grassroots organizers have pressed ahead to build an ambitious communal alternative from below.
The communal project today unifies and condenses the revolutionary energy of the Venezuelan grassroots—it is the project of projects, coalescing the aspirations of many different grassroots sectors and their struggles. In the process, the communes embody both the present and the future of the Bolivarian process: with the commune, so goes the Revolution. But to stand at the forefront of historical motion is to occupy an uneasy and unstable position, pressing forward with no blueprints to consult, no banisters on which to lean, neither comfortably cradled by the dialectical oppositions of the present nor pulled along in their wake.
From such a position, nothing is guaranteed. If anything, the opposite is the case: the odds are never in our favor. This much is clear today amid the persistence of corruption and bureaucracy, the mounting economic crisis, and the continued aggression by ferocious enemies in Venezuela and beyond. “We are in the worst moment of the Bolivarian Revolution,” Rojas confesses with a sort of exasperated pride, “but chamo … the communes, that’s where the vitality is.”
THE BARRIOS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR URBAN SPACE
In Caracas, the rich have felt surrounded for decades. And they are surrounded—never more so than today. Stand on the rooftop of any building, and you have an almost 360-degree view of the poor barrios that ring the city’s hilltops, broken only by the mountainous El Ávila National Park to the north, known since 2011 by its indigenous name, Waraira Repano. These mountains, which once sheltered the city from Caribbean pirates, today shelter the rich from a similarly fearsome threat—the poor—with the wealthiest enclaves of the city tucked just south of the national park where barrio settlements are prohibited. Absent the kind of white exodus that saw elites abandon urban centers in the United States, their Venezuelan counterparts often dug in. Building checkpoints and higher walls, paying for guards and new security systems, they refused to leave.
The borders are sharp. Wealthy eastern Caracas ends abruptly where the Francisco Fajardo Highway swings suddenly northward toward the mountains. As the city expanded eastward, poor migrants took over this area, building ramshackle housing where an old sugarcane plantation once stood. But starting in the 1960s, a series of governments criminalized these settlements of the poor before eventually evicting them, tearing out their fresh roots and pushing their residents further east to build the highway and, in the refuge that this asphalt barrier provided from the poor, to build modern apartment blocks as well. Today, the streets are cleanly gridded and interspersed with green spaces, their crisp ninety-degree angles projected vertically in the high-rises that line them.
Across the highway, however, is a dense tangle of unmarked streets, paths, and walkways, and of hundreds of thousands of self-constructed homes stacked one on top of the other. This is Petare, the largest and most dangerous slum in all Venezuela, if not all Latin America. After Chávez was elected, the opposition soon accused him of dividing the country with his aggressive rhetoric in defense of the poor and against the oligarchs. In response, Chavistas began to circulate a meme consisting of an image of the Fajardo Highway—an asphalt ribbon dividing rich from poor—with the incredulous caption: “It was Chávez who divided us?” The message is clear: the division was there long before Chávez helped to reveal it.
This division is clear even in language. At first, the rich called the barrio residents marginals, and the term was certainly an accurate description of the segregation they suffered. Lured to the capital by the promise of access to oil wealth, newcomers were instead confined to the outskirts of the cities. It was on the unstable terrain of the hills surrounding Caracas that they erected first cardboard, then tin, and finally cement homes as their informal settlements gained a degree of permanence. These were never truly permanent, however: lacking a stable foundation—legal or geological—their residents were often forcibly displaced through government evictions, or by the precarious terrain itself betraying them in unpredictable mudslides, periodic torrents of mud, flesh, and bone.
Despite being labeled as marginal, however, the residents of the shantytowns were in fact central to the circulatory system of the capital. These were the people who cooked for the rich, cleaned their homes, cared for their children, parked their cars, and guarded their buildings and belongings. Wealthy Venezuelans thus suffered the permanent contradiction of colonial and capitalist elites alike: they were dependent upon the labor of people they were desperate to avoid at all costs. In the early 1980s, a regional debt crisis across Latin America coincided with a sharp drop in oil prices to throw the Venezuelan economy into a tailspin. Armed revolutionary movements—heirs of the 1960s guerrilla struggle but long isolated from poor communities—capitalized on discontent in the barrios over increasing drug violence and the need for running water, electricity, schools, and health care.
The increasingly corrupt and unresponsive Venezuelan two-party system—unable and unwilling to provide for the poorest—responded to rebellion with massacre, killing twenty-three guerrillas in Cantaura in 1982, nine student organizers in Yumare in 1986, and fourteen unarmed fishermen in El Amparo in 1988. But no massacre was more devastating than the concluding act of the 1989 Caracazo, provoked by then-president Carlos Andrés Pérez’s neoliberal reform package. During the Caracazo, the urban poor of Venezuela’s barrios looted everything from basic goods to imported whiskey. But most importantly, they took over the city, broke the bounds of informal segregation, and entered zones previously reserved for the rich.
Never before had the space of Venezuela’s wealthy, white elites been breached so suddenly and so devastatingly by the poor. In response, the polite rhetoric of the rich gave way to open expressions of racism and class hatred that mixed together in anxious denunciations of the rabble, the mob, and the hordes. To this day, nothing provokes the panic of the wealthy like a poor-looking motorcyclist, or motorizado, unpredictably crossing the bounds of this informally segregated landscape. Many wealthy caraqueños still speak of the Caracazo as the day when, in a peculiarly dehumanizing phrase, “the hills came down”—the poor entered the city not as individuals seeking poorly paid work, but as a collective seeking equality. But when the state killed hundreds, even thousands, in the same barrios it had marginalized for so long, it set into motion revolutionary social movements and a military conspiracy that would eventually see Hugo Chávez thrown into the seat of power.
The shock and fear that the Caracazo inspired in elites led to “progressive” urban reforms like the Organic Law for Municipal Government, which claimed that decentralizing the city into autonomous municipalities would lead to better governance. While the law—conceived prior to but hastily approved after the Caracazo—was presented as a solution to the social exclusion that had created the rebellion, in reality, it only made things worse. Within two years, new municipalities in the wealthiest part of the capital had effectively seceded, claiming autonomy from city government, electing their own mayors, and—crucially—establishing their own police forces.
Already wealthier than much of the urban area, these new municipalities—and in particular the sheltered central business district of Chacao—used their newfound autonomy to drain even more revenue away from the traditional city center, no longer the center of the capital’s wealth. Deploying their enhanced policing powers to cleanse neighborhoods of marginal populations, these rich enclaves trumpeted their safety in contrast to other, less fortified areas. The same year Chávez was elected, Chacao outlawed the informal street vendors who make up a considerable segment of the city’s workforce; faithful to its brand, the municipality has more recently declared its intention to become Venezuela’s first “graffiti-free” zone.
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