Saudi Arabia – The Pull Of The Land

Det. Bernard “Old Stoneface” McCole

December 30, 2023December 30, 2023 Richard Barnes

I don’t know if Det. McCole’s grave is one of those many who are unvisited, but I do know that he is one of the many who were faithful in their callings and who, though dead, still speak.

My uncle, Alfred L. Barnes, was murdered in the early hours of October 19, 1968. Later, in the afternoon, hunters found his body in a lonely forest clearing in Monroe County, PA. That night, our beloved Aunt Sarah had taken us to a concert in Miami — and you did not say “no” to Aunt Sarah. As usual, however, we were happy she had made us go and were in a joyful mood as we entered the house.

But we found our Uncle “Wichy” sitting next to the phone, weeping. He told Aunt Sarah that Pennsylvania police had called and insisted on speaking only to her. They would not tell Uncle Wichy what this was about, but he noticed that the number they asked her to call was Uncle Alfred’s number. He naturally assumed the news was not good.

And he was right.

Aunt Sarah sat next to the phone, dialed the number and did not wait long before Det. McCole answered. “What?” she said as she then listened. “But how can that be? … Yes, of course. I will come ….”

She hung up the phone, and remained seated for a while, her face in her hands.

“Uncle Alfred has been murdered,” she told us with great simplicity and with no hysterics. Then she stood and walked to her bedroom, closing the door after her.

The next few days were a whirlwind. Aunt Sarah with her daughter, Cousin Janis, flew up, met with authorities and also arranged for transport of the body to Miami for burial in the family cemetery.

My father and Uncle Max flew up from Venezuela and so the three surviving siblings buried their brother.

I suppose that what happened next will explain my eventual, obsessive desire to see this case solved: my father flew up to Bethlehem, PA, where my uncle lived and worked. I asked my father if I could accompany and he agreed. He was interviewed at length by Det. McCole. I remember the detective looking at me and then, turning to my father, “Would you ask your son to step outside? I need to discuss some sensitive matters with you.”

Of course, I stepped outside and many years flew by before I learned what those “sensitive matters” were. More importantly, I could see that Det. McCole was concerned he not overstep the bounds between a stranger — himself — and a father-son relationship. He figured that some things were best handled by the father of a 14-year-old, as opposed to being addressed by an unknown person, regardless of rank.

In summary, McCole determined that my uncle had been shot as he sat in the driver’s seat of his Thunderbird by someone to the right rear of the car. He also determined that the shooter then pulled my uncle from the car while still alive. My uncle slumped to his knees and two more shots were fired downward into his skull.

My father and the detective corresponded well into the following year, during which time the investigation accumulated many man years of “gumshoe” work, having visited no less than 400 potential witnesses or people in the area who might have heard or known of something. It was exhaustive work, all dutifully and carefully documented.

And then, he died suddenly of a heart attack, not having solved the case. My father was in great shock, but was hopeful that McCole’s second in command would carry on the work with the same zeal. But about six months later, that detective also died. You could not make this up, but it is true.

The case went cold.

And I, a pimply-faced kid would visit Bethlehem often and do my own follow ups, which of course were met with barely concealed contempt as I was dismissed from “grownups” work.

But one detective, even as he pushed me out the door, did say to me, “A murder case is never closed.” I grabbed onto that declaration and wielded it forcefully four decades later.

My own father was murdered in 1982 and I became a pest to the GBI, insisting that they were looking in the wrong places — which they were. When they finally listened, precious time had been lost; however, the murderer was found — over a thousand miles away. About thirteen years later he died suddenly of blood poisoning in prison.

In 2010 I again looked through old correspondence between my father and Det. McCole and decided to write persistently and methodically to the Pennsylvania State Police. After a few false starts, I established a relationship with Captain McAndrew and he assigned a young trooper to this cold case.

I was working in Saudi Arabia when I received the following email from Captain Mcandrew:

HI Richard,

Hope all is well in the Middle East. The Monroe County District Attorney has in fact approved murder charges in your uncle’s case. That essentially means we have an arrest warrant for an individual. As I mentioned we will be flying to Texas next week in an effort to locate and arrest the individual. I will keep you posted.

Be Safe,

Tom

I replied that I too would be in Texas that following week. His reaction:

The coincidence is unbelievable….as I mentioned, we will be flying into DFW that same day. Our arrival is 9:40 AM. We will attempt to make the arrest the following day (Thursday, October 17). Is there a number I can reach you once we are in Texas?

The arrest was actually made on October 19, 2013, which added an even greater “coincidence” to this saga: that was 45 years to the day of my uncle’s murder.

This turned out to have been the oldest cold case in Pennsylvania history and one of the oldest in the United States.

During the trial, I was amazed at how Det. McCole’s work kept coming up again and again. He had been thorough and precise. His work was key to getting a conviction.

The murderer was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole, according to 1968 Pennsylvania law.

After the sentencing, one of the district attorney staff pulled me aside to tell me that the daughter of Det. McCole had been following the case and the trial with avid interest. “She said that her father was obsessed with the case; that he was determined to see your uncle’s case closed and the perpetrator brought to justice.”

“Well,” I replied, “Her father certainly did bring it to conclusion and justice.”

He surely did. He is one to whom we owe the fact that “things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been,” because men and women like Det. McCole “lived faithfully a hidden life” even though he might be resting in an unvisited tomb.

Pennsylvania State Police Detective Bernard “Old Stoneface” McCole. He investigated my uncle’s October 19, 1968 murder.

Similar to the furniture where Uncle Wichy sat as we entered the house that night and where Aunt Sarah sat as she returned the call from the Pennsylvania state police.

Visiting my grandparents’ and related family tombs in Miami, FL.

Highest Known Oil Reserves … And People Cannot Buy Gasoline

September 23, 2020September 23, 2020 Richard Barnes

Venezuela is still Number One on the list of countries with the highest known oil reserves. According to WorldAtlas.com (link below), her production has fallen because of the decline in oil prices and because she did not “invest in the renovation of its obsolete oil extraction infrastructure.”

Second on the list is Saudi Arabia, which makes “it a strong ally to the United States, despite many [sic] blatantly problematic aspects of the country. Some of those include human rights violations and many international incidents.”

Readers of this blog know that I love the country of my birth and grieve for what she has been becoming. I have childhood friends there whom I dearly love and hold in the highest esteem, especially the few surviving friends of my own parents. However, I must say that to point out “blatantly problematic aspects” of Saudi Arabia while blithely ignoring the very real “blatantly problematic aspects” of Venezuela is irresponsible and is the type of reporting which has given cover to the catastrophe that has been unfolding there since the 1960’s and which accelerated dramatically since the Chavez regime.

Venezuela continues to be very rich in natural resources: not only is she the richest in oil reserves, but she is also supremely rich in other minerals (see here and also see under “Juan Vicente Gómez here) and yet many of her people are malnourished (I have personal knowledge of this), others have regressed to the use of donkeys because they cannot afford to buy rationed gasoline even at under $0.10 per gallon. Many thousands are now turning to fire for energy in their homes given the ongoing failures of the energy grid, often plunging them into utter darkness. Some reports say that the grid failed over 80,000 times (!) in 2019. Think of the impact on public transportation, hospitals, clinics. On everything needed for modern life.

The situation is so dire that the Venezuela refugee crisis is the largest ever recorded in the Americas.

Let that sink in for a moment. The largest ever recorded in the Americas. We’ve all read and heard about the despotic regimes of Gómez and Pérez Jimenez in Venezuela, Pinochet in Chile, the generals in Argentina, Stroessner in Paraguay, and others in Central America. But none of them — none — caused such magnitudes of peoples to flee their homelands in such massive numbers. None. The only one that comes close, as a proportion of her population, is Castro’s Cuba. The reader can deduce whatever similarities there may be between Cuba and Venezuela that would cause their peoples to leave their homes and head to unknown destinies through even less known, and frightening, seas and jungles.

Latest estimates are that about 6 Million Venezuelans have fled the country. That’s twenty percent of her population. See here.

How is it that a land so rich can be so poor? How is it that a land once hailed as the most stable democracy in South America is now a despotic regime where torture is commonplace (see here)?

As has been seen throughout this blog, the current problems did not begin with Chavez or Maduro.

Venezuela’s initiation into democratic rule took place in 1959, after a half century of unprecedented prosperity, mostly under General Juan Vicente Gómez, who in my childhood, an era of less political correctness, was often referred to as “the father of modern Venezuela.” He was a dictator but was not hailed as Castro was, even though he too was a dictator. The difference? Castro was one of the Socialist Beautiful People; Gómez was not.

Be that as it may, the long years under Gómez (in office from 1908 to 1935) were characterized by unparalleled stability and prosperity. This stability began years before the discovery of the first major oil reserves in Mene Grande (see here). Venezuela had a growing and prosperous middle class by the end of the Pérez Jimenez regime (see here), after which came the election of Rómulo Betancourt, generally acknowledged to be the country’s first democratically elected president.

So, Venezuela’s first democratically elected president was installed 140 years after the country’s declaration of independence. In sum, during the preceding (19th) century, Venezuela, like her neighbors, had been racked by revolutionary governments and bloodletting, and during the first half of the 20th century she had phenomenal growth and stability under authoritarian governments.

(The unfortunate fact is that South America’s wars for independence were not at all like North America’s. Unlike the North American colonists, the South American Criollos were enthralled by French Revolutionary ideas and sought the positions of power to which they believed they were entitled. This partly explains the long years of despotism and carnage, which is similar to post revolutionary France. If interested, see more on the differences between the United States and the Venezuelan Declarations of Independence here.)

As we have noted before (for example, see here) Betancourt, who had organized the Communist Party in Costa Rica in the 1930’s, but who had since shed his radical outspoken ideology and had migrated to a kinder, gentler democratic socialism, immediately set about to dismantle the structures of economic freedoms and low levels of taxation and regulations that had enabled the country to achieve such heights. In effect, his policies spurred the growth and intrusions of government, including nationalizations of major industries such as oil and iron ore. These reversals of economic liberties continued up to Chavez and Maduro where such policies did not change. They accelerated.

So the owners of industries in Venezuela are now the people. And, of course, when politicians say “the people,” that means The State and all those who, along with them, have the right political connections. And that has been catastrophic for Venezuela.

And so the country with the highest known oil reserves in the world is now a financial nightmare suffering shortages under political oppression, with many of her people in distress and, where able, voting with their feet by leaving.

Pray for the people of Venezuela.

For more on the power outages, see here (Spanish language article).

For the WorldAtlas report on oil reserves, see here.

Back to use of donkeys, mules, and horses.

Colombian police stand before a multitude of Venezuelans seeking asylum.

Juan Vicente Gómez (1857-1935), circa 1920

Marcos Pérez Jimenez (1914-2001), circa 1955

Fidel Castro (left), Rómulo Betancourt (center), in Caracas in 1959. Betancourt’s relationship with Castro ended shortly thereafter when Castro sought to foment guerrilla activity in Venezuela.

Once one of the continent’s most prosperous countries, Venezuela is now plagued by frequent blackouts.

Mining

April 12, 2019April 20, 2019 Richard Barnes

Any blog on Venezuela must include posts on mining. In the future, I hope to have a post or two from guests with more expertise on the more technical aspects of the mining industry in Venezuela and their complex engineering facets. Meanwhile, we can certainly post things of interest or of general introduction.

Depending on your sources, Venezuela was one of the world’s largest producers (some sources had it as the largest) of direct-reduced iron (iron ore which is reduced to a smaller form, usually pellets by means of a specially formulated gas). It was in the top ten of the world’s producers of iron ore, aluminum, and bauxite. And it still ranks as possessing one of the world’s largest known reserves of crude oil, second only to Saudi Arabia, although some say the United States has surpassed both.

It holds one of the world’s largest reserves of gold and was second only to South Africa in diamond production. Countless gems and precious stones have been mined there, especially in the interior state of Bolivar and the giant Territorio Amazonas.

The attentive reader will note the use of the past tense in the second and third paragraphs above. The past tense is used because extraction and production have suffered precipitous declines since the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. I would not be surprised by the discovery of vast new deposits and reserves, alongside the return of successful mining and production, once the investment climate improves. (Meanwhile, we should not be surprised by the intense interest focused on Venezuela by China and Russia.)

In 1956, Time Magazine had at least two issues on iron ore mining in Venezuela. The article in its November 19 issue began thusly:

“Inland from Venezuela’s Caribbean coast some 200 miles, the swift, black Caroni River plunges into the chocolate-colored Orinoco. Southward from this junction of two mighty streams lie jungles and sandy scrublands studded with low, reddish mountains. This poor-looking expanse is one of the world’s great storehouses of iron. West of the Caroni looms Cerro Bolivar, blanketed with 500 million tons of high-grade ore. Farther west lies another iron mountain, El Trueno, endowed with 150 million tons. On the other side of the Caroni, Bethlehem Steel Corp. gathers up 3,000,000 tons of ore a year from El Pao….”

Poetically and dramatically, the article captures the vastness of the country’s riches in iron ore alone. The country is “awash” with natural resources, even including coltan. We are told that Venezuela is one of only seven countries in the world that have known coltan reserves in sufficient quantities to export. It is a black mineral that is used in mobile (cell) phones and computer chips.

According to recent publications, metal production is at all-time lows; even oil has suffered catastrophically. Here is a recent headline from a technical publication which will suffice for all: “Venezuela’s Iron Ore Mines Operate At Less Than 10% Of Capacity“.

The iron mines of El Pao, where I was born, had massive structures such as a giant ore crusher which was loaded from trucks carrying about 30 tons of ore from the dynamite sites. The crusher ground the ore down to chunks of about 8 inches. Then its covered conveyer carried the reduced ore to a secondary crusher which crushed it further down to 2 or 3 inches. Finally, that ore was poured into 34-car trains which transported 4,500 tons of crushed ore 35 miles daily to the company port on the Orinoco River from whence it was shipped to a deeper water port on the Caribbean coast, transshipped to larger oceangoing vessels, and delivered to Sparrows Point, Maryland, the world’s largest steel mill at the time.

**Clearing through the jungles from the Orinoco to the camp site. Arduous work, which at times brought mishaps and frights**

**train loaded with ore headed to the company port, Palúa, on the Orinoco**

**Sparrows Point, Maryland. At the time, the largest steel mill in the world**

That accounts for a fraction of the investment required by one company to successfully extract and produce steel. To that, must be added roads, bridges, hundreds of houses for miners and their families, schools, churches, recreational facilities, commissaries, airports, and more. Multiply that by the dozens of American and European companies who came to Venezuela for iron ore, petroleum, and other minerals, and you begin to get an idea of the gargantuan investment made in the country in the first fifty or so years of the 20th century. For example, US Steel’s investment greatly surpassed Bethlehem Steel’s. And so did the oil companies’.

**Some of the home office staff bidding farewell to one of their number who was going on annual leave**

Circa 1958, my beloved aunt visited us from Miami, Florida. Although a busy homemaker, she was of that generation who would, nevertheless, find time to experience and appreciate the natural world that surrounds us. So, naturally, we would go on day excursions to different parts of Guayana. Once, in the interior, as we drove over a small stream she asked my father if he’d stop the car so that we could walk around a bit. We got out and made our way to that stream and my aunt promptly took her shoes off and waded in, carefully stepping on the rocks and smooth stones under the water.

“There are gems in this place,” she said.

I, regrettably, never learned why she thought that, although I do recall spirited conversations between my parents, my godmother, and my aunt about the possibilities. Then, all possibilities having been exhausted in conversation as we wandered around, we embarked and continued on our journey.

A few years later, my father brought a newspaper report noting that a gem mining concession had been granted in that spot, which became a profitable enterprise.

A country might be supremely rich in natural resources; it may have people, like my aunt, who can discern the riches under the surface. But if it discourages investment and healthy incentives, what can we say about all those natural resources other than, “Why cumbereth it the ground?”

Or, “Why bury your talent?”