Tag: Venezuela stamp

Maracaibo is the second largest city in Venezuela. This stamp marks the cities first founding by Spanish in 1569. The Germans were there before in an earlier attempt to get a commercial colony started. I can understand why Venezuela doesn’t want to acknowledge an earlier failure, but when bankers go far and wide in search of gold, The Philatelist is there. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

This is a well printed version of the 1960s United Nations style stamp issue. Instead of showing the city on it’s anniversary in a historical context, the cities new large hospital complex is shown to imply things are getting better, Good job.

Todays stamp is issue A169, a 70 Centimoes stamp issued by Venezuela in 1969. It was a single stamp issue. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 45 cents used.

There are two guesses over the etemology of the name Maracaibo. Some think it marks the place where a great Indian chief Mara fell. Others think it is from the local Indian dialect meaning place where serpents run wild. Speaking of serpents, that brings us to the bankers and their earlier attempt at a city they called New Nuremburg.

The German Welser banking family made a great fortune on the Caribbean slave trade and trading with the Levant. The Welsers were officially Catholic and claimed to be related to the Byzantine general Belisarius. They loaned a great deal of money to Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was also King of Spain. In return the Welsers were granted a charter allowing them to set up a colony on the territory of modern Venezuela. The territory would have to be completely financed by the Welsers and utilize only Germans and Spaniards. The family named the colony Klein-Venedig which means little Venice. There was the normal sugar caine plantations using African slaves but the real lure was to find the mythical Indian city of Eldorado that they believed would contain a rich gold mine.

The going was not easy with many of the German colonists succumbing to tropical diseases and the local Indian attacks.10 years after the founding in 1535 Georg Von Speyer organized a new expedition into the interior with 450 German and 1500 friendly Indians to turn the colony around by finally finding Eldorado. They were gone for years and the settlements appointed a new Spanish governor in the absence of the Germans. In 1546 a few from the expedition returned empty handed now under Phillip Von Hutton. The Spanish governor did not welcome them. Instead he had them ambushed and Von Hutton was beheaded. The Welser family back in Germany sued to have the colony returned to them but their claim to it ended upon the death of Emperor Charles V in 1556. During the German absence, New Nuremburg had been abandoned in favor of a more defendable settlement  at Cabo.

The German adventure in Venezuela was romantized in united 19th century Germany as a basis for new German colonial adventures that also harbored dreams of colonial wealth from trading, The stories were of adventurers Von Speyer and Von Hutton, not the Welser family bankers that employed them. Remember they found no gold and the world of the sixteenth century was not yet ready to make use of the areas ample oil resources.

The finding of gold to the south in Brazil in 1695 had most of the adventures, Pizarro and Sir Walter Raliegh had also tried, gave up on finding mythical Eldorado. In 1871 gold was found in Venezuela at El Callou, and a productive mine for 12 years until the vein played out. In 2016, Venezuela formed the Orinco Mining Arc to find and exploit gold and other minerals in the area. At least they didn’t call it Eldorado.

Well my drink is empty. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Venezuela was one of the many nations that broke off from Gran Columbia after independence from Spain. This breaking apart leaves small nations to try to piece together a cultural heritage as Venezuelans rather than Colombians of even Spaniards. So here we have an author from a period of history when less than 20% of the country could read. To promote him might distort a sadder legacy. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The stamp shows author Rufino Blanco Fombona standing in front of some of the books that he published. The portrait is worthy of a man of letters who rests in the National Pantheon of Venezuela. A nice positive image, but one that totally distorts the Venezuela of Blanco’s time.

Todays stamp is issue A212, a 10 Centimoes stamp issued by Venezuela on October 16th, 1974. It was a four stamp issue in various denominations honoring the birth century of Mr. Blanco. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents whether used or unused.

Rufino Blanco Fombona was born in Caracas in 1874. He published about 10 books of fiction in the first three decades of the 20th century. During the years he was active he was nominated five times for a Nobel Prize in Literature. The nominations got his books out on the wider world market that was unusual for a local literary figure of the time. He never won the award and the nominations shouldn’t be conflated to assume that Blanco’s work ranked among the worlds best. The nomination was often a sign of respect and support for someone trying to create literature in a desolate place. Blanco’s name is on an upscale primary school in todays Venezuela.

Education in the old days of Venezuela was spotty at best. The Spanish and the Columbians left little in the way of educational institutions and even their outposts were few and far between. Aside from outreach from the Catholic Church, little at all was done to educate indigenous people. Well off people were taught by tutors or at boarding schools. Simon Bolivar’s tutor is often elevated in order to imply levels of education that were not reality.

In 1881 school attendance was mandated by the government and a few schools were built. Oil was discovered in Venezuela in 1919 and oil revenue started to flow to the government. On purpose the money did not flow into education. Less than a third of eligible children attended school and the nations literacy rate was around 20 %. The long term dictator of the period, Juan Vincente Gomez openly stated his belief that an uneducated people were a docile people. Remember stability is supposed to be a selling point of a dictator. He may have had a point. An uprising in 1928 was lead by university students. Obviously members of the top two or three percent of their age cohort. The uprising was put down and the student leaders sent into exile. Lefties like to point out how rough Gomez could be with agitators in the use of murder and torture. Hanging men upside down  by their testicles till dead. Yet these students only got a probably well funded exile, a leap year. Well the rich are different, even to a dictator. Many of the exiled students came back to be leaders in Venezuela. There is debate how much of the early oil revenue was stolen by Gomez and how much by Wall Street. I imagine some was spent on leap years.

Later governments got more democratic and oil revenue kept flowing so things eventually improved. There is a perception that the situation in Venezuela has deteriorated under the Socialists claudillos lately. One area that has continued to improve is literacy which is currently 96%. This is one of the highest in Latin America. They should perhaps do more stamps on people that made that happen and less made up stories from the countries dark age.

Well my drink is empty and so I will wait till tomorrow when there is another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

A new lefty government in Venezuela wanted to diversify the oil economy so that imported foodstuffs could be replaced by home grown production. Doing so would improve the lot of the average peasant who was to be the beneficiary of government mandated land reform. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The early 60s really saw socialism on the march. The educated, urban, intellectuals created some great visuals to go along with it. Case in point this stylized view of a cow’s head, grain, and a peasant family. Pretty cool if grain was an important part of Venezuela’s agriculture. It wasn’t, and strongly hints that the socialist didn’t have a good grasp of the situation. Perhaps good intentions are more important as they replaced neglect.

Todays stamp is issue C762, a 40 Centimos airmail stamp issued on February 6th, 1961. It was a 15 stamp issue in various denominations that recognized an agricultural census that went on the previous year in preparation for land reform, the redistribution of farmland from large landowners to the ownership of small tracts by the agricultural laborers. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.

The economy in Venezuela was really all about oil. Here the leftists work was solid because they showed flexibility and followed through when there was an advantage. Romulo Betancourt was a young communist who was exiled to Costa Rica. He had in mind a string of leftists regimes forming a block out of the former Gran Columbia. He had studied the 1938 Mexican nationalization of their oil industry and realized that was not the way to go to pay for it. The oil had naturally been found by American oil companies and World War II demand  had seen the companies greatly increase Venezuelan production. The softening of demand post war would have allowed them to boycott Venezuelan oil. Venezuela under the right wing had not much benefited from the oil as the tax revenue amounted to only 9% of production. In Betancourt’s first term as President, he raised the tax on the oil to 50% and the money flowed in while leaving the professional foreigners to keep production up.

Betancourt was not as successful with land reform. Millions of acres were bought from wealthy landowners and distributed to peasants. The products were mainly coffee, sugar cane and tobacco. Seeing the vast economic growth in the cities with it’s promise of an easier life, many peasants resold the land given to them and used the proceeds to finance the move to the cities. So land reform was no help to output. Indeed only 4 percent of the land in Venezuela is under cultivation. Food must be imported.

Betancourt was not done maximizing oil revenue however. American President Eisenhower was not pleased with the taxes on American oil companies and signed a law promoting importation of Mexican and Canadian oil over Venezuelan. Betancourt in turn sent his Arab speaking oil envoy to Cairo to work with fellow traveler pan Arabist socialists who were facing similar issues regarding getting control of middle east oil revenue. In 1961, Venezuela became a founding member of OPEC that over time had such a big part in rising oil prices.

I mentioned that Betancourt was a young Communist. Indeed he was a participant in violent plots against right wing strongmen in Columbia and Costa Rica. Back in Venezuela however he marketed himself as a democrat. His early radicalism was not forgotten though when Dominican Republic strongman Trujillo tried to have him assassinated by a car bomb. See https://the-philatelist.com/2019/07/05/dominican-republic-1937-making-the-guy-behind-the-cow-understand-you-are-working-for-him-with-parsley/  . He was badly burned but survived. With the change in the USA from Eisenhower to more progressive President Kennedy in 1961, Betancourt sought and received better relations with the USA. He  forever burnished his democratic credentials by leaving office without incident at the end of his final term in 1964. A rarity in the Latin America of the day.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the Venezuelan stamp designers of the 60s. The international socialist movement in the 60s did not turn out to have all the answers, but they definitely had a hopeful vision of where they wanted to go, well captured on this stamp. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Oil revenue can do much, most of all raise expectations. Most dictators would prefer a lower bar of success. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

Today stamp shows the grand façade of the main Carmelite Post Office in Caracas. The oil revenue was seeing much construction in Caracas of the time and yet the post office building was almost 200 years old. The stamps of the time show a lot of these historic old facades. I suspect that the reason for them was that the government believed Venezuela underpopulated and was trying to attract a new crop of European immigrants. The old world style architecture might help attract them.

The stamp today is issue A102, a 5 Centimos stamp issued by Venezuela on May 14th, 1958. It was part of a six stamp issue in various denominations showing the main post office. In addition to this issue there were three other issues of stamps in the previous 5 years showing the façade of the post office. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used. Indeed of the 28 stamps featuring the post office, none are today worth more than $1.50. So the office has lost its once large popularity.

Marcos Jimenez was an army officer that ruled for about 10 years in the 1950s. The oil revenue was really flowing at the time and he started massive public works projects in Caracas. His slogan was sow the oil. The reality was that a lot of debt was being built up and much of it was trying to employ large numbers of Venezuelans to avoid revolution. He also tried to attract European immigrants into the capital in order to benefit from their education and to skew the racial makeup of the country. Jimenez did not succeed in this. Though 2 million immigrants came, most only stayed a few years. He hosted a regular show on Venezuelan TV, where he and a historian friend would talk about historical events

Jimenez was not popular with the elites in the cities, nor with the peasants in the countryside. When a coup was in the offing, Jimenez avoided bloodshed from his side by quickly leaving the country. He settled in the USA until 1963, when he was extradited back to Venezuela to face corruption charges. He sat in jail for 5 years before his sentence was commuted and he was allowed to retire to Spain. He died there in 2001. A later fan of Jimenez was Hugo Chavez. He said Jimenez was one of the best presidents, that people only disliked him  because he was a military man, and Chavez was impressed by all the public works that went on in that era.

The Carmelite Post Office was originally built as a home in the 18th century. It later became the War office and in the 1930s was rebuilt as the main post office with the Gothic façade that appears on the stamp. In 1984, the building was declared a national historic landmark. It still stands but has been dwarfed by the huge buildings that now surround it. The look is a little different today as it has been painted bright colors.

Well my drink is empty and so I will open the discussion in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Welcome readers to todays offering from The Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. We have an interesting story of an adventurer who got around.

At first glance, todays stamp looks European, perhaps a West German stamp from the 1950s. If you could touch it, a great tactile part of stamp collecting, you would feel that the paper used for the stamp is of a lower quality. This might send your guess toward Spain. This would be getting warmer. It is actually a stamp from Venezuela, albeit one honoring someone born in Europe.

The stamp today is issue C715, a 1960 issue honoring the 100th anniversary of the death of Augustin Codozzi. It has a face value of 25 centavos and is part of a six stamp issue in various denominations intended to be used for air mail. It has a value of $1 in its cancelled condition.

Augustin Codozzi was born in Lugo, Italy in 1793. After attending a military academy in Italy, he served with Napoleon’s army. After the defeat of Napoleon and infused with the ideals of the French Revolution, Codozzi was off to South America. He offered his services to those fighting for freedom from Spain under Simon Bolivar. Many of us have heard of young adventures taking up the cause of American independence. This is the first I have heard of it happening in the South American struggle.

Codozzi was made a Coronel of Artillery and after independence was given Venezuelan citizenship by President Paez. He was then made governor of the region of Barinas. It his then that his real contribution started. He was a cartographer and geographer and set out to do a proper atlas of the new country. The Geography and Atlas of the Venezuelan Provinces was a word respected work. He was even inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1842. During this time he also promoted the German settlement of Alonia Tovar, which still exists today.

Venezuela was not a stable place in this time period. When President Paez was overthrown, Codozzi was forced to flee to neighboring Columbia. He was allowed to keep up his non political work in Columbia. some of you will remember that the current state of Panama was then a part of Columbia. Codozzi was hired by a British firm to investigate a potential route for a canal across the isthmus of Panama. The British plan came to nothing. The later American construction used the exact route that Codozzi mapped out.

Codozzi died of malaria in 1859. He was held in such esteem that the Columbian town where he died was renamed in his honor. Today it contains 70,000 people. Later his remains were moved to Caracas, Venezuela and placed in the National Pantheon of Venezuela as a national hero.

What I like about this stamp is that it reminds us a figure in his day may only be judged by his politics. Over time however, the achievements are recognized and remembered. This stamp was issued during the term of President Betancourt during an outbreak of democracy in Venezuela. Former President Paez, being of the South American strongman school, would not have been a hero to small d democrat Betancourt. Time has passed and it did not stop Codozzi from receiving the thanks of his adopted homeland.

Well my drink is empty and so it is time to open up the conversation in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.