VENEZUELA: Backland Bonanza

Inland from Venezuela’s Caribbean coast some 200 miles, the swift, black Caroni River plunges into the chocolate-colored Orinoco. Southward from this junction of two mighty streams lie jungles and sandy scrublands studded with low, reddish mountains. This poor-looking expanse is one of the world’s great storehouses of iron. West of the Caroni looms Cerro Bolivar, blanketed with 500 million tons of high-grade ore. Farther west lies another iron mountain, El Trueno, endowed with 150 million tons. On the other side of the Caroni. Bethlehem Steel Corp. gathers up 3,000,000 tons of ore a year from El Pao. and barely dents the mountain’s treasure.

To the Sea. These are only three among dozens of ore-crusted hills and mountains. Geologists’ estimates run to 2 billion tons of iron ore, and that may be only the beginning. Oil-rich Venezuela is also iron-rich.

The iron riches lay virtually untouched until 1950. when a Bethlehem Steel Corp. subsidiary began mining El Pao. The ore traveled by rail to the Orinoco, then by shallow-draft vessel to deep-water Puerto de Hierro (Iron Port). In early 1954, a U.S. Steel Corp. subsidiary, Orinoco Mining Co., sent its first load of Cerro Bolivar ore down the river. Orinoco Mining has spent $230 million on its Cerro Bolivar mine and the installations that go with it: a trim little company town near the base of the mountain; a river port (Puerto Ordaz); 90 miles of railroad; and iSo miles of Orinoco channel, making it possible for ore ships to steam down the Orinoco to the sea. Cerro Bolivar’s 1955 output: more than 6,000,000 tons, i El Pao’s: 3,600,000. These two moun-j tains accounted for all of Venezuela’s ! iron-ore exports last year, but a newly formed U.S.-Venezuelan company expects to begin shipping ore from El Trueno by late 1957.

Oil Boom Backstop. Within a few years, Venezuela will be using part of its ore to make steel at home. An Italian combine is under contract with the Venezuelan government to build a $200 million, 421,500-ton-a-year steel mill near the mouth of the Caroni. Last week, a few miles up the Caroni from the mill-to-be, the workmen, trucks and power shovels of a French construction firm were clearing a site for a government-owned hydroelectric plant that will provide 143,000 kw. for steelmaking, plus another 157,000 for the region’s future industrial growth. The project’s total wattage is twice what the entire capital city of Caracas now uses, but less than one-tenth of the Caroni’s unharnessed potential.

In the midst of their country’s roaring oil boom, thoughtful Venezuelans sometimes wonder what might happen to their economy if some adverse development—widespread utilization of atomic energy, perhaps, or big new oil finds in other countries—rubbed the bloom off the boom. Industrial growth based on abundant iron ore and the huge hydroelectric potential of the Caroni promises to put a second powerful prop under the economy, and make Venezuela’s future more secure.