A wonderful, bitter tasting story about Venezuelan chocolate:
With its reliance on cheap labor, the industry seems hard-wired for conflict, though chaos afflicts some cacao areas are more than others. Barlovento, near here, is plagued by thievery of cacao pods, score-settling murders and the torching of storage facilities.
Built with slave labor, the industry here became the mainstay of Venezuela’s colonial economy. For centuries, the nation was the world’s top producer. European monarchs sipped concoctions made from Venezuelan cacao.
Then, in the 20th century, there was oil. Dictators came and went. Venezuela, despite its vast fertile lands, became a net food importer. The legendary strongman Juan Vicente Gómez seized cacao plantations in this forest and made them part of his personal empire.
Bureaucrats later assembled a monopoly over the industry, eroding incentives to produce high-quality cacao. Yields plunged. Still, cacao cultivation survived, attracting growers obsessive enough to weather policies bedeviling exports of anything but petroleum.
Venezuela is widely known as a difficult place to do business. But the peculiar resilience of the conflict-ridden cacao trade is evident from a ride on a fisherman’s skiff to Chuao, an isolated forest village founded in the 16th century that knows a thing or two about the cycles of Venezuelan history.