VENEZUELA: Pillsbury’s Best in Maracaibo

On the hot, wind-lashed shore of Lake Maracaibo last week, ground was broken for a new, $3,000,000 flour mill. Most of the Venezuelans who watched would have needed only one guess, if they did not know already, at the name of the man responsible for building the mill (jointly with Minneapolis’ Pillsbury Co.). He is Eugenio Mendoza Goiticoa, 52, a ranking example of the new, still small and largely unsung breed of Latin American industrialists who believe not only in good profit, but in productive private industry, well-treated, self-respecting labor, and—even more notable—in philanthropy.

Out of the spotlight, because Venezuela’s oil boom has spurred attention-getting public works, Mendoza has been on the rise since he quit high school at 17 (“I was too much in a hurry”) to go to work as an office boy. At 28, he owned a thriving construction import business, and his interests were gushing out like Venezuela’s oil. He expanded into a 3,000-acre dairy farm, three cement plants (which produce half the national supply), pulp and paper products, insurance, a paint factory, a giant finance company. As he prospered. Mendoza took care of his own: as early as 1933 his workers were collecting on incentive plans and sharing company profits. Many employees now share annual profits equal to eleven months’ salary. He has financed 700 low-cost workers’ houses, built a marina for his Pertigalete cement-plant employees.

In 1940 Mendoza built the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital in Caracas, supported it for months out of his own pocket. Other philanthropic works: five schools, scholarships and agricultural research. Recently, he promoted $6.000,000 in private capital to finance a low-cost housing project for poor Venezuelans. Mendoza served as a civilian member of the revolutionary junta that ousted Dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, but resigned in dismay four days after Vice President Richard Nixon was mobbed (TIME, May 26, 1958). “He is,” says one high government official, “the first case of a Venezuelan capitalist with the modern mentality.”