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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Caracas is a city built into the jungle, but everyone I meet here looks perfectly European. Silken hair, porcelain skin, small nose. The young women spend a great deal of time, and surely money, achieving what is often described as an impossible body standard. One wears a lavender sweater so commensurately tight with her own body that you can see the outline of every abdominal muscle in her six-pack. The young men could have walked out of the Upper East Side or a European capital.
Alex Deep hands me another bottle of Polar beer, which the birthday girl's family has made several billion dollars manufacturing, and explains: "This is the top 2 percent of the country, what you are seeing. We have no middle class."
But they have a lower class. Squalid adobe towns flicker across the mountains on the other sides of the city. Each house does its best with a single light bulb while the teakwood pillbox shines, bright and cheery, an electrocution-prone pleasure dome.
Early on, Chavez sacked the entrenched management of Petroleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil corporation, replacing it with his own supporters. Last year he redirected oil revenues to social programs to the tune of $1.7 billion.This sounds entirely humanitarian, especially when you consider that Venezuela is the world's fifth-largest producer of oil. It makes even more sense when you account for the persistent global energy panic; the cost of oil skyrocketed past $50 a barrel last year because of China's insatiable appetite for crude and threats to oil fields in the Middle East (namely, Iraq). To a socialist leader in an oil-rich country the arithmetic is easy. Why not share the wealth?
Critics, though, charge that Chavez implemented his programs to buy quick support from the masses -- at the cost of the large-scale capital reinvestment, which experts say the state oil industry needs if it is to continue producing the low-quality jungle oil that is this state's lifeblood. Analysts estimate that Petroleos de Venezuela requires $6 billion of reinvestment each year to remain competitive, and under Chavez in 2004, it received less than half that amount. The fear is that Chavez is acting recklessly to bolster his own power and that oil prices may fall, triggering an economic crisis. For the time being, Chavez's educational programs and subsidies have improved the quality of life for some poor Venezuelans, though the basic fabric of society remains unchanged.
In this crowd, the very mention of his name brings sour looks and rumors: Chavez has a private collection of Rolex watches and Armani suits that he wears to the same types of debauched parties that he once railed against. More: His sons have trust funds filled with the people's money and spend their days as bourgeois wastrels in Florida. Still more: His lieutenants fill entire sections of Miami with million-dollar mansions similarly paid for by the single-light-bulb adobes off in the distance. With power firmly consolidated, Chavez holds all the cards.
One man insists to me that a little over 10 percent of the country's leading families are represented on this single lawn. It is at first difficult to believe, but it seems more plausible after one girl invites me to her birthday party without ever learning my name.
"We are flying to Margarita on Sunday!" she says. "Three hundred of us!"
Lightning flickers over the Bantustan built into the side of a less fortunate mountain. Mud slides killed 25,000 and left 100,000 homeless in towns like this across the country in 1999, but no one outside Venezuela took much notice. No one takes much notice now.
