight and so did.

That was a good decision, for while they struggled, a Wyoming deputy sheriff drove by and, seeing the commotion, stopped. The youth jumped back in the Packard, while his girlfriend ran to the sheriff, quickly transforming herself into a damsel in distress.

After a short pursuit, both were in custody and returned to Nebraska where they were tried and found guilty of murder. He, playing the deceased James Dean to the end, was electrocuted in 1959; she made parole in the 1970’s.

Later in life, I apprehended how prescient had been that conversation I had heard, that the breakdowns in the fringes of society were not being explained, let alone denounced.

As severe deterioration was increasingly evidenced here and there (for instance, the Clutter murders took place in Kansas a mere year later), some (many?) parents were closed mouthed about it, believing that “the experts” – teachers, bureaucrats, psychiatrists, clergymen — were better able to deal with it. However, some clergymen, either directed their fury to wine and beer and other irrelevancies (alcohol played no part in this ghastly series of crimes), while others continued slouching their congregations away from the historic faith towards a sort of progressive twentieth century new beginning, cheerfully oblivious that, thus far, more people had been killed in that degenerate century than in any other, while still others preached what was termed an evangelical gospel message, but one that had little relevance to what was happening right before their very eyes.

In an age whose elite was feverishly busy destroying and mocking its Christian foundations, all under the guise of creating a truly “civilized society”, the church should have been dedicating the time and sweat to intellectually and spiritually denounce such intellectual termites.

So it is no surprise that, when it came to parenting, millions of parents of “The Greatest Generation” turned from the Bible to Dr. Spock’s humanistic advice in Baby and Childcare. The results have not been pretty as generations have been trained to look to themselves for solutions as opposed to seeking the Mind of God, our Creator and Redeemer.

To take two noteworthy examples, while parents and churches hearkened to humanism’s siren songs, Marx’s 19^th century Manifesto and Connolly’s 20^th century “programme” were being promoted in the theatre and university and legislatures throughout the twentieth century and bore spectacular fruit: abolition of the death penalty; equalization of wealth; rehabilitation of criminals; free medicine; food subsidies; decriminalization of homosexuality; easing, if not outright elimination of divorce laws, thereby weakening marriage; children’s rights; elimination of all discrimination; and so forth. Question any of the above today and you will be denounced as a troglodyte. Or worse.

As for teachers, they were coming awfully close to intellectually justifying or at least “understanding” these acts – acts which even children (before twentieth-century-indoctrination took hold) could plainly see were wholly, horrendously unjustifiable by any civilized measure.

As for politicians and bureaucrats, they sought for angles and positioning: the political Freudians, in their myriad manifestations, urged more therapy and, therefore, more dollars to state-funded psychiatrists and psychologists, most of whom represented another, alien, philosophy as opposed to an empirical discipline; the political Quakerians, in their multifarious, contradictory incarnations, urged more jails, as if evil could be transformed into goodness by some inner light emanating from a cell in Sing Sing.

A mere twenty years later and beyond, Hollywood was making, not one, but up to four or more movies, in effect, romanticizing these murderers who were absolutely devoid of any sense of pity or compassion. A major rock star wrote a song about them. And a major publisher was backing a project where the murderous lassie would be able to tell “her side” of the story (she claims innocence, of course).

If you don’t denounce breakdowns in the fringe, you’ll soon see them lionized in the center.

In that era, the paradoxical 1950’s, precious few men forcefully and learnedly tied such actions, whether murder or otherwise, to their antecedent: a loss of the Faith. Lonely preachers valiantly made that case. But they were few.

Typical reactions to such acts were ineffectual because both the action and the reaction proceeded from the same source: an antithetical faith whose genesis occurred way back in Eden, where man determined to decide for himself what was good and what was evil.

Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather, convicted murderers.

Robert Jensen (17) and Carol King (16), the sweethearts murdered by the killer couple. This was the murder which was tried and for which the James Dean wannabe was executed. Their high school junior class was reduced overnight from 8 to 6. Both were greatly loved and greatly missed. And, decades later, their town was aghast to learn that the murderers held a fascination for some people, including Hollywood.

Robert Colvert (21), murdered gas station attendant. His only daughter, Barb, was born five months later. She still weeps when talking about him, given her recollections of interactions with her mother.

Mr. and Mrs. Ward. He was the industrialist who fought to the death. Still remembered as a generous couple.

Lilyan Fencl, the Ward’s maid. She was remembered as shy, gentle, quiet, and hard working.

Velda Bartlett: Caril Ann’s mother. One of the first murder victims.

Betty Jean Bartlett, the 2-year old step sister of the murderess. They killed her with the butt of a gun.

Murderer statement shortly before his execution in 1959. A self-pitying, alienated sentiment, worthy of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is very much with us still.

Evocation

October 8, 2019October 8, 2019 Richard Barnes

Frank Reaugh painted a life he loved but a life that was already gone by the time he memorialized it. He painted from sketches he had drawn as a young man. He loved the big skies, the eternal prairies, the longhorn cattle, and the cowhands. He lovingly recreated these as best he could in paintings which are evocative and, to me at least, deeply moving.

Charles Goodnight was a giant of a pioneer. Far more exciting than the Rock Hudson and James Dean characters in Giant, the 1956 smash movie hit about early 20th-century Texas. And, of course, Mr. Goodnight and his friend, Oliver Loving, the characters who were fictionalized in Larry McMurtry’s novel, Lonesome Dove, were not filthy-mouthed but were much more colorful than those depicted in the novel and subsequent smash TV mini-series. And, yes, it is true that Goodnight returned his friend’s body back to Texas for burial in Weatherford, as in the novel.

At the age of 9 he rode bareback behind his parents’ covered wagon. At 14 he was hunting with the Caddo Indians beyond the frontier. At 25, he scouted for the Texas Rangers in the war with the Comanches and Kiowas. He preserved the Buffalo; founded a college; encouraged the settlement of the plains, and “led a long fight for law and order.” He died in 1929.

Both men, and much more, are featured in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, about a twenty-minute drive south of Amarillo. If you are in the area, you might check it out if you have an afternoon to spare.

My father was born twelve years before Mr. Goodnight passed away and, looking back, I realize I knew men who grew up during that generation. I recall sitting at the El Pao bar or in the pocket billiards area in the presence of men now long gone. One, Mr. Marley, a Texan, would tease me saying he had more hair than my father. Mr. Marley was completely bald (naturally, that is; it was an era when shaved heads were not “in”). That would trigger me in defense of my father (in an era when triggers were something on guns). Mr. Marley would howl with laughter, and I would complain to my father, who would also be laughing. I can still see him walking from the club to the bachelor quarters, wearing his ten-gallon hat, the only one in the camp with such accoutrement. Mr. Marley was not a young man, but his expertise was in setting up mining camps and that was in great demand in that era.

I can see men like Mr. Marley growing up in the presence of men like Mr. Goodnight. Men of great stamina, good humor, and sterling character.

And, like Frank Reaugh, I am blessed to have the ability to remember a life that is no longer, but that can be evoked and which has lessons for us today, I believe.

A childhood friend met me in Caracas about fifteen years ago and in catching up on our respective lives, I spoke about Texas and it’s heritage of independence. My friend laughed, “Texas is just like [the Venezuelan western state] Zulia!”

Of course! There are some similarities between Texas and the land of my birth. Both are rugged lands with stark beauty, tempting landscapes, and beguiling skies. And, like Texas, Venezuela is an enchanting land but if you are careless, if you take things for granted, if you treat it as a sandlot or a plaything, it can be fatal.

Up to that conversation, I had seen great similarities between Kalamazoo, Michigan, and El Pao, the place of my birth. The friendliness and easy hospitality of southwest Michigan still enchants me, even after thirty years, and allows for easy and favorable comparison to the mining town of my childhood, including the fact that I made lifelong friends in both places. And the ruggedness of Texas (which, by the way, also characterizes the Michigan Upper Peninsula) allows for easy and favorable comparison to the striking landscape of Venezuela.

Frank Reaugh paintings. The last one (immediately above) is “The O Roundup”. It compels one to sit and contemplate it for a while.

This is believed to have been the last time Mr. Goodnight was able to ride a horse.

Los Llanos, Venezuela. Los Llanos is a vast area in Venezuela and also eastern Colombia.

One of countless sites on Venezuela’s northeastern coast.

Life In An American Camp II — Gone Fishin’

June 29, 2019June 30, 2019 Richard Barnes

A boyhood friend returned with his family to the United States several years before it was my turn to leave. Back in the USA, he was so homesick for El Pao that he “ran away from home” to find his way back to Venezuela.

“I’m going to El Pao! [pronounced ‘pow!’]” That’s the explanation he gave to the baffled policeman (“What’s ‘L Pow?'”) who picked him up and returned him to his parents.

What would make him miss the place so much for so long? What kept pulling him back?

Well, you might refer to an earlier post (Life In An American Camp) to begin getting an idea of the “why”.

Perhaps a reason might be the community life, which yielded solid friendships.

The reality was, for anyone looking from the outside in, El Pao’s was an active social life. There were many dinner engagements, which may have been “dull” to the men, who would (this would be heard off and on, usually in lighthearted bantering humor) rather be doing something else, like reading the newspaper or listening to Voice of America on shortwave radio.

Nevertheless, these formal and semi-formal activities served to polish and sharpen the adults’ interpersonal skills while developing the children’s. Years later, as a young man invited to cocktail gatherings or full course dinners, a boy from El Pao would generally know how to behave with decent etiquette in settings among folks who, in theory at least, had had far more opportunities to have developed social graces than families in a South American mine.

Perhaps an enclosed community creates its own pressures to conform to proper behavior and manners, especially if its inhabitants are mostly of the same or similar upbringing, culture, tradition, general religion, and understanding of what is the good, the permanent. Whereas those in large settings, with multiple options, lacking the self-discipline, or the encouragement, to seek to develop such skills, find it easier to take the path of least resistance, which is to avoid such opportunities.

The hosts and hostesses never expressed thinking about a “purpose” behind their hospitality; they simply brought “continental” habits to a small colony in the forest and proceeded as if they were still in Chicago, New York, Bethlehem, Kalamazoo, or whatnot. In this, they were apt heirs of their mostly British ancestors who had their silverware brought to Kenya or Rhodesia and served tea at tea time, no matter where the location. Given the smallness of the place, these events, no matter how formal, had an intimacy which yielded a greater, longer lasting personal impact than they would have in larger, more impersonal settings.

Consequently, these activities also forged, over a few short years, strong familial chains between folks who, back in the States would most likely have remained strangers for the most part. But here, after visiting one another’s homes and sharing each other’s bread and wine, not to mention working hard jointly as teams, they formed kinships stronger than that of many families. These bonds persevered for decades beyond the end of their pilgrimage in the Venezuelan interior. In some cases, they’ve persevered for life.

Non-work-or-school-related activities in El Pao were many and varied: Bowling nights; volleyball nights; movie nights; Christmas season nights; “free nights” which invariably meant calls on friends’ homes — meaning, over time, everyone’s home. There were also special nights, when, for instance, a magician would be brought in by the company to entertain and educate both children and adults; or some would deliver lectures on eclectic subjects or events. There was a Spaniard who was an outstanding pianist who would regale those in the club, usually on a spontaneous basis.

All this occurred in an Amazonian jungle.

Some wives complained about being so far from “civilization”. Some sons and daughters would echo those gripes. These were laments the boy never heard at home and never understood. How could anyone not feel lucky to be here? Well, as he once heard it said, there are people who, when viewing the Grand Canyon, will ignore the breathtaking vistas and focus their gaze on the back of a vulture which may be flying below.

The good news is that most folks bloomed where they were planted.

As for the runaway friend in the States, while the boy joined in the hearty laughter when told the story, he also felt the same yearning in his heart that his buddy had felt in his.

Home in El Pao. Many of the early homes in the camp were principally prefabricated steel, which would tremble when dynamite went off in the nearby mines.

Recess in the camp school. The boyhood friend in the anecdote above is second from the left.

Gone Fishin’ (1951) was a sunny little ditty performed by Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong. I link it here as an example of the type popular music played in the club that I recall from my early childhood. The juke box contents changed in later years along with the composition of the camp.

Above link is to a movie trailer of the popular High Society (1956) (Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong also starred) seen on a movie night in El Pao in the 1950’s, When The Going Was Good, as the late Professor Jeffrey Hart put it.

Life in an American Camp

May 18, 2019May 18, 2019 Richard Barnes

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.

Mining II

April 20, 2019April 24, 2019 Richard Barnes

To add to the prior post, I thought it good to tell a bit more about El Pao’s background and impetus as something of a microcosm of the myriad mining and petroleum camps dotting Venezuela in the 1950’s.

As noted in the Time Magazine article cited in the previous post, El Pao was a Bethlehem Steel iron ore mining camp built in the 1940’s in the Venezuelan southeastern interior, within a low and gentle mountain range in an area of dense, seemingly infinite jungles, just beyond the Gran Sabana prairies and plains whose boundaries seemed to melt with the sky.

The company, along with US Steel had negotiated concessions with the government of Marcos Pérez Jimenez, the shortest-lived of the numberless military dictatorships in Venezuela’s history. Actually, these concessions were signed prior to Jimenez’s official assumption of the presidency, but “everybody knew” he was actually in charge a few years before his official ascension in 1952. Perez Jimenez sought to enhance Venezuela’s independence by promoting oil and ore concessions and improving and expanding the transit infrastructure. He insisted, wherever possible, the companies build “open cities” as opposed to closed camps. US Steel did just that, which impelled the phenomenal growth of the thriving metropolis of Puerto Ordaz, at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroní rivers. As for Caracas, it was modernized with skyscrapers, including the symbolic Humboldt Hotel, overlooking the capital city from atop Mt. Ávila. The hotel was named after the famous naturalist and explorer, Alexander Von Humboldt, who explored and studied much of Venezuela in the late 18th century. We’ll be seeing more of him in later posts. Construction projects were launched to build large public housing projects, bridges, and South America’s finest highway system, most of which would still be in use into the 21^stcentury, including the then spectacular La Guira – Caracas expressway in 1953 and the Tejerías – Caracas expressway in 1954.

Furthermore, his tenure saw the creation, in 1956, of cable car transport to the 6,000 ft., Mt. Avila, which stands like an imposing sentinel over Caracas. He also commissioned the building of the even more remarkable cable car system to the 20,000 ft. Pico Bolivar in the Andes in the western state of Mérida. Both systems were built by Swiss engineers and materiel. Venezuela was transformed into the most modern nation of South America: “modern” defined as excellent infrastructure, breathtaking skylines, and a rapidly growing middle class. Today, some old timers say it was the Dubai of the 1950’s.

A telling but quickly forgotten change imposed by Perez Jimenez was the revision of the official name of the nation. Since 1864 the country’s name was “United States of Venezuela”, reflecting Simón Bolivar’s admiration for the United States, but not his conviction that South America should not seek to emulate a similar type government because, as he put it, “the United States form of government will only work for saints, which is what they are [and what we are not]”; Marcos Pérez Jimenez, apparently understanding Bolivar’s admonition, changed the name to “Republic of Venezuela”, a name which stuck until, in the 21^stcentury, another authoritarian politician changed the name yet again, but left Venezuela’s 20 states intact. El Pao was in the large state of Bolivar, to the southeast of the country, bordering on Brazil to the south and British Guiana to the east.

Marcos Perez Jimenez ruled from December, 1952 to 1958, but his following persisted even after his death five decades later, in 2001.

A plebiscite was held in December, 1957 which Jimenez won by a wide margin, but which opponents insisted was a rigged exercise. He went into self-imposed exile in Miami Beach, in 1959, only to be deported later by the Kennedy administration, which vainly believed it could afford to break the United States’ promise of asylum in exchange for the applause of Venezuelan politicians: honor out; applause, in. But, as often happens with asymmetrical swaps, Kennedy succeeded with the former, weightier matter; and failed with the latter, transitory one.

Unbelievably, Jimenez was, in 1968, elected to the Senate, even though he ran in absentia from Spain; however, the Venezuelan politicians succeeded in overturning his election on technicalities. In 1973 his supporters nominated him for the presidency of Venezuela; however, the political parties amended the constitution, in effect prohibiting him from running for president again.

He never returned to Venezuela. Nevertheless, love him or hate him, his administration’s negotiations with the American steel and petroleum industries brought matchless prosperity to the country. This promise of future increase and liberality was reversed by the overturning of his economic policies, which tended to favor free enterprise locally coupled with pragmatic agreements with foreign companies, within a low tax and regulatory environment.

Amazingly, all major projects undertaken by the Perez Jimenez administration still stand, unsurpassed: either still in use, such as in the case of the magnificent, now barely maintained, and, therefore, in some places dangerous expressways, or as silent, empty monuments of a long past era, such as the Humboldt Hotel, alone and padlocked, alternating between stints as a reflector of countless brilliant sparkles of sunlight or as a lone sentry shrouded in clouds atop Mt. Ávila, reminding all who look and wonder, that historical eras ought not be facilely catalogued as bright or dark, evil or good. Much depends on who tells the story, how it’s told, of whom it is told, and, of course, by whom it is told.

But the foregoing was yet in the future. Most, if not all, Americans who came to Venezuela when Pérez Jimenez was either in power or was the power behind the throne, that is, from the late 1940’s through the 1950’s, were quite apolitical and gave little thought to the country’s civil government. Streets were safe, people were courteous, Americans were respected and admired, and work was abundant for both Americans and Venezuelans. What mattered to them, and to their companies, was that Venezuela became their largest supplier of iron ore, by far – ore ultimately incorporated in America’s magnificent bridges, skyscrapers, monuments, homes, and automobiles.

For those of you interested in Marcos Pérez Jimenez, you might want to check out the series of interviews (in Spanish) he granted not too long before his death. The link below is for the sixth of the series.

For those of you interested in the Humboldt Hotel, you might find the documentary linked below to be worth your while