(See front cover)
Nine months of the year the northeast trade winds blow across the Gulf of Venezuela into Colombia, where the Andes taper off in three great wrinkles in the earth's crust. As the warm, moist trades are deflected upward by the first mountain range the air is cooled, releasing part of its burden of rain. In the tropical night an almost continuous electrical display can be seen along the mountain peaks, resembling successive flashes of sheet lightning. This phenomenon is called the "Catatumbo Lights," after the Catatumbo River, which rises in Colombia and empties into Venezuela's saltish Lake Maracaibo (see map p. 68). Early explorers thought the Catatumbo Lights might be similar to the "Perpetual Fires" at Baku, where burning natural gas seepage illuminated the discovery of that fabulous Russian oil field. Their guess was a scientific error. But the Catatumbo Lights did illuminate the discovery of another major source of the world's oil.
In the 29 years since oil was first found oozing from the ground around masses of asphalt in the Maracaibo Basin, more than 1,000,000,000 barrels of crude petroleum have crossed the shallow bar that joins Lake Maracaibo to the Gulf of Venezuela. For a few years Venezuela ranked second to the U. S. in oil production, though since 1931 Russia has crowded it into third place. In neighboring Colombia, where the oil oozed just as freely, only Standard Oil of New Jersey has so far made the tremendous investment necessary to get South American oil to market. Colombian oil fields are deep in mountainous jungles, far from water transport. Even more important in delaying Colombian developments were the involvements of Colombian concession laws. Standard's 356-mi. Andean Pipe Line from its De Mares Concession to Cartagena on the Caribbean has carried virtually all the oil Colombia has ever produced, less than 175,000,000 bbl. Most famed of Colombia's undeveloped concessions is the Barco, covering an area larger than that of Rhode Island. Originally granted to the late General Virgilio Barco, an able Colombian who had grown rich in such varied activities as cattle, sugar, matches, liquor, the Barco Concession has had a purple history. After sinking more than $100,000 of his personal fortune in development work, General Barco put his concession on the market. Through the intervention of a seasoned promoter named Carl Kendrick MacFadden, most of the Barco went to Henry Latham Doherty's Cities Service Co. A minority interest was taken by Carib Syndicate, then headed by Mr. MacFadden. Cities Service grew tired of the responsibilities of jungle oil and in 1926 sold it to Andrew William Mellon's Gulf Oil Corp.