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VENEZUELA
Devils
and Angels
By
Jheri St. James
 It
was an angel named Nazarena Toledo Sanchez who sent us the
soil of Venezuela. She wrote that it came from “Margarita-LaAsuncion-Castillo
de Santa Rosa, the capital of the Margarita Island and a cultural
and historical place.” She was a link in a chain of
Sister Cities people who finally helped Gary Simpson gather
this soil. Gary joined Sister Cities International because
of members’ help with the collection in Armenia. August
Pujois and Steven Naimoli are the names of links to this final
South American soil acquisition. 
The Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela is a tropical country on the northern
coast of South America. It is a continental mainland with
numerous islands located off its coastline in the Caribbean
Sea. Bordering Guyana east of the Essequibo River, Brazil
to the south and Colombia to the west, Venezuela wears a necklace
of islands to the north: Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, St. Lucia,
Barbados, Curacao, Bonaire, Aruba, St. Vincent and the Grenadines
and the Leeward Antilles. Its capital is Caracas. The yellow
in Venezuela’s flag stands for land wealth, the blue
for courage, and the red for independence from Spain (1522-1821),
facilitated by Simon Bolivar, also liberator of Colombia,
Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru.
 The
name “Venezuela” is believed to have originated
from Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who, working for
the Spanish crown, led a 1499 naval expedition along the northwestern
coast’s Gulf of Venezuela. On reaching the Guajira Peninsula,
the crew observed dwellings and villages that the native people
had built over the water (palafitos), which reminded Vespucci
of the city of Venice, so he named the region “Venezuola,”
meaning “little Venice.”
There
are a variety of landscapes in Venezuela. The extreme northeastern
extensions of the Andes reach into Venezuela’s northwest
and continue along the northern Caribbean coast, Pico Bolivar
being the nation’s highest point. Extensive plains stretch
from the Colombian border in the far west to the Orinoco River
delta in the east. To the south, the dissected Guiana Highlands
contain the northern fringes of the Amazon Basin and Angel
Falls, the world’s highest waterfall. The Orinoco originates
in one of the largest watersheds in Latin America.
 Mother
Nature is prolific here. Large portions of the country were
originally covered by moist broadleaf forests Some 38% of
the over 21,000 plant species are unique to the country, 23%
of the reptilian and 50% of the amphibian species are also
endemic. Venezuela hosts significant biodiversity across habitats
ranging from Xeric scrublands to coastal mangrove forests.
Its cloud forests and lowland rainforests are particularly
rich, for example hosting over 25,000 species of orchids,
including the flor de mayo orchid, the national flower. The
araguaney is Venezuela’s national tree, whose characteristic
lushness after the rainy season led novelist Romulo Gallegos
to name it “la primavera de oro de los araguaneyes.”
(The Golden spring of the Araguaneyes).
Notable
mammals include the giant anteater, jaguar, and the capybara,
the world’s largest rodent. In the Amazonian forests
south of the Orinoco can be found Manatees, Boto river dolphins
and Orinoco crocodiles, which have been reported to reach
up to 6.6 meters in length. A total of 1,417 bird species
including ibises, ospreys, kingfishers and the yellow-ornage
turpial, the national bird.
Naturally,
all this wildlife is threatened by logging, mining, shifting
cultivation, development and other human activities. In response,
federal protections for critical habitat were implemented.
The country has a biosphere reserve that is part of the World
Network of Biosphere Reserves; five wetlands are registered
under the Ramsar Convention. In 2003, 70% of the nation’s
land was under conservation management in over 200 protected
areas, including 43 national parks. Below, some more photos
of Venezuela’s grandeur.
The name
of Angel Falls came from a “hell-raising soldier of
fortune,” a daredevil obsessed with finding gold. Instead
he found the world’s tallest waterfall, which was not
really his discovery. That honor belongs to Ernest Sanchez
la Cruz in 1910. The name apparently was the result of headline
newspaper writers’ work. In 1933, Angel was plying his
trade as a bush pilot in South America, ferrying men and supplies
out of the jungles. There, he said, an old prospector hired
him to find a mythical “golden river.” With a
payment of several thousand dollars, the miner guided Angel
to a mysterious mountain site in Venezuela known as Auyan
Tepui or Devil’s Mountain. It was here that he first
saw the dramatic waterfall spilling from the mountaintop.
After loading the plane with 75 pounds of gold nuggets, the
miner mysteriously died; Angel headed back to the States.
 In
1937 he was back in Venezeuela with his new bride, red-haired
Mavis Marie, and two other passengers. As they headed for
the mountain, Angel mistook the shimmer of the falls for the
glint of gold and landed his plane in six feet of mud atop
Devil’s Mountain. There it sayed, mired in the muck.
It took the four two weeks to hack through the jungle and
down the mountain to safety. In 1938, the American Museum
of Natural History sent an expedition with Angel and pilot
and guide, which bolstered Angel’s renown. “The
U.S. press picked up on the world’s highest waterfall,”
Carl Posey wrote in a 1991 issue of the Smithsonian’s
Air and Space Magazine. And the press focused on a “natural
legend: a pilot with the airworthy name of Angel who had stranded
his airplane on Devil’s Mountain.  Angel’s
ashes were interred at the Portal of Folded Wings, an aviation
shrine near Burbank Airport. But in 1960, Mavis Marie Angel
and her sons flew over Angel Falls and scattered his ashes.
The widow had intended to recover her husband’s plane
too. But “seeing the Flamingo there atop the 8,000 foot
mesa of Devil’s Mountain,” she told The Times
after the expedition, “I decided to leave it there beside
Angel Falls. It simply belongs there—not in a museum.
Nevertheless the Venezuelan government removed the plane in
the 1970’s. Today it is on display at Ciudad Bolivar
Airport. (photos: www.z.about.com
and
www.worldsgreatestsites.com)
The angels
must have sent us the angelic Sister Cities International
group, August Pujols, Steven Naimoli, and Nazarena Toledo
Sanchez. We thank them once again for their willingness to
participate in our project. The word for peace in Venezeula
is “paz.”
* * *
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