These sons of a Venezuelan dynasty
saved the family rum company. now they're helping save street
kids and slums.
Driving into
Venezuela's capital city,
Henrique Vollmer points,
with a rueful half smile, to a handmade banner hanging from a
highway overpass. "Welcome to Caracas," the graffiti reads. "Take
care of your life."
The warning might not seem to apply to a man like Henrique Vollmer,
who, along with his brother Alberto, runs the family rum company, a
generations-old business dynasty. But it is exactly what the
Vollmers have been trying to do for five years, not only by
rescuing that family business from near-bankruptcy, but also by
rehabilitating Venezuelan street gangs and helping homeless
squatters.
In some profound, positive ways, the Vollmers are working both ends
of Venezuela's economic spectrum. The tropical country's natural
landscape is lush, and it is home to some spectacular wealth
produced by natural resources like sugar cane and oil; the nation
is the world's fifth-largest
oil exporter, the source of about 15
percent of the U.S. oil supply. But because Venezuela was an
oligarchy for centuries, where a few rich and powerful ruled the
many, there's an equally spectacular gap between rich and poor.
It's this gap the Vollmers are trying to bridge. In rural areas
like the municipality of Revenga in the state of Aragua, where the
Vollmer family lives, poverty and crime have been problems for
decades. As the car proceeds from
Caracas to the town of El
Consejo, where the Vollmers' 209-year-old hacienda is located, slum
dwellings increase - but Hacienda Santa Teresa certainly isn't one
of them. Built in 1796 by the count of Tovar y Blanco, the
expansive estate joined the extensive land holdings of the Vollmer
brothers' great-grandfather, Gustavo Julio Vollmer Ribas, in 1885.
It was converted to sugar cane fields, and by 1896, Santa Teresa
was Venezuela's first rum-making operation.