From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Beach Paradise to Caracas Barrio

Following a weekend of paradise, alternately swimming in the surf and lying around like royalty under palm-thatched sun shelters drinking cold caipiriñas, we went home. Dang! I hate that. Entering Caracas from the east the first big thing you drive through is the Petare barrio. I think barrio just means neighborhood in some Spanish-speaking countries but in Venezuela, it means slum. The US Embassy and other rumor spreaders claim that most of the approximately 65 homicides in Caracas on an average weekend occur in the barrios. Petare is one of the biggest and the worst. I never know where truth ends and legend begins in this country but our friends' sweet and wonderful maid lives in Petare. She sometimes is unable to get to work because she's hunkered down in her house ducking a flare up of street violence. A few weeks ago her nephew was murdered there.

Although my cultural enrichment-craving wife is dying to visit a squalid barrio, I hope to steer clear of them. I prefer instead to keep them as romantic fantasies in my mind like pirate ships. Zooming past one at 100 km per hour on the autopista, while taking snapshots out the window, is plenty close enough for me. I am peppering a few of the snapshots in this blog post.

Being an engineer (retired emeritus) and not a sociologist, I am most interested in the structure and infrastructure of the barrios. In a word, it's scary! Around Caracas they are built on prime view property, i.e. perilously steep hills. They ain't exactly geotechnically engineered for this kind of terrain. In fact, we are told they are all squatters' habitations and sometimes wash away in the wet season. There seems to be a lot of public land in Venezuela and poor people are prone to just find a piece of it, get some of the hollow extruded clay tiles that Venezuela is made of, slap 'em together with some mortar, then presto…a house. If the bare land is all taken up, they may just build their house on top of someone else's…literally! We just heard the other day that someone's maid was agitated because someone else was building a house on her roof.

I don't know a whole lot about how the utilities work in the barrios. I don't think the plumbing is pretty but I can at least testify that by dusk they are twinkling with the light of modern efficient screw-in compact fluorescent lights. Charles Hardy, a Wyoming native and former Catholic priest actually lived in a very impoverished barrio ministering to the occupants during the early years of Chavez' administration. He reports on life and infrastructure there in his book "Cowboy in Caracas". See http://www.cowboyincaracas.com/. His description of the habitations that he and his neighbors lived in was even more dismal than what you see in the photos. He says they were desperation shelters provided by a former "benevolent" right wing leader, consisting of cardboard walls with tin roofs. The bathroom was wherever the lowest corner of the concrete floor was so you could take a whiz and it would run outside under the crack between the wall and the floor. You did your number 2 on a newspaper then discretely took it outside and set it across the road to wash away (wherever away is) in the next rain. Somebody brought drinking water in on a truck that didn't always arrive. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that Charlie is a fervent believer in Chavez as a positive instrument of beneficial social change. I can agree with Presidente Chavez that his predecessors were corrupt right wing oligarch's and that his arch-enemy George Bush is an arrogant belligerent imperialist doophus. However, Charlie has a long way to go to convince me that Chavez has the intellectual capability and the genuine commitment to bring long term prosperity, stability, democracy, and an end to corruption and poverty. But, hey! I like the energy-saving screw-in fluorescents.