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But they are essentially short-term problems. In the long run, what Venezuela needs most is more and better people—skilled, educated, healthful, productive citizens. Pérez Jiménez obviously realizes this. Through crop subsidies, the building of sugar mills and the construction of whole agricultural colonies that supply farmers with credit to buy land, houses and tractors, the government has already made the country self-sufficient in rice and corn, nearly so in sugar. Highways help farmers get to market. Schools are successfully struggling against illiteracy (still 39%); clinics and hospitals are lowering mortality rates while raising birthrates. Malaria, an old scourge, is now confined to the far jungles.
Foreign immigration, the world's second heaviest (after Canada) in proportion to population, is bringing new skills and faces to Venezuela. From 1947 to 1952, the country took in 373,000 newcomers—Italian stonemasons, barbers and restaurant keepers, Austrian pastry cooks and opticians, French butchers and dressmakers, Portuguese bus drivers and Spanish carpenters. Italy has agreed to send 2,000 more immigrants each month for the next five years.
And a Big Future. Venezuela's plans for the future are bold. Using oilfield gas now 75% wasted, the government wants to build a petrochemical industry and produce fertilizer, explosives and chlorine. It plans a domestic steel plant to use some of the rich Orinoco River iron ore now being mined by U.S. Steel Corp. and Bethlehem Steel Co.† Lacking blast-furnace coal, it has resolved to dam the great Caroni River (an Orinoco tributary), generate 300,000 kw. for an electric steelmaking process. Besides these heavyweight plans, there is talk of building a tourist cable-car line to the top of Mt. Avila, Caracas' northern rampart, and of boring a 10-mile tunnel through it to the sea, for easier access to the sandy Caribbean beaches.
Heavy industry, schools, roads, better national health and skilled immigration can make incalculable contributions to Venezuela's economic life, and may ultimately lead the country to true self-government, to an active political and cultural life. But Pérez Jiménez, the little colonel from the Andean village, whose hand was on the spigot when it started to spout big money, frankly distrusts political democracy and pins his hopes for his country and for his place in history on the material things that he is buying and building now. "Rome would be forgotten," he argues, "if it were not for its roads and aqueducts."
* Delgado Chalbaud's hysterical, accusing widow, who became a serious embarrassment to the new regime, was pensioned and eventually shipped off to Europe.
* Captains, $5,760 a year; colonels, $10,800.
† Shipping 5,000,000 tons a year. Venezuela is the biggest iron-ore exporter to the U.S. But iron ore is no oil-like fountain of wealth to the country; a low-profit business, it pays Venezuela only $3,500,000 a year.