VULTURES OVER LAKE MARACAIBO
Though its participation in the world market has dwindled by half in the past decade, Venezuela is still the top petroleum exporter. Almost half the profits U.S. capitalists take from Latin America come from Venezuela. One of the world's richest countries, it is also one of the poorest and most violent. It boasts of Latin America's highest per-capita income and most complete and up-to- date highway network, and no country consumes as much Scotch whiskey per inhabitant. Immediately exploitable iron, petroleum, and gas reserves in its subsoil could multiple by ten the wealth of every Venezuelan; the population of Germany or England could fit into its enormous virgin lands. In half a century, oil rigs have extracted an income double the resources of the Marshall Plan. Since the first well blew, the population has multiplied by three and the national budget by 100, but most of the people scramble for the plush minority’s leavings, still as poor as the country depended on cacao or coffee. The capital, Caracas, has grown 700 percent in thirty years: the old city of airy patios, central and silent cathedral is covered with skyscrapers as Lake Maracaibo covered with oil wells. Today it is a supersonic, deafening, air-conditioned nightmare, a center of oil culture that might pass as the capital of Texas. Caracas chews gum and loves synthetic products and canned foods; it never walks, and poisons the clear air of the valley with the fumes of its motorization; its fever to buy, consume, obtain, spend, use, get hold of everything leaves it no time to sleep. From surrounding hillside hovels made of garbage, half a million forgotten people observe the sybaritic scene. The gilded city's avenues glitter with hundreds of thousands of late-model cars, but in the consuming society not everyone consumes. According to the census, half of Venezuela's children and youths do not go to school.
Every day Venezuela produces 3 .5 million barrels of petroleum to move the capitalist world's industrial machinery, but four-fifths of the concessions owned by Standard Oil, Shell, Gulf, and Texaco are untouched reserves and over half the value of the exports never returns to the country. Creole (Standard Oil) publicity brochures point with pride to the corporation's Venezuelan philanthropies much as the Royal Guipuzcoan Company proclaimed its own virtues in the eighteenth century; the profits milked from this wonderful cow, in proportion to capital invested, are only comparable with those obtained by old-time slave merchants and pirates. No country has yielded as much for world capitalism in so short a time: the wealth drained from Venezuela, according to Domingo Alberto Rangel, exceeds what the Spaniards took from Potosí or the English from India. Some estimates put the real profits of Venezuelan oil concerns at 38 percent in 1961 and 48 percent in 1962, although the profit rates announced in their balance sheets were 15 percent and 17 percent respectively. The difference is attributable to the juggling of accounts and to hidden transfers.
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Salvador Garmendia, the novelist who reinvented the prefabricated hell of this whole conquest culture, the culture of petroleum, wrote to me in the middle of 1969:
Have you seen the apparatus that extracts crude petroleum? It looks like a big black bird whose sharp-pointed head rises and falls heavily day and night without stopping for a second: it is the only vulture that doesn't eat shit. What do we do when the characteristic sound of the sipper tells us there isn't any more oil? The grotesque overture is already beginning to be heard over Lake Maracaibo, where fabulous communities grew up overnight, with supermarkets, dance halls, a profusion of whorehouses and gambling dens-- money had no value. I recently made a trip through there and felt claws in my stomach. The smell of death and decay overpowers the smell of oil. The towns are semi-deserted, wormeaten, ulcerated, the streets deep in mud, the stores dilapidated. One of the companies' old divers goes down every day with a saw to cut lengths of abandoned pipeline which he sells as old iron. People are beginning to talk about the “companies” as if conjuring up a golden fable. They live like acrobats on a tightrope of myths about the old days, when fortunes were squandered on a turn of the dice or a week-long drinking orgy. Meanwhile, the pumps continue bobbing up and down and the rain of dollars falls on Miraflores, the government palace, to be turned into superhighways and other cement monsters. Seventy percent of the country lives a totally marginal existence. In the cities an unconcerned, well-paid middle class stuffs itself with useless objects and makes a strident cult of imbecility and bad taste. The government recently announced with great fanfare that it had exterminated illiteracy. Sequel: in the recent electoral fiesta registration lists showed a million illiterates between eighteen and fifty years of age.