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Barrio Rising
Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela
By Alejandro Velasco UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95918-7
CHAPTER 1
Dictatorship's Blocks
The Battle for the New Urban Venezuela
By all accounts, the 2 de Diciembre housing project cut an imposing figure on the Caracas landscape: thirteen residential buildings, each fifteen stories tall and containing 150 identical apartments, with only a seemingly random patchwork of colors breaking the monotony of concrete (fig. 2). The so-called superblocks rose from the hills overlooking the Presidential Palace, Defense Ministry, Congress, and National Cathedral, in an area where just months before had stood growing slums. When finished, the 2 de Diciembre project would consist of 56 superblocks and 42 four-story blocks, planned in addition to new schools, parks, athletic facilities, roads, and commercial strips. It was to become one of Latin America's largest public housing projects, capable of housing seventy thousand working-class residents while promising to remake Caracas, and the nation. And it was brought to initial fruition on the third anniversary of the 2 December 1952 coup that cemented the rule of its founder, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
Of all the public works built during Pérez Jiménez's dictatorship — a period of such frenzied construction that some have dubbed it "the bulldozer years" — the 2 de Diciembre housing project stood out as the most emblematic of his efforts to provide for Venezuela's rapidly urbanizing working classes a central place in the nation's body politic. Official photos of the inauguration told as much, showing Pérez Jiménez surveying the superblocks with crowds of ministers, soldiers, and onlookers flanking him, all of them dwarfed by imposing high-rises. Almost everything about the 2 de Diciembre signaled the symbolic and unmistakable ambition of Pérez Jiménez's "New National Ideal." Razing slums as well as historic neighborhoods, Pérez Jiménez cleaned the slate of Venezuela's provincial past to make way for its urban future. In their clean lines and angular shapes, the superblocks — neatly arranged one behind the other — marked the triumph of order over the chaos that had increasingly characterized Caracas's unplanned growth. In its name and location, situated by the major symbols of social and political power — the presidency, the legislature, the military, and the church — the neighborhood and its working-class population represented the popular foundations of Pérez Jiménez's government. Here, in short, was the "material expression" of perezjimenismo.
For Inés Oliveira the superblocks represented "a whole new way of life." When she was 15 and her family arrived in Block 12 of the La Cañada sector of the 2 de Diciembre, they were typical of Caracas's urban poor, forcibly moved from the crammed improvised housing that precariously hugged Caracas hillsides. Like many others, they left for their new home the night bulldozers razed what remained of their old zinc-roofed rancho. Fifty years later, Oliveira still recalled the exuberance of early life in the superblocks: "That for us was like a mansion. You know the conditions we poor people lived in? When we learned we were to be moved, no one slept from the happiness, the joy of it all. No more cockroaches, no more outhouses. ... My parents were ecstatic." Despite the dust and the tight quarters (two bedrooms for eight people) that greeted them in their new thirteenth-floor apartment, Oliveira stressed, "that was so beautiful. ... If Pérez Jiménez hadn't left, well, if he hadn't been overthrown, there would be no ranchos in Caracas, because he dreamed of a beautiful Venezuela."? So it was striking that Oliveira was among those who took to the streets to celebrate Pérez Jiménez's ouster.
At dawn on 23 January 1958, just weeks after workers laid the final slab on the neighborhood's third and largest construction phase, Pérez Jiménez fled Venezuela on a plane bound for the Dominican Republic. His departure followed a volatile month that began with a failed coup attempt on New Year's Day, several cabinet shuffles, an indefinite national strike, and violent street clashes between state security forces and Caracas residents. Finally, on 23 January, a junta composed of young military officers formally seized power in the vacuum left by Pérez Jiménez's departure. As Oliveira remembers it, at seventeen years old the self-admitted saltamonte "was one of those who shouted, ran through the streets, and got on a truck and yelled 'Down with the government! Down with the government!'" The ten-year dictatorship was over.
Oliveira's participation in the events of 23 January reveals the ambivalent relationship between Pérez Jiménez and residents of the superblocks he built to make concrete his government's vision for Venezuela. No doubt the passage of time helps wash the past in comfortable shades. But Oliveira's testimony reflects a complex, conflicted set of memories and emotions: a spirited appreciation for the man whose ouster she supported. In memorializations that followed Pérez Jiménez's ouster, these complexities were largely lost. Returning from exile, political figures now cast Oliveira and others taking to the streets that day as central players in a narrative of popular insurrection by a people unwilling to accept tyranny in exchange for concrete goods, and ready to support the promise of a democratic government, however ill-defined that promise remained. In press accounts, the neighborhood that once stood at the literal and figurative center of Pérez Jiménez's regime was now a backdrop to the coup. Press photos of the superblocks he had inaugurated with high fanfare just two years earlier now portrayed the site as emblematic of his downfall, high-rises dwarfing the crowds and tanks gathered in front of the Presidential Palace below. The very neighborhood that was founded as the symbol of Pérez Jiménez's new Venezuela turned on him to forge a new and again deeply symbolic connection with the national government. Henceforth, the 2 de Diciembre would be known as the 23 de Enero.
This chapter examines the complex social foundations of a neighborhood conceived, planned, and built to link urban popular sectors to the modern Venezuela state. Where at first the hundreds of photos that graced government publications, architecture journals, and press reports offered a gleaming portrait of a government committed to the wellbeing of its urban underclass, following Pérez Jiménez's ouster those same photos seemed more significant for what they lacked than for what they showed: scarcely any people. The buildings stood as monuments of political achievement, more to be admired than inhabited. This was perhaps the most revealing symbolic tie to Pérez Jiménez's government: whether grateful for their new housing or indignant at the dictatorship that made it possible, the opinions of people like Inés Oliveira and the thousands of others moved to the blocks hardly mattered. Symbols of the regime's popular foundations on the one hand, but effectively cast aside on the other, residents of the 2 de Diciembre held a contradictory place in the national imagination. This dynamic would become a central feature of the relationship between state and urban popular sectors in modern Venezuela, one that would follow from one regime to the next.
VENEZUELA'S "GREAT URBAN REVOLUTION"
"You have to keep in mind," says Juan Martínez to help explain conflicting attitudes toward Pérez Jiménez by residents of the 2 de Diciembre, "that we were in a dictatorship." And a particular kind of dictatorship, one that, after several decades of failed attempts by various governments to harness economic prosperity into concerted state policy, had turned oil wealth into massive construction projects aimed at moving Venezuela away from its provincial past and toward a modern and urban-based future. Martínez, a father of three, was in his twenties when he first arrived in Block 4 in the neighborhood's Monte Piedad sector, part of the first of three phases of the project. He had come to Caracas as a child in 1935, seeking work opportunities in the capital following the death of Dictator Juan Vicente Gómez after 27 years in power. The Caracas that Martínez found was a city long held back by Gómez's provincial proclivities, though nevertheless on the cusp of dramatic transformation. Twenty years prior, a handful of oil wells had begun to sprout in Venezuela's arid northwestern plains, where petroleum seeped freely from the ground. Shell had installed Venezuela's first oil rig in 1914. But in the first decade of Gómez's dictatorship, Venezuela's economy remained tied to the fortunes of a coffee crop that since the 1830s had been a reliable if financially lackluster staple export. That Gómez's own power base hailed from Venezuela's coffee-rich southwestern Andes inhibited any serious changes to national economic policy.
But the post-World War I economic boom and the burgeoning prominence of internal combustion engines in Europe and the United States created a demand for oil that Gómez shrewdly exploited in negotiating land concessions and leases with British and North American corporations. By 1928, oil exports equaled three times the combined worth of all other Venezuelan exports, exploding from an annual production of 490,000 barrels in 1920, to 140 million in 1930. To appease coffee-planting elites, Gómez distributed revenues from oil concessions and rents through lucrative bribes; to check challenges from regions poorly favored under his "patriarchal autocracy," Gómez professionalized, modernized, and expanded the military, constructed Venezuela's first interregional road system, dispersed trusted Andean lieutenants throughout the national territory to enforce his orders, and made fast use of a vast network of spies that infiltrated all sectors of social life.
In this climate, Gómez relocated Venezuela's capital to Maracay, a sleepy provincial city 60 miles west of Caracas. It was a personal choice born in part of his antagonism toward the Caracas elite — whom he regarded as a nuisance rather than a threat to his rule — and in part as a strategic play meant to subvert Caracas's growing prominence through a policy of neglect. Distrust for Caracas and its elites exposed deeper misgivings about urban life and culture, which Gómez viewed as "potentially revolutionary." Yet, during the 1920s Caracas grew in political importance and size, an unintended result of the shift toward an oil-based economy. For one, the explosive growth of the oil industry replaced investment in coffee, depressing traditional coffee-growing regions and sparking peasant migration to cities. As the nation's major urban hub, Caracas proved a desirable destination for oil executives and became home to the industry's corporate offices, while rural migrants found work in the growing service sector of the city. From 1920 to 1930 Caracas's population nearly doubled, from 92,000 to about 175,000 residents. By the time of Gómez's death in 1935, 260,000 people lived in the city. Despite Gómez's efforts, then, the 1920s had set the stage for "Venezuela's great urban revolution."
Still, even with efforts to institutionalize urban planning in the interwar years — for instance through the founding of a Dirección de Urbanismo (Urbanism Directorate) in 1938 and the unveiling of a Plan Monumental de Caracas (Caracas Master Plan) in 1939 — early urbanization in Venezuela was more of a rudderless revolution. In the wake of Gómez's death political and economic elites agreed that Caracas would be Venezuela's main urban hub. And while they had formed part of the Gómez regime, neither of his immediate successors, Eleazar López Contreras (president 1935–1941) or Isaías Medina Angarita (president 1941–1945) shared Gómez's fear of urbanization. Instead they looked to exploit the capital's strategic "proximity to the centers of the civilized world" vis-à-vis other would-be South American competitors: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lima, and Bogotá. Yet neither commanded Gómez's power, ensuring that during this period the growth of Caracas would be debated in national politics rather than imposed by force.
For their part, the traditional elites of Caracas were committed Francophiles, and had been since the late nineteenth century, when President Antonio Guzmán Blanco had tried to turn the capital into a tropical Paris. They favored investing oil revenue into building an ornate city that would mirror Parisian grandeur, envisioning broad tree-lined boulevards linking multiple city centers, where residential and commercial life would coexist. The city's emerging middle class also voiced a vision for their city. Made up largely of oil industry technocrats and engineers who identified with British and North American utilitarian planning methods, these new, modern middle classes emphasized the need to create a sense of urban discipline along axes of work, leisure, and sanitation, with a strong and unmistakable business hub.
As planning debates unfolded, the population of Caracas continued to grow through the mid-1940s, drawing both from internal migration to the city and from postwar immigration from Europe. In the 1941 census, roughly 39% of Venezuela's population lived in cities. By 1950 that number had grown to 54%, marking the first time more Venezuelans lived in cities than in the countryside. As the country's largest city, Caracas experienced the greatest growth: by 1950 the population in the capital had risen to nearly 700,000, up from 500,000 in 1945. But an official plan to guide Caracas's growth remained elusive. More and more, elites and middle-class sectors abandoned a city center that was becoming increasingly chaotic — the narrow colonial-era streets now filled with ever-expanding squatter settlements — establishing new communities in the old coffee estates to the east. Rapid densification and increased segregation thus came to define the human and political geography of midcentury Caracas.
As the country's population changed, so did its politics. This period of major urban growth coincided with a short-lived period of democracy when the political party Acción Democrática (Democratic Action) rose to power in 1945, affecting Caracas's social and political life for several decades. Founded in 1941 as a social-democratic alternative to the Partido Comunista de Venezuela (Venezuelan Communist Party), the leaders of Acción Democrática (AD) cut their political teeth under the Gómez regime. They drew on nationalist, anti-imperialist discourse to decry the dictator's concessions of Venezuelan subsoil to U.S. and European interests. They denounced the failure of the Gómez regime to distribute oil wealth across economic sectors, instead dividing the spoils among those in his milieu. But while AD differed with Gómez, the party shared the dictator's popular foundation in the countryside, taking up "Bread, Land, and Labor" as its banner and seeking to vindicate the peasantry through agrarian reform financed by redistributed oil revenues.
In 1945, AD leaders joined with a group of military officers to stage a coup and seize power, laying the groundwork for Venezuela's first popular elections. In the meantime, interim President and AD founder Rómulo Betancourt moved to "sow the oil" nationally, mandating a 50/50 revenue-sharing agreement with foreign oil companies and seeking to diversify Venezuela's economy by jump-starting long-abandoned agrarian sectors. In the process, AD cemented its support among the rural peasantry, still Venezuela's largest constituency in 1946: that year AD took 78% of the vote in Constituent Assembly elections, the nation's first contest conducted by universal suffrage; and in 1947, AD candidate Rómulo Gallegos won 74% of 1.2 million votes cast, to become Venezuela's first popularly elected president.
In practice, Acción Democrática's focus on wealth distribution to the rural peasantry meant diverting already-limited resources and attention away from urbanization plans and projects in Caracas. Yet migration statistics showed that the prominence of urban popular sectors continued to grow. In November 1948, Colonel Marcos Pérez Jiménez and a cadre of midlevel military officers overthrew Gallegos in a bloodless coup centered in Caracas. What the coup revealed was a striking contradiction of Venezuela's first democratic experiment: a popular government, elected by an astonishing margin just nine months before, was overthrown without popular resistance. Whereas AD had largely overlooked the political opportunities offered by the country's growing urban base, the new junta would channel oil wealth and state attention toward urban hubs, Caracas in particular. In doing so, the junta would powerfully show how urbanization had significantly shaped the future of national politics.
TARGETING THE URBAN LABYRINTH
Juan Martínez, who had moved to Caracas in 1935 at the dawn of Venezuela's urban revolution, came of age during a period characterized by shifting dictatorships and hectic growth. In 1948 he took a construction job and settled with his new bride in the Tiro al Blanco barrio at the foot of the mountain known as El Ávila, in north-central Caracas. It was a neighborhood that well encapsulated Caracas's explosive growth in the 1930s and 1940s: a community made up mainly of provincial migrants. "[We started] with cardboard and zinc roofs," recalled neighborhood resident Francisco Suárez, a child at the time. But as time went on "and a little money started coming in, we bought [cinder] blocks," eventually building, block by block, a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home for their seven-person family. Other houses in the community were two stories tall and had real foundations, according to Suárez — "and there were also red-tiled colonial houses." The Tiro al Blanco of Suárez's memory — a heterogeneous neighborhood — mirrored how the new military government that took power in 1948 saw Caracas: as a mix of traditional poor rancho housing amid more-sophisticated and -hygienic developments. For housing authorities, even a makeshift rancho could be seen as "part of a neighborhood," a community and constituency with political power.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Barrio Rising by Alejandro Velasco. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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