Author Archives: Joel

by | 26 September 2025 · 5:31 pm

Loss of Portugal’s Flagship, 1512

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 268-271:

The Frol de la Mar was one of the trophy ships of the Portuguese fleet. At four hundred tons, it was the largest carrack yet built; equipped with forty cannons, distributed on three decks, its stacked high stern and forecastle made it an intimidating presence among the dhows of the Indian Ocean—a floating fortress that could fire in all directions. At the battle of Diu, it had slammed six hundred cannonballs into the Egyptian fleet in the course of a single day, but its size made it awkward to maneuver in tricky conditions, and it was now old. The average life of a ship on the India run was perhaps four years; the battering of the long voyages and the ravages of the teredo worm turned stout planks to pulp in a short time. By 1512 the Frol had been at sea for ten. It was seriously leaky and required continuous patching and pumping. Albuquerque wanted to nurse it back to Cochin and conduct repairs, but the common consensus was that the ship was a death trap. Many of those leaving flatly refused to sail in it. Only the formidable confidence of the governor ensured a crew. Because of its size, it carried the bulk of the treasure as well as many of the sick and wounded and some slaves as presents for the queen.

…

The Frol was in trouble, now leaking badly and unable to maneuver with the burden of its cargo and the growing weight of water. It had also anchored to ride out the storm, but water was coming in so fast that the pumps were useless. According to Empoli, “another wave struck it, and the rudder broke off, and it swung sideways and ran aground. It immediately filled with water; the crew gathered on the poop deck, and stood there awaiting God’s mercy.” It was time to abandon ship. Albuquerque ordered some of the masts cut down and lashed together to make a crude raft. The sick and wounded were put in the one ship’s boat, while the remaining crewmen were transferred to the raft in a rowboat. Albuquerque, with one rope tied around his waist and the other tethered to the Frol, steered the skiff back and forward until all the Portuguese had been taken off. Disciplined to the last, he ordered all to leave the ship in just jacket and breeches; anyone who wanted to keep any possessions could stay behind. As for the slaves, they could fend for themselves. Their only recourse was jumping into the sea; those who could not swim drowned. Some were able to cling to the raft but were prevented at the point of a spear from climbing aboard and overloading it. At sea, it was always survival of the most important. Behind them the Frol broke in two, so that only her poop deck and mainmast were visible above the water. The ship’s boat and the raft drifted through the night, “and so they stayed with their souls in their mouths begging God’s mercy, until dawn, when the wind and the sea abated.”

…

In the Frol “was lost a greater wealth of gold and jewels than were ever lost in any part of India, or ever would be.” All of this had vanished into the depths, besides the gems and bars of gold intended for the king and queen, along with beautiful slaves drowned in the catastrophe and the bronze lions Albuquerque had reserved for his own memorial. And there was something else, equally precious to the geographically hungry Portuguese as they attempted to take more and more of the world into their comprehension and their grasp. It was a fabulous world map, of which only a portion survived. Albuquerque lamented its loss to the king:

a great map drawn by a Javanese pilot, which showed the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the spice islands, the sailing routes of the Chinese and the people of Formosa [Taiwan], with the rhumbs [lines marking compass bearings] and the courses taken by their ships and the interiors of the various kingdoms which border on each other. It seems to me, sire, that it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen, and Your Highness would have been delighted to see it. The place names are written in the Javanese script. I had a Javanese who knew how to read and write it. I send this fragment…in which Your Highness will be able to see where the Chinese and the Formosans really come from, and the routes your ships must take to the spice islands, and where the gold mines are, the islands of Java and Banda, source of nutmeg and mace, and the kingdom of Siam, and also the extent of Chinese navigation, where they return to and the point beyond which they don’t voyage. The main map was lost in the Frol de la Mar.

But Albuquerque was already using the new bridgehead of Malacca to seek out and explore these seas for himself. He sent embassies to Pegu (Bago in Burma), Siam (Thailand), and Sumatra; an expedition visited and mapped the spice islands of eastern Indonesia in 1512; reaching farther east, ships sent to China in 1513 and 1515 landed at Canton and sought trade relations with the Ming dynasty. He was tying together the farthest ends of the world, fulfilling everything [King] Manuel could demand.

Unfortunately for the Portuguese, these bold extensions had unforeseen consequences. The Malacca strike had been partially undertaken to snuff out Spanish ambitions in the Far East. Instead it provided the personnel, the information, and the maps to advance them. Among those at Malacca was Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan); he returned to Portugal, wealthy from the booty, with a Sumatran slave, baptized as Henrique. When Magalhães quarreled with King Manuel and defected to Spain, he took Henrique with him, as well as Portuguese maps of the spice islands and detailed letters from a friend who had made the voyage. All these he put to use a few years later in the first circumnavigation of the world, under the flag of Spain, during which Henrique was to prove an invaluable interpreter—knowledge that allowed Portugal’s rival to claim the spice islands of the East Indies as its own.

Leave a comment

Filed under education, migration, military, Portugal, religion, slavery, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Spain, war

by | 25 September 2025 · 6:41 pm

Weekend in Łódź (alliterative)

Poland’s large branch of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) held its annual convention in Łódź last weekend. So we took a local train up through the countryside to get there before noon on Friday. Our return trip after the conference ended on Sunday had to be routed through Warsaw because of heavier weekend ridership. We didn’t have reserved seats on the final leg to Kielce, but managed to find seats for the whole trip, which arrived about a half-hour late. That long train had started in Vilnius and would end in Krakow.

Łódź became an industrial powerhouse during the early 1800s, with many textile mills employing thousands of German and Jewish immigrants. The largest plant, Manufaktura, just across from our hotel, was founded by Izrael Poznański, whose family built a palace adjacent to it that now serves as the city’s history museum. The huge brick buildings of Manufaktura have been nicely restored and repurposed into a major market and entertainment district, while some of the older brick buildings nearby have been abandoned. (The Łódź ghetto was the second largest in Poland during World War II, and the last to be liquidated because it was so productive.) I spent a day exploring and taking photographs around Manufaktura and the city museum there while my wife attended the conference.

On Saturday, I explored the major pedestrian mall, Piotrkowska Street, which runs north-south, starting above Liberty Square (Plac Wolności), with its Tadeusz Kościuszko Monument, where a band was playing when I first passed. On my way back, I heard a preacher shouting loudly in English, with each utterance translated into Polish (somewhat less loudly). Signage showed that the city was that weekend celebrating Kocham Łódź (I Love Łódź) Festiwal Nadziei (Festival of Hope).

On Sunday, I explored the University of Łódź area near Fabryczna, where the huge central train and bus station is located. We had time between the conference and our train departure to enjoy a traditional meal at Imber Restaurant off Piotrkowska. The rustic Zalewajka soup and Łódź-style pickled herring on sour cream were wonderful.

Leave a comment

Filed under education, food, industry, Poland, travel

by | 24 September 2025 · 6:32 pm

Goa Falls to Portugal, 1510

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 249-252:

AT THE ISLAND OF Anjediva, Albuquerque was surprised to meet a small squadron of four ships bound for faraway Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, under the command of Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos. Manuel had airily ordered this insignificant force to conquer the place. Some of the financing had been provided by Florentine investors; their representatives included Giovanni da Empoli, who had accompanied Albuquerque on an earlier voyage. Empoli found the governor “very displeased at the defeat sustained in Goa and also about many other things.”

Empoli’s surviving account, written probably two years later during a bout of scurvy while becalmed off the coast of Brazil, is sour and peevish. He recounts how Albuquerque was obsessed with Goa, determined to return and take it as soon as possible; he needed all the forces he could muster, including the squadron bound for Malacca, and, given the wearisome ordeal in the Mandovi River, he needed to be sly about his tactics in order to get consent from his commanders. Albuquerque had seen the potential of the island, and he feared that the return of a Rume fleet could render it an impregnable base against Portuguese interests. He stressed the approaching threat of a new armada. To Empoli, the Egyptian menace had become a phony war: “the news about the Rume was what had been expected for many years past, but the truth had never been known…at present such news could not be considered as certain because of the lack of credibility on the part of the Muslims.” Privately, he accused Albuquerque of concocting letters, with the aid of Malik Ayaz in Diu to bolster his case.

Whatever the truth of this, Albuquerque quickly managed to reason, bully, or cajole the fleet, including the Malacca squadron, into a new strike. Given the sensitivity of the Portuguese factions in Cochin and Cannanore, this was a considerable feat. Word from the ever-alert Timoji informed him that Adil Shah had left Goa to fight new wars with Vijayanagar; the moment was right. Two months of frenetic refitting and reprovisioning readied the fleet. At a council in Cochin on October 10 he imposed his will on the captains: let those who would follow him, follow. Those who refused must give their explanations to the king. The matter of Malacca and the Red Sea would be rapidly returned to afterward. Again, by sheer force of personality, and some threats, he carried the day. Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos, with the reluctant Florentines in tow, agreed to postpone the visit to Malacca. Even the mutineers in the Ruy Dias episode, who had preferred to stay in prison, were released and joined up. On October 16, Albuquerque was writing a letter of justification to the king, explaining yet again why he persisted with Goa: “You will see how good it is, Your Highness, that if you are lord of Goa you throw the whole realm of India into confusion … there is nowhere on the coasts as good or secure as Goa, because it’s an island. If you lost the whole of India you could reconquer it from there.” This time it was not just a matter of conquest. Goa was to be utterly purged of a Muslim presence.

On the following day he set sail with nineteen ships and sixteen hundred men. By November 24, the fleet was back in the mouth of the Mandovi. Increasingly the Portuguese did not fight alone. Within the fractious power struggles of coastal India, they were able to pull small principalities into their orbit. The sultan of Honavar sent a reputed fifteen thousand men by land; again Timoji was able to raise four thousand and supply sixty small vessels. Adil Shah, however, had not left Goa undefended. He had placed a garrison of eight thousand men—White Turks, the Portuguese called these men, experienced mercenaries from the Ottoman empire and Iran—and a number of Venetian and Genoese renegades with good technical knowledge of cannon founding.

Deciding not to wait, on November 25, St. Catherine’s Day, Albuquerque divided his forces in three and attacked the town from two directions. What followed was not a triumph for the organized military tactics he had been trying to instill. It was the traditional berserker fighting style of the Portuguese that won the day. With cries of “St. Catherine! Santiago!” the men rushed the barricades below the town. One soldier managed to jam his weapon into the city gate to prevent it from being closed by the defenders. Elsewhere a small, agile man named Fradique Fernandes forced his spear into the wall and hoisted himself up onto the parapet, where he stood waving a flag and shouting, “Portugal! Portugal! Victory!”

Distracted by this sudden apparition, the defenders lost the tussle to slam the gate shut. It was ripped open, and the Portuguese poured inside. As the defenders fell back, they were hit by another unit, which had smashed through a second gate. The fighting was extremely bloody. The Portuguese chroniclers reported acts of demented bravery.

…

The Muslim resistance collapsed. Men tried to flee from the city across the shallow fords, where many drowned. Others who made it across were met by the Hindu allies. “They came to my aid via the fords and from the mountains,” Albuquerque later wrote. “They put to the sword all the Muslims who escaped from Goa without sparing the life of a single creature.” It had taken just four hours.

Albuquerque shut the gates to stop his men intemperately chasing their enemies. Then he gave the city up to sack and massacre. The aftermath was bloody. The city was to be rid of all Muslims.

Leave a comment

Filed under migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, South Asia, war

by | 24 September 2025 · 3:30 am

Portuguese Adopt Swiss Tactics

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 227-229:

Manuel, chronically fearful of entrusting power to any one man, had decided to create three autonomous governments in the Indian Ocean. Nominally Albuquerque had authority to act in only the central segment—the west coast of India from Gujarat to Ceylon. The coasts of Africa, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf were the domain of Duarte de Lemos. Beyond Ceylon, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira had responsibility for Malacca and the farthest Orient. This dispersal of forces was strategically flawed, as neither of the other two commanders had sufficient ships for effective action. Albuquerque not only saw the pointlessness of this division, he also believed that no one was as capable as himself. Over a period of time, he found ways of obtaining the ships of the other commanders and integrating them into one unified command, without royal say-so. It made for an effective deployment of military resources; it also made him enemies, both in India and back at court, who would snipe at his methods and malign his intentions to the king.

Equally unpopular was the issue of military organization. The massacre at Calicut had highlighted the shortcomings of the way the Portuguese fought. The military code of the fidalgos valued heroic personal deeds over tactics, the taking of booty and prizes over the achievement of strategic objectives. Men-at-arms were tied by personal and economic loyalties to their aristocratic leaders rather than to an overall commander. Victories were gained by acts of individual valor rather than rational planning. The Portuguese fought with a ferocity that stunned the peoples of the Indian Ocean, but their methods were medieval and chaotic and, not infrequently, suicidal. It was in this spirit that Lourenço de Almeida had refused to blast the Egyptian fleet out of the water at Chaul and Coutinho had attempted to march into Calicut with a cane and a cap. The laudatory roll calls of fidalgos who went down to the last man pepper the pages of the chronicles. Yet it was clear, too, though cowardice was the ultimate smirch on a fidalgo’s name and the merest whisper of a refusal to fight had ultimately cost Lourenço his life, that the ill-disciplined rank and file could crack under pressure.

Albuquerque was certainly in thrall to Manuel’s messianic ideas of medieval crusade but, like the king himself, he was also keenly aware of the military revolution sweeping Europe. In the Italian wars of the late fifteenth century, bands of professional Swiss mercenaries, drilled to march and fight as organized groups, had revolutionized battlefield tactics. Highly maneuverable columns of trained men, armed with pikes and halberds, had steamrollered their opponents in tight mass formations. Albuquerque, with the energy of a zealot, set about reorganizing and instructing men in the tactics and disciplines of the new warfare. At Cochin, he formed the first trained bands. Immediately after his return from Calicut he wrote to Manuel, asking for a corps of soldiers practiced in the Swiss techniques and for the officers to instruct the India men. As it was, he proceeded anyway. Men were formally enrolled in corps, taught to march in formation and in the use of the pike. Each “Swiss” corps had its own corporals, standard-bearers, pipers, and clerk—as well as monthly payment. To encourage the status of this new regimental structure, Albuquerque himself would sometimes shoulder a pike and march with the men.

Within a month of his return from Calicut, he was again sailing north up the coast of India, this time with a revitalized fleet: twenty-three ships, 1,600 Portuguese soldiers and sailors, plus 220 local troops from the Malabar Coast and 3,000 “fighting slaves,” who carried baggage and supplies and in extreme cases might be enrolled in the fight. The initial objective of this expedition appears to have been ill-defined. There were rumors that the Mamluk sultan was preparing a new fleet at Suez to avenge the crushing defeat at Diu. But Albuquerque kept his cards close to his chest. Anchored at Mount Deli on February 13, he explained to his commanders that he had letters from the king to go to Ormuz; he also dropped in news of the Red Sea threat—and casually mentioned the subject of Goa, a city that had never figured in Portuguese plans. Four days later, to the surprise of almost everyone, they were embarked on its capture.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, South Asia, Switzerland, war

by | 23 September 2025 · 8:08 am

Outliers in Poland, Week 2

We arrived in Kielce in Świętokrzyskie (‘Holy Cross’) Voivodeship in (Lesser Poland) on a Friday, after a fast 2-hour highway drive south from Warsaw past lovely green countryside. We lodged temporarily in Jan Kochanowski University’s welcome center dorm while we looked for a local apartment. A very helpful recent graduate helped us navigate the Otodom real estate site and called to line up three possible sites to visit the following week. We lucked out with a spacious, fully furnished apartment in the center of town that had been rented out as an AirB&B. The owner was happy to have a ten-month rental by an older couple, and we signed the lease on the Friday before we left for a weekend language-teachers conference in Łódź.

The welcome center dorm had no cooking facilities, but just up the street were four grocery stores: a large Polish-owned Lewiatan, a German-owned Lidl, a smaller Portuguese-owned Biedronka (“Ladybug”), and a tiny Żabka (“Froglet”). The last is Poland’s ubiquitous convenience chain, one of the few stores open on Sundays.

Kielce is a very walkable city, but is also well served by buses. We first took a bus ride to the main terminal by the train station, where we found out that bus rides are free for anyone over 70. (The age limit may differ in other Polish cities.) We also see lots of families with children on the streets. There are at least two large, enclosed shopping malls (Galleria) within walkable range, with many international brands. Our apartment is near the intersection of the Silnica River and the long Sienkiewicza pedestrian mall that runs from the train station to the top of the hill. Across the river is a line of nicer restaurants, including one featuring food and wine from Georgia.

I’m still very tongue-tied in conversation, but I’m recognizing lots of words on signage. For instance, I correctly guessed that nieruchomość ‘real estate’ literally translates into ‘not-moving-ness’ (Fr. immobilier), after having seen many street signs warning pedestrians about Strefa Ruchu (traffic zone) driveways and parking lots.

Leave a comment

Filed under education, language, Poland, travel

by | 15 September 2025 · 10:06 pm

Outliers in Poland, Week 1

Last Monday, the Faroutliers arrived in Warsaw. We flew United Airlines on the first legs from BWI to ORD (!) to FRA(nkfort), then I flew the last leg to WA(rsa)W on Poland’s Lot airways while my wife arrived on a later United flight.  My Lot plane was a long, narrow Embraer, which perhaps didn’t have enough room for my second large checked bag of winter clothes and other things we wouldn’t need until we find a place to rent. I filed a claim at Lot’s lost baggage office and they delivered the bag to our hotel a day later.

We were lodged at the fancy Presidential Hotel in the center of the city, across the street from Warszawa Centralna train station, with a good view of the Stalinist-era Palace of Culture and Science. After a day of rest to mitigate severe jetlag, my wife went off to attend orientations for her yearlong teaching position, and I took a long walk down to the Wistula River, taking more photos of Polish signage than of the river itself.

Among the most frequent words on airport signage were Zakaz (Verboten, Prohibited, 禁止) and Uwaga (Achtung, Attention, 注意). After months of Polish self-study, I could recognize many words, but cannot converse easily at all yet. I started with Duolingo, but its lack of any grammatical explanations left me frustrated, especially, for instance, given the expanded role of the genitive case to cover not just partitive (like French du vin), but negative and irrealis nouns, as well (like things you don’t have, or that you need or want). I turned to Youtube, which has many, many Polish lessons on various topics. Among the clearest grammatical explanations for English speakers I found are those at Learn Polish with Monika.

On our last free day in Warsaw, we walked to and then through the very impressive POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, next to which is a monument and square dedicated to Willy Brandt, respectively labeled Pomnik Willy’ego Brandta and Skwer Willy’ego Brandta. We walked back along aleja Jana Pawła II (John Paul II Avenue, a bit like Warsaw’s Fifth Avenue, it seemed). I haven’t yet found out what that avenue was called before it was renamed for the Pope.

Our last evening in Warsaw we found ourselves next to a table with a young Romanian-speaking couple who were enjoying a multicourse meal. I couldn’t resist interrupting them between courses, and we had a long, pleasant conversation in Romanian and English. Our Romania stories echoed those their parents and grandparents had told them about the old days.

2 Comments

Filed under education, language, Poland, Romania, travel

by | 14 September 2025 · 3:38 am

Polish Language Exhibit in Osaka

Culture.Pl announces EXPO 2025 in Osaka: Interactive Exhibition about the Polish Language… the World’s First Using AI, running October 3-23.

Following the international success of ‘Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words’ – an unconventional book about the Polish language – a remarkable exhibition based on its pages will soon arrive back in Japan. The seventh edition of the exhibition will open on 3 October 2025 at Knowledge Capital in central Osaka, this time utilising the potential of artificial intelligence for the first time.

Thanks to a collaboration between the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Knowledge Capital Association, and Atsuhiko Yasuda (XOOMS co. ltd.), the exhibition will be enhanced with an AI module that enables visitors to engage in dialogue with artificial intelligence inspired by the book’s content. This innovation, made possible by close Polish-Japanese collaboration, allows visitors to experience ‘The Amazing Land of Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi’ – previously shown at EXPO 2020 in Dubai, London, and Basel – in an entirely new way. The project is part of Po!landポ！ランド, a series of events organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and funded by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. It is part of the cultural programme accompanying Poland’s participation in the World Expo 2025, coordinated by the Polish Investment and Trade Agency.

…
Since its 2018 premiere, the bestselling ‘Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words’ has won praise from readers and media outlets around the world. Designed for an international audience, the book presents 100 words that best capture Polish culture, history and everyday life in an original, accessible and humorous way.

The texts, written by Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies and Adam Żuławski, are full of witty observations, linguistic curiosities and cultural references, while its distinctive visual style was created by painter and illustrator Magda Burdzyńska.

The exhibition ‘The Amazing Land of Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi’ continues the success of the book, creating a fascinating, multidimensional story about the Polish language. The exposition combines illustrations inspired by the publication with various artistic forms – from embroidery, textiles and sculptures, to neon lights and video animations – all accompanied by an original sound installation.

Leave a comment

Filed under art, Japan, language, literature, Poland

by | 13 September 2025 · 7:20 am

Afonso de Albuquerque vs. Ormuz

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle p. 173:

That Albuquerque possessed an intemperate streak was becoming increasingly apparent, not just to the hapless Omanis but also to his own captains. It was usual for the captain-major to consult with his ship commanders and, often, to be subject to a vote of the whole group. Albuquerque, intelligent, impatient, and possessed of an unshakable belief in his own abilities, had no such tact or cooperative spirit. The captains had been nominally informed at the start of the Omani expedition, but as the weeks wore on the relationship became strained. By mid-September they were inside the mouth of the Persian Gulf, increasingly distant from the key task to which they had been assigned: blocking the mouth of the Red Sea. The drive up the Arabian coast had one clear destination in Albuquerque’s mind: the island city of Ormuz, a small nugget of parched rock anchored offshore that was the axis of all Gulf traffic between Persia and the Indian Ocean. It was an immensely wealthy trading place—the great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta had found it “a fine large city with magnificent bazaars” and tall handsome houses. When the Chinese star fleet had called, they’d declared “the people of the country…very rich….There are no poor families.” It controlled the famed pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf and dispatched large numbers of Arabian horses to meet an insatiable demand among the warring empires of continental India. “If the world were a ring, then Ormuz would be the jewel in it,” ran the Persian proverb. Albuquerque was well aware of the city’s reputation and strategic worth.

Aggressive action against Ormuz seems to have formed no part of his instructions from King Manuel to “establish treaties.” The harbor was thronged with merchant ships when Albuquerque arrived, but he proceeded in customary style. He refused all gifts from the king’s messengers; his reply was simple: become vassals of the Portuguese crown or see your city destroyed. The chief vizier, Hwaga Ata, concluded that Albuquerque, with just six ships, was a seriously deluded man, but on the morning of September 27, 1507, in a hubbub of noise, Portuguese bronze cannons again outgunned a far larger Muslim fleet. The vizier quickly sued for peace, accepted Manuel as his lord, and agreed to payment of a hefty annual tribute.

Albuquerque saw the hand of the Christian God at work in the victory.

Leave a comment

Filed under Arabia, economics, Iran, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, war

by | 12 September 2025 · 5:07 pm

Venezuela’s Malaria Battle

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 241-243:

Chávez, Chavismo, and its intellectual supporters in Venezuela and abroad, had argued since 2004 that the old liberal state could not produce people who cared for the well-being of the majority. The “representative” governments from the 20th century had not been able to deliver for all. But if there is an area where the liberal state was able to create long-lasting institutions with veritable results, it was health care.

The first nationwide, publicly funded efforts to eradicate malaria started during Rómulo Betancourt’s first government in 1945. The program had begun under the old generals in the mid-1930s. Dutch, British, and American oil companies had been active in the eradication of the disease in their areas of influence. But Betancourt’s social priorities and taxes on oil companies provided a new impetus. The efforts led by Dr. Arnoldo Gabaldón started with a massive campaign to eradicate mosquitoes in malaria zones. Within three to five years malaria had disappeared from the areas where the infecting mosquito predominated, although the WHO would not certify the disease had been eradicated from the country. Betancourt and his party would be thrown out by a coup in 1948, only to return to power by February of 1959. One of his first acts the second-time around was to name Dr. Arnoldo Gabaldón as Health Minister. The renewed emphasis and funding would officially free the country of malaria by 1961. Gabaldón’s work did not stop as efforts to build a robust central health authority continued for a decade. Critically, his lifework had been dedicated to getting the academic and practical experience necessary to build such an organization.

Gabaldón had started work as an assistant at the Ministry of Health in 1928, when generals still ruled the country. This gave him an early acquaintance with the ins and outs of the health bureaucracy across the country. He then studied at the German Institute of Naval and Tropical Diseases and the Italian Experimental Station for the Antimalarial Battle, before returning to Venezuela in 1932. He received a health science doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1935 through the Rockefeller Foundation and interned at Rockefeller University in New York City.

Upon returning to Venezuela, he joined the Ministry once again. At that time, fighting malaria was the country’s number one priority. By 1945 no pathogen, including the influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic, caused more deaths than malaria in Venezuela. The population had declined between 1891 and 1920 because of the disease. The historical devastation caused by malaria no doubt contributed to the zeal with which a generation of reformers fought a tireless battle against it.

First in his front-line role eradicating malaria, and then as the builder of a first-class health ministry and epidemiology network, Gabaldón delivered the most enduring results in the history of Venezuelan health care. Over three decades he dedicated himself to reforming, modernizing, and growing an existing, prior organization. The deep differences between Betancourt’s perspective and that of the military governments he had overturned had no real impact on Gabaldón’s work. His formula of achieving scale through incremental reforms, long-term training of middle cadres, deploying compliance systems, and creating strong legal frameworks, continued until the 1970s. Gabaldón was able to defeat every health challenge he met, to international acclaim. The epidemiology systems he created prevented the return of any serious epidemic for more than forty years, until everything he had built was dismantled.

Gabaldón’s legacy was overturned in the name of the people’s originary wisdom and the virtues of intuitive decision-making in health matters. Yet, no one suffered more than those in whose name the health sector was destroyed. By 2017, over a decade into the Chavista dismantling of the liberal state, more than 400,000 Venezuelans had been infected by malaria. This increase amounted to 84% of the rise in malaria cases between 2010 and 2017 around the world.

1 Comment

Filed under democracy, disease, education, malaria, nationalism, Venezuela

by | 11 September 2025 · 6:15 pm

Venezuela’s Oil Industry Makeover

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 230-233:

Nationalizing and running government-owned enterprises had been perfected by socialist governments for one hundred years. From the examples in France and Germany, to the more recent profitable state ventures in China and Vietnam, there were many successful formulas to choose from. In Venezuela, participatory identity politics drove an entirely different agenda.

This story has been chronicled in the book Comandante, a first-person account by the Guardian’s Caracas correspondent Rory Carroll. Published in 2013, the book provides a unique view of events unfolding between 2004 and 2012, the years before Chávez died.

In one chapter Carroll describes a visit to Ciudad Guayana, the place where every Venezuelan government since the late 1960s had invested in the promise of a non-oil economy based on hydroelectric power, ore, bauxite, gold, and diamond mining. Ciudad Guayana would become tragically violent by the 2010s, and already bore the hallmarks of squalor and massive de-industrialization. At the city’s aluminum plants, in the hands of new worker-managers, everything had collapsed well before Chávez’s death.

“Political managers from Caracas with no background in industry. Ideological schools set up in factories. Investment abandoned, maintenance skimped, machinery cannibalized. A catalog of grievances detailing blunders, looting, and broken promises. Venalum, they said, had at a time stopped exporting to the United States to vainly seek ‘ideologically friendlier’ markets in Africa and South America. After months of stockpiling, aluminum managers returned to US buyers, but then the market had crashed, losing the company millions. To curry favors with Miraflores [the presidential palace in Caracas A.N.], another company imported trucks from Belarus, Chávez’s European ally, but the cabins were too high for the region’s twisting paths, terrifying drivers. The trucks were abandoned. Managers at another factory halted production and sold the company’s entire stock before disappearing with the cash. On and on went the denunciations, one anecdote bleaker than the last. Worst of all, said the union men, was that for the previous years bosses had refused to renew collective agreements, meaning workers lost their rights and half their wages to inflation.”

Carroll’s descriptions show the new priorities in the running of these enterprises. The formal world of management seems to have been trumped by the personal feelings and experiences of the new leaders. Most importantly, by the intuitive sense of their ethnic legacy. In this view a government company’s assets did not represent an opportunity for the country’s future profit. Rather, it was booty stolen from the blood and sweat of centuries. It was treasure. And the fair and right thing to do with treasure was to distribute it.

On a grand scale this was the fate of PDVSA, the state oil company. Because the value of treasure was perceived to be intrinsic to itself, and had no relationship to exploration, extraction, refining, and its sale in global markets, the new Chavista leadership’s priority was its distribution among the people. After 20,000 highly skilled managers and middle managers were fired in the PDVSA purges of 2003, more than 100,000 bona-fide Chavista party members were hired to work at the company. One of the best-run energy companies in the world had become a patronage machine tasked with running myriad welfare programs. The government would distribute the treasure while crude production capabilities degraded, refining capacity dwindled, and entire operational capabilities were destroyed. Actual production sank to about a million barrels a day in 2019, down from the 3.5 million that had been produced the year before Chávez assumed power. It was the lowest level in almost seventy-five years. The trendlines for production into the 2020s looked bleak.

Leave a comment

Filed under democracy, economics, education, energy, industry, Venezuela