“But one must have one’s feet planted firmly on the ground. If we still have oil, we will have a real country in twenty years’ time, but we have a lot to do between now and then.” Giordani paused, and recited a Venezuelan adage: “If the dog dies, this is over.”
Chávez had lately been showcasing a plan for “twenty-first-century socialism,” in which Venezuelan society was to be restructured into comunas. Nobody understood exactly what the term meant or how it would be applied, except perhaps Chávez himself, and a heated debate was taking place. Barreto said that he and his followers were concerned that, without pressure from groups like Redes, the plan would be used to “straitjacket” the true revolutionary forces.
To help create an authentic commune, Barreto was working closely with Alexis Vive, one of the most organized of the armed colectivos in El 23
In many parts of the city, though, it is not the rich but the malandroswho are ascendant. Caracas is among the world’s easiest places to be kidnapped.
While his anti-capitalist rhetoric has induced some companies to leave, others have learned to work with the government and have done quite well. Regulations are astonishingly profuse—the mere act of paying for dinner in a restaurant requires showing I.D.—but, perversely, this has encouraged a surge in black-market entrepreneurship. Many doctors and engineers have fled the country; other professionals have flourished. The one constant is the flow of oil money, which brings some people great wealth, and also supports a burgeoning public sector. The poorest Venezuelans are marginally better off these days. And yet, despite Chávez’s calls to socialist solidarity, his people want security and nice things as much as they want an equitable society.
In a converted storeroom near Daza’s church lived Gregorio Laya, a buddy of Daza’s from prison. Laya worked as a cook in the Presidential kitchen at Miraflores Palace, but in the old days he had been part of a gang of roleros—thieves who specialize in expensive watches. He reeled off his favorites: Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet. Usually, he and his men waited outside the Teresa Carreño theatre for concertgoers to leave. But one day he went to rob the owner of a health club—“near here, just a few blocks away,” he said, pointing past the Tower.
After a disastrous flood in December, 2010, left an additional hundred thousand people homeless, most of them dislodged from poor hillside barrios, Chávez had commandeered hotels, a country club, and even a shopping mall to house them.
“The political discourse that has justified the invasions, the outright thievery, has come out of Chávez’s speeches,”
As always, though, it was full of billboards and banners on which the government congratulated itself for various achievements
This was a minority opinion. Guillermo Barrios, the architecture dean, told me, “The Tower of David wasn’t a beautiful example of self-determination by the people but a violent invasion.”
For many caraqueños, the Tower is a byword for everything that is wrong with their society: a community of invaders living in their midst, controlled by armed gangsters with the tacit acquiescence of the Chávez government.
Hundreds of buildings have been invaded since the phenomenon began, in 2003: apartment blocks, office towers, warehouses, shopping malls. Invasores now occupy some hundred and fifty-five Caracas buildings. The Tower complex houses an estimated three thousand people, filling the shorter tower completely and the taller one as far up as the twenty-eighth floor.Young men with motorbikes operate a mototaxi service for residentson high floors, driving them from street level to the tenth floor of the attached parking garage
The Tower, built as a marker of Venezuela’s eminence, has become the world’s tallest slum.
The Tower is named after David Brillembourg, a banker who made a fortune during Venezuela’s oil boom, in the seventies. In 1990, Brillembourg launched the construction of the complex, which he hoped would become Venezuela’s answer to Wall Street. But he died in 1993, while it was still under construction, and shortly after his death a banking crisis wiped out a third of the country’s financial institutions. The construction, sixty per cent complete, came to a halt, and never resumed.
