Greener Mansions

Of Venezuela's 4,200,000 people, 90% live close to the Caribbean coast. They prefer the mild climate, the 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.

Selection. This year nearly 50,000 D.P.s will arrive to take up life in the back country mountains and jungles where the Spaniards once sought El Dorado. About 15,000 will be sponsored by the International Refugee Organization; at least 30,000 will be immigrants paying their own way. By last month 9,000 had arrived; last week the S.S. Santa Cruz brought 1,200 more; this week the U.S. Army's S.S. General S. D. Sturgis will dock with 850. Next year's goal is 100,000; within five to ten years, predicts Julio Grooscors, head of Venezuela's Institute of Immigration & Colonization, the country's population will double.

Farmers get top priority from three Venezuelan missions now in Europe. Next come technicians* (chemists, mechanics, carpenters, electricians), then professional men. Merchants without special skills are discouraged. Venezuelans prefer Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese to Slavs or Germans. Few Jews are admitted; caraquenos contend that they are almost as hard to assimilate as men & women from the U.S., tend to "pitch-their camps too near the Plaza Bolivar in the capital."

Assignment. A job was the first thought of the immigrants who waited last week in two reception centers in Caracas: Guaratero, a converted five-story hotel, and Sarria, a group of 17 Quonset huts. A curly-haired Pole, 19, announced proudly that he was a tractorista, that he was ready to start work on one of the cooperative farm colonies organized by the Government in the fertile interior to grow corn, potatoes, beans, rice, coffee, tobacco. An Italian with a shy little wife and black-eyed little girl was to go to a privately owned hacienda in Carabobo. Another, a bank clerk in Italy, had a job as a hotel waiter. Said he: "You have to start somewhere."

Soon the Caracas centers will be closed; all new immigrants will be taken to a reception center big enough to house 2,500 now building in El Trompillo, near Puerto Cabello, where some are already living in Quonset huts. Puerto Cabello is 130 miles from the lures of the capital. Venezuela wants frontiersmen.

* When more than 100 Italian immigrants in Argentina decided to go back home, the Argentine Central Bank blamed it on the fact that they were "masters of philosophy, musicians, journalists."

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