Along the coffee route

Abstract

Two events took place in Paris in the fall of 1886, a marriage between elites French-Venezuelan women and the construction plan of a complicated and deficient railway through the swamps of the south of the lake, to facilitate the export of coffee and other Venezuelan products to Europe and the United States, from the port of Maracaibo. POR LA RUTA DEL CAFÉ, is a chronicle where fiction is intertwined with "historical truths" to narrate the genesis of the tortuous Zulia Railroad, Santa Bárbara-El Vigía (1896-1954) bridge between the Venezuelan Andes, the lake, the port from Maracaibo, Europe and the US. The chronicle narrates the difficulties and deficiencies of a railway contracted to please family ties and commercial commitments, just when coffee prices, its main engine, were already declining in the international market. It is a story that takes place in different countries. It comes and goes, the time of the agricultural exporting Venezuela of the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the oil and conflictive Venezuela of today.