When Hugo Chávez — predecessor to deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — came to power in 1998, Denver builder Noel West Lane was deep into a homebuilding venture in Caracas, supported by business leaders close to the preceding administration of President Rafael Caldera.

Early Saturday morning, Lane, who had been president of Denver’s Melody Homes, was awakened by a phone call from Caracas: A friend with a house overlooking the city was watching distant explosions, followed by scattered reports that Maduro was gone from power and that associates in the government and military were fleeing town.

The development offered joyous news to Lane and his former Venezuelan associates, who had lost their operations after Chávez nationalized swaths of the economy. The socialist upheaval is widely credited for having driven a total collapse in a nation that once boasted the highest per capita income in Latin America.

On Monday, Lane showed The Denver Gazette photos of “La Marcha” of April 2002 in Caracas, where he joined a crowd estimated at 300,000 to a million protestors in opposition to Chávez’s regime. Some 18 shooting deaths followed when police and national guard troops sought to quell a street battle with Chávez’s own supporters.

MARCH THROUGH CARACAS

Chávez was briefly deposed, but rapidly regained power with military support. He died of cancer in 2013 at the start of a third term, replaced by Maduro, who narrowly won a special election.

“I’d never been in a protest march in my life,” Lane said.

Lane had been back in Caracas later that year when he took a call from Denver, where he had been named “Builder of the Year” by the Home Builders Association in recognition of his accomplishments, including setting up and running a nonprofit organization to create temporary housing for the homeless.

Melody Homes, which built neighborhoods in Westminster and other suburban areas and was often vying for the top spot among builders in metro Denver, was sold by Lane in 1993.

Under Lane’s direction, Melody had pioneered manufactured home technologies that included ways to package American-styled “stick building” using wood components into forms adaptable to mass production.

Former Gov. Roy Romer, Lane recalled, asked him to meet with a Japanese delegation that was anxious to adapt American production techniques for Japan’s market.

At a moment when U.S. tariffs were making Canadian softwood lumber expensive, Lane traveled to Venezuela to see if Caribbean pines, planted during Caldera’s regime, could meet Japan’s homebuilding demand for wood.

That led to a deep involvement in Venezuelan building. Lane joined Venezuelan associates in a number of commercial and residential projects, including construction of worker housing and for-sale units.

CAPTURED BY HISTORY

Lane, who never learned Spanish but said he could do “Spanglish” well enough to teach American building techniques, became captured by Venezuela’s history and traditions.

“I fell in love with the people, the culture, the society,” he said Monday. He also discovered a large Venezuelan community that was already in Colorado.

The Denver-Caracas connection, he said, was amplified as first-baseman Andrés “The Big Cat” Galarraga emerged as the biggest star on the Colorado Rockies.

Lane recalls a time while coaching his kids’ little league team when he took a call from Caracas business associates asking him to drive out to newly opened Denver International Airport and pick up Henrique Salas Römer, the opposition party leader running against Chávez in 1998, and to get him to Coors Field to watch Galarraga play.

Lane, who said he is happy with the fast-moving events in Caracas today, recalled when his associates lost an entire apartment building conscripted in a government takeover and seeing the country’s economy destroyed.

In moving ahead, he cautioned, it is essential to the economy that a rule of law be re-established. He has already received reports of chaos on the streets as thugs, seeking to restore Maduro’s regime, intimidate passers-by and take away cellular phones.

With Venezuelan friends telling him opportunities might return to the country under a new regime, Lane offered a piece of advice.

“When you’re visiting somebody’s house, you should live by the rules of the house,” Lane said. “We can’t force our ethics on another culture.”