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Forty 15-story apartment houses plus other vast developments provide public housing. The new University City has a brightly painted super-hospital and two cantilever-roofed stadiums that seat 75,000 fans without a single view-blocking pillar.
The nation's highway net, doubled (to 7,500 miles) in the last six years, is capped by the famed Autopista, a spectacular $6,000,000-a-mile parkway that connects mountain-bound Caracas with its main airfield and seaport, ten miles away. Throughout Venezuela there are 250 new schools, 690 new clinics or hospitals, aqueducts, airstrips, first-class private or government-financed hotels.
Oil & Water. The oil that runs this dreamboat comes up at the rate of nearly 2,000,000 bbls. a day from 9,249 wells. Only the U.S. produces more (6,340,000 bbls. a day) than Venezuela, and no nation exports more. The boom began in 1922, when a fabulous gusher spewed up the drilling tools and geysered petroleum for nine days. Oil has been found all across the top of Venezuela, but most of it comes from in and around Lake Maracaibo, an arm of the Caribbean Sea. One of the sights of the continent is Maracaibo's 2,012 derricks, set on piles in the lake, busily sucking up the black crude from 2,000 ft. to 4,000 ft. down. A tenth of the world's oil is produced right there. And there is plenty left: proven reserves for 15 years at the present rate. New concessions, expected soon (the government has received offers totaling a reported $150 million), will probably bring the store of buried riches up to one hardheaded oil executive's guess: "Enough for 100 years." By themselves, great oil reserves do not guarantee great oil wealth. The happy secret of Venezuela's prosperity lies in the partnership between the country and the foreign companies (Jersey Standard, Shell, Texas, Gulf and others), which have provided the investment capital—$3 billion—and the know-how that gets the oil into the northbound tankers.
Other Latin American countries may also be sitting atop lakes of oil. But in the '20s and '30s, when the business was growing up, Mexico and Bolivia expropriated foreign companies, Brazil shut them out, Peru, Argentina and Colombia discouraged them. In effect, the other countries channeled investment into Venezuela, which prudently held its royalties to an average 8% during the early, expensive job of exploration. Once the companies struck it rich, Venezuela raised royalties (to 16⅔%) and taxes, eventually pioneered the celebrated 50-50 agreement—half the profits to the country, half to the companies—that has now been copied in the Middle East and elsewhere. The companies went along with little complaint, led by Creole Petroleum Corp., the Jersey Standard affiliate whose Venezuelan operations were ably directed by veterans of Standard's painful expropriation experience in Mexico. Today, Brazil and Argentina pay heavily to import foreign oil, Mexico and Colombia barely hold their own with nationalized industries, Peru and Bolivia are inviting foreign oilmen to return. Venezuela builds and prospers.