Word: maracaibo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...cities' culture and the wealth from oil to a frontiersman's life in the rough & tough interior. As a result, the winning of Venezuela's West (actually its South) is still a century-old dream. An English colony failed at Betajoque, a French colony in Maracaibo; 30 miles from Caracas, the capital, is the blond, impoverished remnant of a 19th Century German colony. But the old dream lives on: now Venezuela hopes to push back her frontier with the brains & brawn of Europe's displaced persons...
...jungle valleys, back from the southwest shore of Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, live the world's most determined isolationists: the celebrated Motilon Indians. They are naked, few in number and disunited. Airplanes fly over their territory; the modern machines of U.S. and British oil companies clank around their borders. But the Motilones, not budging an inch, go right on in the old ways: slipping through the tangled jungle, invisible as the wind, silent as their heavy arrows that can slam through a grown man's chest and out the other side...
...arts prospered. Sweltering Maracaibo, the oil port, was about to get its own orchestra. A campaign against illiteracy - with matchbooks exhorting DON'T BE ANALPHABETIC!- was in full swing. The Government was distributing good cheap books, and it looked as though the new President of Venezuela's first representative government in generations would be Rómulo Gallegos Freire, a revered old novelist. A nation, most of whose citizens believe that the way to cure a cold is to grow a beard, found itself saying : "We've always had a grand future. Now we have a chance...
...each voter left the polls he dipped the little finger of his right hand into a green fluid. That was to keep him from voting twice. The creation of one Dr. Roberto Finol of Maracaibo, the green dye was supposed to be proof against soap, acid or anything for at least a couple of days. Venezuelans read the inscription on the bottle-". . . to guarantee universal suffrage"-and submitted willingly...
Suspicious of city revolutions, the tough Andinos (Andeans) of the west held out for awhile, then joined the rebels. So did the garrisons around the great Maracaibo Lake oilfields. The revolution had won, but the price had been heavy: 100 to 300 dead, 300 to 1,000 wounded...