VENEZUELA: Rocky’s Second Home

For a ten-day rest after winning the governorship of New York State, Nelson Rockefeller went to a country that looms large in his career. Venezuela is the home of Creole Petroleum Corp., most profitable affiliate of the Rockefeller-founded Standard Oil Co. (N.J.), and he once served on Creole’s board. But Venezuelans rarely think of him as an oilman; instead, he is the single man who has striven hardest to raise the country’s standard of living.

Nelson Rockefeller owns three farms in Venezuela and will vacation in his hilltop hacienda—a white stucco colonial house with red tile roof built around a swimming pool—at La Mona, a 1,200-acre spread of potato and cattle land 90 miles southwest of Caracas. His farms are no mere rich man’s fancy. Originally developed by the International Basic Economy Corp. (IBEC) that he founded to invest in Latin American development, the first farm lost so much money in a try at large-scale agriculture that Rockefeller bought it from IBEC, ran it himself. He put it on a paying basis, and at the same time demonstrated the raising of tick-resistant Santa Gertrudis cattle crossbred with African and local Venezuelan breeds. To spread the word, he set up two other experimental farms.

Other Rockefeller and IBEC Venezuelan ventures: a thriving milk business, a hotel, a string of shopping centers, a mushrooming chain of supermarkets that have, by competition, forced Venezuelan food prices down to reasonable levels.

He suffered one noble flop. Trying to put needed nitrogen into Venezuelan diets, he conceived the idea of a fishing industry. He bought trawlers, icing machines, hired Florida fishing experts, went to work. But Venezuela’s distribution system cannot handle fish at any distance from the country’s ports, and few Venezuelan housewives have any way to keep frozen fish frozen. But by and large, Rockefeller has served successfully for Venezuelans as a one-man development bank.

Before switching to his private plane at Caracas’ Maiquetia Airport last week, he chatted in Spanish with a friendly crowd of 200 diplomats and newsmen. Was he out to beat Vice President Richard Nixon for the presidential nomination? “I’m not running against him or anyone else now,” he said. Was he sent to improve U.S.Venezuelan relations? Rockefeller laughed. “No,” he said. “I’m on my own.”