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Hillside Millions: Living Beyond Security in Caracas
| Article
# : |
11451 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
3,045 Words |
| Author
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Ben Barber
Ben Barber is the State Department correspondent for the
Washington Times. |
Celia Fonseca was roused at dawn last August by a growing roar. Her tin shack in the hillside slum of Vengas, on the outskirts of Caracas, was shaking uncontrollably. It had been raining all night. A steady drumbeat had thundered on the metal roofs of her neighbors' homes. Fonseca and her family slept on mattresses spread amid the puddles on their home's dirt floor. But the sound that now turned Celia's damp misery into panic did not come from the rooftops. It came from the earth.
What she, her family, and neighbors had feared for ten years was coming true. A 200-foot-high wall of earth, covered with shacks, had broken loose on the mountainside above them. Sliding and tumbling over upon itself it descended, wiping out the homes in its path and burying several dozen people alive.
Fonseca and her husband and children rushed through the tattered curtains that divided their home into rooms. They emerged on the narrow earthen ledge that served as both pathway and porch. Incredibly, the killer tidal wave of mud and demolished houses had narrowly missed them. But they did not try to find a safer place. That afternoon, as hundreds of rescue workers hacked at the mud a few yards away in the search for bodies, she told me, "We were afraid someone would steal our things."
Vengas and hundreds of similar ranchos (slum communities) house an estimated two of Caracas' four million inhabitants. But the slums, which are also called barrios, have grown out of control. They are warrens of malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, violence, and fear. And when the earth collapsed at Vengas and a half dozen other slums during tropical storm Brett, journalists and sociologists raised a question that Venezuela's leaders have dodged for decades: Why do millions of people live in this quasi-chaos? What kind of life do they share with their neighbors and leave to their children?
Poverty built on poverty
When Caracas grew wealthy from oil exports in the 1950s, it attracted thousands of poor from the countryside and from neighboring countries. Over five hundred barrios were established by squatters around Libertador, the central borough of Caracas. The government provided materials to build water systems and drains, but no technology was available and the construction was shoddy. A further oil boom, after the Arab oil boycott of 1973, increased the migration. With space in the narrow valley quickly used up, the hills became the focus of new settlements. But the problem
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