SHOW NOTES

Officially the 'Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela' - it became Bolivarian in 1999 in reference to the struggle for independence in the area lead by Simon Bolivar.
Go to South America, which you can find by starting in the USA and going South, and it is on the Northernmost coast of the continent. It has borders with Guyana to the East, Colombia to the West and Brazil to the South.
It covers 916,500 square kilometers or 353,800 square miles, making Venezuela about 1.6 times the size of France, or just over a France and a half.
It has about 29 million people living there, 5 million of whom live in and around the capital Caracas.
The national anthem is Gloria al Bravo Pueblo" which means "Glory to the Brave People” and it is sometimes dubbed The Venezuelan Marseillaise after it’s apparent resemblance to the French National anthem.
The lyrics were written by physician and journalist Vicente Salias in 1810 and it was later set to music by musician Juan José Landaeta. Although we acknowledge that there is a competing theory about who wrote it, but apparently this is a minority view so we’re going to go with the mainstream.
The current flag was introduced in 2006, although based on an original 1811 design. It is a horizontal tricolour of yellow, blue, and red, the classic colours of flags of this area. .In the centre of the flag is an arc of eight stars – and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that the 2006 change was to add the eighth star.
It’s one of the 17 megadiverse countries Ryan, and as you might expect that means it has a range of geographical areas including mountains, lowlands, swamps, river plains and urban sprawl.
It is also home to the highest waterfall in the world – Angel Falls. These are found Canaima National Park in the Guiana Highlands of Bolívar state.
The falls are 3,212 feet (979 meters) high and they have a plunge of 2,648 feet (807 meters). Funnily enough, they aren’t named after the celestial being, as you might expect, but rather prosaically after Jimmie Angel, an American pilot who was the first person to fly over the falls.
Economically, it is an oil nation, Venezuela is the 25th largest producer of oil in the world and a member of OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The official language is Spanish.


Venezuela has a lot of beauty – by which I mean sexy ladies.
The Big Four are the major international beauty pageants for women – Miss World, Miss Universe (which is almost always won by someone form Earth which is a bit suspicious), Miss International, and Miss Earth.
And Venezuela is the first and only country to win all four pageants multiple times. It has a total of 24 wins across the four pageants – the most of any country.
And the current Miss Venezuela is Ileana Márquez, who did not respond to my request for an interview – although instead of ‘interview’ I may have accidentally used the words ‘hot date’ which would explain it.
And finaly, just recently Venezuela was in the news.
The country’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro just announced that Christmas would begin in October - kind of the opposite of the Sherrif of Nottingham’s ‘Cancel Christmas’.
Maduro said, “It’s September and it already feels like Christmas. So this year – as a way of paying tribute to you and thanking you – I’m going to decree that Christmas be brought forward to 1 October,”.
It’s being said that this is an attempt to distract people from the growing disquiet that arose from increasing evidence that he actually lost the last election and shouldn’t be president at all.
Apparently it’s not the first time he’s done this either – in various attempt to curry favour, because Christmas in Venezuela means extra bonuses for public employees and more lavish government handouts.
So, Merry Christmas to our Venezuelan listeners, I guess.


HISTORY

The land that makes up Venezuela today was formed around 1.5 billion years ago. Around 500 million years ago, it forms part of the supercontinent of Gondwana, but as tectonic plates shift, the region moves around the planet, at times, mostly covered in shallow seas.

Around 250 million years ago, Venezuela as part of South America, separates from Africa and drifts west.
Not much happens for millions of years, still mostly under water, there wasn’t much living there, and very few dinosaur fossils have been discovered.

That changes around 66 million years ago when a giant collision of tectonic plates lifted the land up, creating the Merida Andes - part of the Andes Mountain range - which gives shape to much of western Venezuela today.

Rivers formed, including the Orinoco, one of the largest river systems in the world.

Several ice ages pass, and Venezuela becomes home to a variety of megafauna, like Toxodonts (rhino like creatures), sabretooth cats, and giant ground sloths, all attracted to the warmth of tropical rainforests and vast savannahs.

But as small bands of early man migrate from Central America around 15,000 years ago, the megafauna slowly disappears.

Shifting their diet from megafauna to smaller animals, early man starts to develop tools for hunting and gathering, and by 3,000 BCE they’ve settled down in permanent settlements and started to do agricultural things, like growing maize, cassava and beans.

Complex cultures emerge, the most notable being the Arawaks and the Caribs, each with their own unique language and way of life.

A life that remains relatively uneventful until the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1498, his third voyage to the Americas.

The first European to visit, he named the land, ‘Isla Santa’ or Holy Island, because he thought he’d found a large island that was so full of rich vegetation that he believed it to be the location of the garden of Eden.

Later, explorers Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci rename the place Veneziola, "Little Venice”, after seeing a series of tiny houses built on stilts over Lake Maracaibo and thinking that it looked like a ramshackle version of Venice.

None of these explorers settle though, that comes in the early 16th century, when the Spanish arrive in large number numbers and build themselves some towns.

They do their thing by exploiting the land and the indigenous people, killing off many of the population by introducing forced labour, new diseases, and general racist violence.

The Spanish combine Venezuela with Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama, creating what they called ‘the Viceroyalty of New Granada’.

But eventually the Spanish Crown becomes disinterested in events half way around the world and the economy takes a significant hit.
In the early 19th century, we see the rise of people calling for independence, with leaders like Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar getting enough support from the people, that they become the first Spanish American colony to drop their allegiance to the Crown and do their own thing.

As is often the case, not everyone thought this was a good idea, and civil war breaks out between those who loved the royals and those who wanted rid of them.

The war delays any official separation until 1821, when the loyalists lost in the Battle of Carabobo and Spain reluctantly handed over the keys.

In the early days of independence, the country became part of ‘Gran Colombia’, a federation that included old friends, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama.

But that didn’t last long, because in 1830, they separated, and became an independent republic, which they called ‘Venezuela’ – a call back to Amerigo Vespucci naming the place Venziola, or ‘Little Venice’.

Conservatives and Liberals fight for control of the country – a battle which results in economic instability as a series of military coups and civil wars prevent any real growth.

Debt rises and eventually Venezulean leaders reach out to foreign powers for financial help – many of which are delighted to oblige, in exchange for land and power. Which was lucky for them, because in the early 20th century, the discovery that Venzeula is sitting on top of one of the largest reserves of oil on the planet is something of a fantastic return in investment.

And by the 1920s, Venezuela is one of the world's leading oil exporters.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the wealth that that brings isn’t evenly distributed, and inevitably the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

Political parties emerge that promise to change all of this, and leaders like Juan Vicente Gómez, a military dictator, takes control and rules Venezuela with an iron fist for nearly thirty years, during which time he jailed his critics, tortured journalists, and murdered political prisoners.

Fortunately, Gomez died in 1935, but the power vacuum resulted in frequent challenges for leadership by other ruthless monsters until, in 1958, a new popular uprising saw the dawn of a new period of democratic governance for the next few decades.

This was a time when Venezuela enjoyed relative prosperity.

Oil prices were high, sex, love and rock and roll were in the air, and things were looking up.

Until the 1980s when oil prices fell and the country took a backward step into economic depression.

In 1998 another military officer took over as leader, but unlike dictators like Gomez, this one, a guy called Hugo Chávez, promised to reduce poverty, redistribute wealth, improve healthcare, and provide housing for the poor.

This all made Chavez insanely popular, but outside the country, a number of critics called his administration authoritarian and anti-democratic. This didn’t stop Chávez getting re-elected several times though, and his policies are today credited with putting Venezuela in a much better place than it was.

In 2013, Chavez was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro who was much less successful in the job – overseeing several economic crises, hyperinflation, and political repression.

Protests broke out and a load of Venezuelans left the country to find opportunities elsewhere.

Despite the controversy, in 2024, Maduro was again voted in for his third term in charge, despite growing evidence suggesting that he actually lost the election in a landslide to his rival Edmundo González – refusing to release voting tallies from polling stations, and issuing an arrest warrant for Gonzalez’s arrest.

Most recently he has had his luxury jet seized by the US government for allegedly purchasing it through a shell company and smuggling it out of the US in violation of sanctions and export control laws.

The point is, Venezuela remains in something of a state of crisis.

Political and economic turmoil continues and the country is divided between supporters of the government and those who oppose it. Unfortunately, there is a dark cloud hanging over the future for Venezuela.

But despite the challenges, something tells me that the enduring spirit of the people will help see them prosper again – hopefully soon!

The Summer of Love

The Summer of Love refers to a period mostly in San Francisco during the summer of 1967.
It was the peak of the hippy movement and tens of thousands of mostly young people, embraced the counterculture and converged in San Francisco, in particular in the Haight-Ashbury district and Golden Gate Park.
It was a time of free love, attempts to redefine society, anti-war feelings and lots and lots of drugs, particularly hallucinogenics.
There wasn’t a starting pistol or anything, but it’s generally agreed that it kind of started with the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. This was the event where counterculture guru Timothy Leary, a, Harvard psychologist and massive fan of LSD suggested we, "turn on, tune in, drop out".
It was the year The Mamas & the Papas wrote the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)". It was flower power, hippy-dippy, drug-addled good times.
But of course it couldn’t last – the massive and sudden population growth brought a range of problems to the area and the hippy movement itself spread way beyond a couple of neighbourhoods of San Francisco.
Before even the year was out the end of the moment was being signalled and a mock funeral was staged by the Diggers, a radical, activist street theatre group on October 6, 1967 called “Death of Hippie” intended to signal the end of the Summer of Love.

The Night of Darkness

In November of 1966, amidst the usual news of political debates and global affairs, something unusual appeared in the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal.

It wasn’t about territorial disputes or the war in Vietnam, but rather a prediction from a notorious Italian clairvoyant named Marina Marotti.

In the article, Marotti claimed to have foreseen a dark future.

She predicted that in July of the following year, 1967, a South American city “celebrating many festivities” would be engulfed in dust, death, and destruction.

The prophecy was vague, the kind of ominous warning easily dismissed as superstition.

But in the capital city of Caracas, it caught some attention.

There was a reason for that—the city was deep in preparations for its 400th anniversary, an event that was expected to bring joy and celebration. While many brushed off Marotti’s words as nonsense, others found them chilling.

In fact, her prophecy garnered enough attention that a few months later, on January 21, 1967, the Venezuelan magazine Elite published an article titled ¿Un terremoto destruirá a Caracas? (“Will an Earthquake Destroy Caracas?”).

In the article, journalist Luis Duque speculated about whether the Italian mystic’s vision could come true. After all, Caracas lay near tectonic fault lines, prone to occasional tremors.

But earthquakes of any significance were rare in the capital—so rare that no one alive in 1967 had experienced a major one. In fact, the last time the earth had truly shaken Caracas was over 150 years earlier, in 1812, when a 7.7 magnitude quake tore the city apart and killed over 20,000 people.

That disaster was long buried in history, and most residents carried on with life, confident that Marotti’s prediction would fade into the realm of forgotten prophecies.

The year pressed on, and Caracas buzzed with life. Public events were being planned, concerts filled the air with music, and ceremonies honored the city’s quadricentennial.

By summer, the celebrations were in full swing.


On one particularly warm and humid evening, July 29, 1967, the city settled in for the night. Families gathered in front of their black-and-white TV sets, eagerly watching the Miss Universe contest, in support of home-grown beauty Mariela Pérez Branger, who was competing at the event in Florida - thousands of miles away.

People drank and ate and in many ways, it was a typical night in the city.

Until suddenly it wasn’t.

Because just after 8:00 PM, dogs across the city began barking, and a low rumble—barely noticeable at first—crept into the background, cutting through the laughter and chatter.

It was a sound that was coming from deep under the Caribbean Sea, 20 kilometres away, where two massive tectonic plates sueezed against each other.

In Caracas, the rumble grew louder, overwhelming the voices of the TV announcers introducing the bikini-clad Miss Ecuador.

The rumbling intensified and people exchanged uneasy looks.

And then.. suddenly.. the tectonic plates jolted violently, and in an instant, the ground beneath the city erupted into juddering, vibrating quakes.

A deafening roar filled the air as buildings swayed and windows shattered. A local radio station captured the moment which we listened to in the podcast.

Moments later, the music cut off as the power grid failed, plunging the city into total darkness.

In the black of night, the Earth raged for 35 seconds.

Entire neighbourhoods were ripped apart.

Buildings crumbled into dust and debris, burying people under mountains of concrete and steel.

The earthquake, a magnitude 6.5, tore through Caracas, leaving devastation in its wake.

When the tremors finally subsided, it was clear that Marina Marotti’s prophecy had come true. Across the city, in the suffocating dark, the only sounds that could be heard were those of collapsing buildings and the desperate cries for help from those trapped beneath the rubble.

In neighbourhoods like Altamira and Los Palos Grandes, where towering 12-story apartment buildings once stood, residents were now buried under tons of concrete.

One survivor recalled, “We were returning from a day at the beach when the earthquake hit. When we got back to our home in Altamira, it was gone—completely destroyed. I’ll never forget the sound—it was like a beast screaming in pain.”

Sections of the city were obliterated. Walls crumbled, flattening cars and crushing everything in their path.

The darkness of the night only deepened the chaos, as aftershocks continued to shake the city.

For hours, the terror didn’t stop. Those lucky enough not to be home when the earthquake hit spent the night sleeping in their cars, or even in the streets, too afraid to return to their shattered homes.

As the first light of dawn broke, the scale of the destruction became clear.

Rescue teams—many using their bare hands—began to dig through the debris, trying to reach those who had been trapped in the chaos.

One man, buried for nearly 20 hours, survived only because a small air pocket had formed around him. Years later, he would still suffer panic attacks whenever he found himself in the dark.

Cranes and bulldozers soon arrived to assist with the rescue, but the scale of the destruction was almost too much to comprehend. Thousands of buildings were either destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Altamira, Los Palos Grandes, and La Guaira were the hardest hit—whole blocks reduced to flattened ruins.

The financial toll was estimated at $140 million—equivalent to around $2.5 billion today.

One resident, who lost everything, remembered, “We spent five weeks in a school shelter after soldiers told us they’d find us a safer place. But what haunted me most was the man who jumped from the third floor because he’d lost his entire family.”

By the time the rescue efforts ended, around 300 people were dead or missing. Over 1,500 were injured, and nearly 80,000 were left homeless.

The humanitarian disaster was overwhelming.

The survivors carried the weight of that night for the rest of their lives—the screams, the fear, the darkness.

Decades later, the memory of the earthquake still lingers.

In the comment sections of documentaries on YouTube, survivors share their stories.

“It’s hard to forget,” one wrote.

“I wish it never happens again, and I pray to God for it.”

The 1967 Caracas Earthquake wasn’t just the realization of a prophecy—it was a night of horror, of death, and of darkness that left a scar on the city’s soul.

But while Marina Marotti may have predicted the destruction, there was something she didn’t foresee: the light that followed.

Because out of the rubble, the people of Caracas came together.

They rebuilt their city, showing the world that even in the darkest moments, hope can rise.


The Heart of Darkness

As you doubtless know, The Heart of Darkness is an 1899 story by Joseph Conrad in which the main character travels into the wild interior of a distant land – in this case, the Belgian Congo.
So I’m going to tell the tale of another trip into the Heart of Darkness, but this time, in Venezuela, during 1967.
The traveller this time is Napoleon Chagnon, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri.
When he was deciding what he wanted to research, decided he wanted to cover “really primitive people,” which in the 1960s really meant either the tribes of the Amazon, or a journey to Papua New Guinea.
Now given we’ve already talked about the tribes of Papua New Guinea, we were lucky in that he chose to study the people of the Amazon basin, specifically, the Yanomamo people, a tribe of some 27,000 people living between Brazil and Venezuela about whom little was known at that time.
Also luckily for me, although he originally planned to go via Brazil, a revolution broke out there so he teamed up with a geneticist named James Neel and set out for Venezuela instead.
All in, he spent 19 months with the Yanomamö, spending time in both Venezuela and Brazil during 1964 to 1966, then again in early 1967 and again in 1968, collating his data in between trips.
In 1967 and into 1968 he wrote up his work and in 1968 he published his book entitled “Yanomamö, The Fierce People“
In it he recalls his experiences, including his first meeting, which he describes thus:
“I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark-green slime dripped or hung from their nostrils—strands so long that they clung to their pectoral muscles or drizzled down their chins.”
It was not a salubrious start, and I have to say the book is quite a contrast with the ‘joining in’ spirit of our friend Don Kulick in Papua New Guinea, notably choosing not to eat with them.
Generally speaking he didn’t seem to get on with the people, feeling they were always trying to use him for gifts or take advantage of him.
But he was there to study, not make friends I suppose.
There are some funny moments though, Chagnon was trying to trace the genealogy of the people there, trying to discover how communities would split and regroup and ally and go to war with each other.
The problem he had in doing this was there was a strict taboo about actually using people’s names. So when he kept pressing the people to give him names for his family trees, the enterprising tribesfolk got around the problem by just making up names for everybody for him – a fact he only realised when he went to a neighbouring village and nobody recognised any of the names he was talking about.
Even better, they started pranking him by making up more and more ridiculous names, and making him repeat them back to the village, with, as they say, hilarious results.
Chagnon writes, “Everybody would then insist that I repeat the name aloud, roaring in hysterics as I clumsily pronounced the name. I assumed that the laughter was in response to the violation of the name taboo or to my pronunciation. This was a reasonable interpretation since the individual whose name I said aloud invariably became angry. After I learned what some of the names meant I began to understand what the laughter was all about. A few of the more colourful examples are ‘hairy vagina’ ‘long penis’, ‘feces of the harpy eagle’ and ‘dirty rectum’. No wonder the victims were angry.”
But he managed to do his studies and in his book he talks about their lives.
He talks about their village dwellings that take a lot of effort to build but get burned down after a couple of years because they gradually get taken over by bugs and other small creatures.
He talks about their tools and material culture – they have knives made of rodents teeth, bows of bamboo and they make a curare poison they coat their arrows with to weaken the limbs of any monkeys they might shoot, so that they fall down to the forest floor where they can be collected rather than die in the unreachable treetops.
He talks about the fruits and vegetables the Yanomamo cultivate and eat, the game animals, grubs and insects they hunt and forage for protein and the honey they love as a special treat.
He also talks about their magic, including this little gem, “Female charms, for example, are used by men to make women more receptive to sexual advances. The dried leaves of the magical plant are mixed with a fragrant wood, and the resulting powder is said to be able to make a reluctant female hunger for sex. Most men carry a small packet of this at all times.”
But the central premise of the book, as suggested by the title, is that they had developed a fighting culture and that the men who were most reproductively successful were the fiercest, the ones who had killed the most enemies.
He talks about how even from childhood “They are encouraged to be ‘fierce’ and are rarely punished by their parents for inflicting blows on them or on the hapless girls of the village.”
He details their origin myth, with their ancestors supposedly having been born from blood cascading from a wound received by the Spirit of the Moon. He says ”Because they have their origins in blood, they are fierce and continuously making war on each other.”
And he details the ritual fighting that breaks out, even during feasts with alliances, that have a graduating degree of violence and danger.
It starts with duels of punching one another hard in the chest – one of which he describes as going on for three hours. If that does not satisfy matters, they move to side slapping, which despite the use fo the phrase to mean hilarious is actually more violent than chest punching, with one person unconscious within fifteen minutes.
If that doesn’t work, they might graduate to machetes, hitting each other with the flat of the blade. After that it’s time for a club fight – whacking each other on the top of the head with long poles like snooker cues.
And finally, we move on to all out war – bows and axes and clubs used to conduct raids on neighbouring settlements to kill their men and abduct their women.
So you can see why he called it “Yanomamö, The Fierce People“
But Ryan, there’s a twist. The book Heart of Darkness was about not the darkness of the jungle but the horrors of colonialism. An lo and behold, it turns out that Napolean Chagnon is quite a controversial figure.
Some claimed he had overstated the fierceness of the people, going so far as to suggest his portrayal of the Yanomamö as fearsome and violent led to a reduction in efforts to protect them as a people and to look after the land they lived in.
Some say this even played a part in enabling a 1993 massacre of around 16 tribespeople by illegal miners in Brazil.
One of these some people was a journalist named Patrick Tierney who wrote a whole book about Chagnon’s activities, published in 2000 and rather conveniently for the theme of this episode entitled Darkness in El Dorado.
This levelled accusations of fixing his data, drug taking and other ethical violations as well as as I said, overstating the fierceness of the Yanomamö. In fact it claimed he effectively encouraged elevated levels of violence by bringing a supply of machetes and weapons to the area.
But it doesn’t end there. The pendulum swung back again.
After that, others examined Tierney’s book, and found massive holes in the things that book claimed, possibly having been spun somewhat by from the catholic missionaries from the area who had a motive to impugn Chagnon for undermining their authority in Amazon.
In fact there is still uncertainty as to what he did and did not do and he professed his innocence until his death. To me personally it seems unlikely he is guilty of the worst things attributed to him.
But we do know that the Venezuelan government refused to allow him continued access to the area.
And what was also know is that over the course of his studies, he and James Neel took around two thousand blood samples from the Yanomamö people, which it was later claimed were given without proper informed consent.
The Yanomamo later said they had no idea their blood would be stored in fridges and used for various research projects.
Worse, the Yanomamö funeral practices involved essentially destroying everything of the deceased, including the cremation and complete destruction and disposal of the body, all of their possessions would be disposed of even their name would never be spoken again after their death.
So with that context, these preserved remnants of tribespeople who later died meant they could not properly be laid to rest.
A Yanomamo spokesman Davi Kopenawa said, “These Americans robbed our blood. They did not say anything in our language about the tests they were going to do. Nobody knew that they were going to use our blood to do research. Nobody thought that the blood would be kept in their refrigerators, as if it were food!... Everybody was very sad knowing that our blood and the blood of our dead relatives was still being kept.”
Fortunately, after years of negotiations the institutes that held the blood agreed to return it and over 2,000 tubes of blood were returned to the Amazon where, to be ceremonially returned to the land by the Yanomamo shamen.
As for Napolean Chagnon, he had his say by publishing the 2013 book “Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists”
Chagnon passed away in 2019 at the age of 81 and was described in almost every obitiuary I read as “controversial anthropologist Napolean Chagnon”
And it all started with darkness in Venezuela in 1967