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A guided tour of the political, economic,
and racial geography of Caracas, Venezuela in four vignettes,
courtesy of a friendly and unwitting member of the anti-Chavista
opposition.
1. The
Political: Parque Central
I thought the jig was up when
I told Raúl where my French friends live. "Oh, they
must be Chavistas!" I played dumb. Playing dumb was my only
option: housing in Caracas is incredibly scarce, and I had already
been looking for weeks before coming upon the empty room in Raúl´s
house.
He immediately launched into
a slow and painstaking explanation of how Venezuelan communism
operates, under the watchful eye of president Hugo Chávez
Frias. An honest, hardworking Venezuelan can't go into the Anauco
Suites-a towering if dilapidated apartment complex tucked between
the 56-story East and West towers of Parque Central, Caracas.
The Anauco, according to our new landlord in an upper middle-class
section of town, is reserved for communists, whether from the
Venezuelan interior or the Cuban-inspired conspiracy abroad.
I avoid details when it comes
to my work in Caracas: "I'm an English teacher in an institute
in Parque Central." His suspicion takes a backseat to his
eagerness to show a young American the political ropes of Venezuela:
"This is how things work under communism," Raúl
reminds me as the subject turns to the East Tower of Parque Central,
damaged in a fire in 2004 and still closed for repairs. "For
every billion Bolivares that go toward it, you know 500 million
go in someone's pocket." I bite my tongue, stifling a comment
about the decades of puntofijismo-the power sharing by
the center-right COPEI and center-left AD which dominated Venezuelan
politics from 1958 to 1998-about the corruption rife under the
exclusionary pact and its inevitably violent outcome in the 1989
Caracazo riots, in the aftermath of which hundreds were
slaughtered when government troops entered the barrios.
This does not pardon corruption
in the present, but the opposition wields the charge of corruption
in patently bad faith: one cannot squander oil profits if these
profits is already being funneled into the pockets of transnationals,
and moreover corruption matters little if the government is already
exclusionary in its very composition.
2. The Racial:
The City Center
Like many escualidos-a
term for the political opposition which designates them as feeble
and sickly-our landlord has a veritable phobia of the old city
center. "Here it's dangerous, but compared to the center,
this area is like a convent." He and others go into great
detail about how slick and ruthless the thieves of the center
are, about how they will rob me blind and kill me for my shoes.
I try to remind myself that they are speaking of the area of
the city that I know best, and in which I have spent months already
and where I work every day, where the food is better and the
people friendlier.
Such phobias certainly echo similar sentiments expressed elsewhere.
Consider the ways in which
the names of entire cities become economically-coded racial bywords
for those living in the suburbs. Think "Oakland." Think
"Detroit." That this phobia masks racial content is
evident when one considers the history and structure of Venezuelan
racism: the one thing that most well-off caraqueños
fear is a repeat of 1989's Caracazo riots, an event
which one can often hear described as the days when "the
blacks came down from the hills."
The TransAfrica forum recently
noted that racism is alive and well in Venezuela, a fact made
clear to them when their own delegation was described in racial
terms as quemado, or "burnt." But the racism
is explicit in my landlord's phobia as well: where we live is
described as a "red zone" after dark, but the Center
is "mapache territory," a term which refers
to the lifestyle and cleanliness of a racoon, while also-not
coincidentally-invoking the Spanish name given to the "Apache"
in reference to their painted faces. The idea of being stalked
by a masked and racialized other haunts the Venezuelan opposition,
the reflection of the irrepressible guilt of a century's crimes.
Of course, the racialization
of the hills and the barrios is more stark than that of
the city center, but the city center is the point of contact,
where the opposition must inevitable meet this other while shopping
for some goods which (regrettably, for the upper classes) are
not to be found in the east of the city, and is therefore perceived
as more of a threat. It is the point of penetration, the wound
through which the barrios enter and multiply as a biologized
and racialized danger to the organism.
3. The Economic:
Sabana Grande
Sabana Grande used to be nice.
Nestled between the old Center and the wealthy municipality of
Chacao (reputedly the wealthiest in Latin America), it used to
be a European style boulevard where the bourgeoisie could relax
with a glass of lager at an outdoor restaurant. Now, Raúl
reminds me, it's choked with buhoneros, the street vendors
of the massively-informalized Venezuelan economy who, he is at
pains to emphasize, even "piss on the street." But
somehow the question doesn't become one of the lack of public
restrooms, or even of the lack of jobs in the formal economy.
The irreducible alterity of someone from a totally different
political, racial, and economic situation provides all the necessary
answers.
His rhetoric doesn't dress
itself in neoclassical economics, as is the case with much of
the immigration debate in the U.S. The problem is less that the
buhoneros drive wages down (after all, they aren't immigrants,
so can't be told to leave). Rather, the concern seems to be more
aesthetic, but what the aesthetic in turn masks is a dream about
the world that neoliberalism and capitalism has been incapable
of fulfilling. After all, it was neoliberalism that created the
conditions for increasing informalization: the eight years prior
to Chávez´s election (1990-1998, the years directly
following president Carlos Andrés Pérez´s
acceptance of the neoliberal Washington Consensus) would see
the urban informal sector increase 14 percentage points-from
34 to 48 percent of total employment-according to CEPAL/ECLA.
Sure, the buhoneros need to work, and sure, there's no
other work for them. But rather than asking the hard questions,
Raúl and many members of the opposition just wish them
away-a wish reflected institutionally in the banning of buhoneros
from wealthy Chacao, which borders Sabana Grande on the east-choosing
instead to picture the Sabana Grande that best represents their
imagined capitalist utopia.
4. The Opposition:
Altamira
The further east one moves
in Caracas from the city center, the more forcefully the colonial
imaginary asserts itself. This is perhaps most visible in terms
of fruit: in wealthier areas, imported apples and pears replace
such local treasures (and staples of the old center) as parchita
(passionfruit), mango, and guanabana (a barely
translatable but sumptuous relative of the cherimolla).
Even the Lechoza, where one can find it still on the menu,
goes by its more universal name: Papaya.
Our rented room isn't even
as far east as Altamira, playground of the über-wealthy
caraqueño -resting just north of Sabana Grande,
still well within the sprawling western Libertador municipality-but
aspiring members of the middle classes gaze ever eastward. When
we arrive, an initial query regarding food yields two suggestions:
a local bakery and pizzeria which boasts incredibly expensive
$15 pizzas and four armed security guards, and perhaps even more
striking, an Italian import store. The local arepa (made
of corn, and priced as low as $1.50 by comparison) is surprisingly
scarce, having lost out to the more westernized consumption of
imported wheat pasta (here it is worth noting that the reversal
of this trend is a central aim of Chávez's Bolivarian
Revolution and its program of "endogenous development").
Here, too, we find the reputedly
largest mall in Latin America-the Sambil-which boasts free wireless
and such western delicacies as Wendy's, Chili's, and Subway.
In fact, of more than 500 locales that make up the Sambil, only
one offers comida criolla (local food). It is through
structures like the Sambil that not only American food, but also
the architecture of American consumption habits, enter into the
everyday experience of elite Venezuelans.
This same aspirational tendency
that we see in the consumption habits of much of the middle class
of Caracas extends as well to political association, and colonial
self-hatred is deeply intertwined with anti-Chavismo. It's useful
to remember that the anti-Chávez opposition are not all
far right conservatives-Raúl reminds me of this by making
clear that he's no big fan of Bush-but we must equally bear in
mind that the far right in Latin America is far worse than many
are willing to admit, and this means that moderate anti-Chavistas
have some pretty nasty bedfellows (we're talking photos of Pinochet
on the wall). I shudder to think that this contact with such
bedfellows extends, quite literally, to me given my living situation.
Centrist anti-Chavistas like Raúl and opposition presidential
candidate Manuel Rosales-running on a populist platform of improving
the social missions that Chávez and others created and
distributing oil wealth directly-are useful pawns for these arch-conservatives.
A local friend, certainly more Chavista than not, remarks: "Rosales
isn't from the right, but the right sees him as an intermediate
step. First, get rid of Chávez, then elect a conservative."
The success of popular organization in Venezuela is so striking-and
Chávez's return to power after the short-lived April 2002
coup was proof enough of this-that the radical opposition is
left with only one option: the poor must be mobilized so that
they can be smashed.
For now, I keep my Chávez t-shirts tucked safely away,
and our cat-named after a well-known Latin American revolutionary-has
been granted a temporary alias.
George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D candidate in political theory
at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Caracas.
He can be reached at: gjcm@berkeley.edu
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