by Rory Carroll
Four months later, in November 2010, Richard was recovered from his wounds. Seven members of his gang were dead, including one shot thirty times in the face. Richard did not follow the news much but was vaguely aware of some grand event at the National Assembly in Caracas. (Chávez had convoked allies, including Eva Golinger, to rebut criticism from the U.S. Congress, calling it an imperialist plot to destabilize his government and “bloody the streets of Venezuela.”) “This existence, always afraid, looking around the corner, over your shoulder . . . it’s not good.” Worrying about ambushes, wondering what day would be your last, calculating odds, it all became complicated, one decision after another. Leave the gun at home or stick it under his shirt? Risk taking a girl to the cinema or watch a DVD at home? Keep tabs on that unfamiliar Chevrolet or let it go? Richard felt his jaw begin to tighten like those of the gangsters he saw in clenched mug shots. He worshipped his jailed brother but possibly lacked the ruthless streak. His mother, Yelitza, a stout, powerfully built matriarch, seemed unsure he was up to it. “He is softer, more gentle than José Daniel.” It was not clear she meant it as a compliment.
Whatever his personality, Richard’s fate was being determined by circumstance. Against the odds, he had stayed at school and was shortly due to graduate, but he felt duty-bound to defend El Cementerio’s reputation, clout, and income. “I’ve been in shoot-outs but haven’t killed anyone.” He rubbed the bullet scar on his belly. “I won’t kill. That’s not me.” A pause. “But I can’t let enemies come in and take what they want. I can’t.” Richard’s fantasy was that the father he barely knew would drop by one afternoon and take him to a movie. Afterward, blinking in the foyer lights, they would finish their Cokes. “Papá can’t visit. They’d think he was bringing me ammunition or something and kill him.” Asked about the comandante, he shrugged. He didn’t care much for politics but would catch fragments of the comandante’s speeches. “I like them. He’s trying to make things better.” Would he vote for Chávez? A bashful smile. “Sure, if I live long enough.”
—
The gang’s struggle, and Richard’s reluctant generalship, showed in microcosm how Venezuela’s social contract shredded under Chávez. Forces were unleashed that gave Richard, and countless more like him, little choice but to trade childhood for a gun. What made it surreal was that one of the revolution’s main aims was to breathe life into Simón Bolívar’s famous exhortation for ethics and enlightenment. “Morals and illumination are our first necessities.” The Liberator’s appeal floundered amid the chaos and bloodshed of the independence war, but the comandante launched it anew, claiming solidarity would blossom now that the people, vested in his rule, had regained dignity and power. The Liberator’s sacred work would be completed with socialist and communal values replacing capitalist individualism. The comandante called it the Great National Moral and Illuminating Journey. “Education, morals, and enlightenment in all spheres, everywhere, at all times.” He had spoken of this upon taking power, and by 2007 he had formalized it into an official campaign, inaugurating moral and enlightenment training brigades and creating a presidential council to guide schools and universities toward the new consciousness.
The campaign did improve lives and elevate learning through literacy programs, which reached rheumy-eyed grandmothers in the slums, and expanded education, which let poor students stay in school and move on to free tuition at Bolivarian universities. The comandante, a talented didact, urged followers to read history, philosophy, and poetry, brandishing his latest favorite tome as an example. “I was up all night devouring this. Stupendous.” Housewives and taxi drivers found themselves debating colonial history, social consciousness, and the global economy in communal councils and evening classes. Teenagers who normally would have dropped out enrolled in colleges to study architecture, engineering, and literature. A new state-run film studio, Villa del Cine, contributed by producing social documentaries and costume dramas about Venezuelan history. State television talk shows discussed gender equality, the rights of indigenous people, and the role of trade unions. All this unfolded, noted the comandante’s supporters, while the West hiked education fees and wallowed in shallow materialism.
Yet in the end the Great National Period of Ethics and Enlightenment—another name for the project—proved a tragic failure. The individual intellects and spirits it lit did not fuse into a collective radiance. They flickered in isolation, marooned candles amid a dark, rising tide of anomie. The problem was not ideological zealotry. For all the Cuban echoes and Orwellian touches, Venezuela never seriously attempted totalitarian brainwashing. Nor was the problem administrative incompetence of the sort that ruined agriculture and industry. The Bolivarian universities creaked and groaned with unqualified professors and overcrowded classes but were better than nothing. The problem was as unexpected as it was brutal: violent crime. The rate of muggings, kidnappings, and murders exploded, spreading fear like shrapnel. The state lost the ability to keep citizens safe, to protect them from each other.
It was baffling. The maximum leader who liked to micromanage everything lost control of society’s most fundamental requirement, security, wringing his hands while criminals shot, stabbed, and strangled with impunity. It was not supposed to be like this. Poverty was falling and new social missions were bringing services to neglected barrios to ameliorate, as the government put it, decades of “savage capitalism.” Chávez’s opponents were also stumped. They called him a dictator, but real dictators—Trujillo, Pérez Jiménez, Fidel, Kim Jong Il—kept streets safe for ordinary people. The great journey shuddered to a halt because towns and cities were quarantined by fear.
The revolution inherited grave social problems and made them worse. In 1998, the year before Chávez took office, there were forty-five hundred murders, a grim per capita rate on par with much of Latin America. A decade later it had tripled to more than seventeen thousand per year, making Venezuela more dangerous than Iraq, and Caracas one of the deadliest cities on earth. Eight times more murderous, it was calculated, than Bogotá, Colombia’s capital. With less than 1 percent of cases ever solved, it was, all things considered, a good place to commit murder. Kidnappings, previously a rarity, became an industry with an estimated seven thousand abductions per year. To allay their terror, the rich and the middle class invested in bodyguards and armored cars, or emigrated, but most of the killing and dying was done by gangs—by some estimates, there were more than eighteen thousand—in slums fighting for drugs, turf, women, and prestige.
The mayhem undermined official rhetoric about moral renewal and the poor being repositories of virtue and authentic national spirit. The government tried blaming the violence on U.S.-backed Colombian mercenaries out to destabilize the revolution, then on capitalism’s legacy of individualism. It deployed the national guard to bolster police, but the violence swirled around the bewildered soldiers, just as it did the police, and they returned to barracks. Street policing was the most visible part of the criminal justice system’s failure. Police, along with prosecutors, judges, bailiffs, jail guards, and parole officers, were underpaid and overstretched. Chávez’s lack of interest left them in a limbo of dysfunction where caprice, delays, and bribes became normal.
As corpses stacked up, the comandante stopped the Interior Ministry’s musical chairs and left one minister, Tarek El Aissami, in place. He tried to rebuild the police force and regain control by rounding up thousands of criminal suspects, including Richard’s brother, José Daniel. Gridlocked courts kept them without trial in stifled, rapidly overcrowding jails while younger gang members took over the streets. A terrified society called them malandros, supposedly feral thugs, and watched them flit across television screens and newspapers as cadavers or hooded suspects paraded by police. Less than human, they were anonymous ciphers who did not speak, leaving their motivations, their world, incomprehensible. A government minister played down murder rates by saying many victims were malandros and so didn’t really count. By 2010 the Great National Moral and Illu
minating Journey sounded hollow when everyone knew someone who had been wounded, killed, or kidnapped.
Society drifted into metaphorical and literal darkness. By dusk, streets emptied, stores shut, and people triple-bolted doors. The rich refitted their vehicles with Kevlar and bullet-resistant glass. Poorer motorists tinted their windows to render themselves invisible so potential attackers would not know if it was a grandmother or a burly man at the wheel. You could crawl through rush-hour traffic, thousands of vehicles bumper to bumper, and barely see a human face: everyone was hidden inside bubbles of black glass, an eerie, alienating experience. Power blackouts extinguished streetlights and turned nights a deep, inky black. Poverty was no defense against kidnappers who settled for modest ransoms. A single mother in Barinas had to sell her fridge to free her three-year-old daughter. People were snatched from malls, campuses, nightclubs.
A gang abducted the Chilean consul from outside a hotel, beat him, and shot him in the buttocks, just for his car and phone. Airport taxi drivers pulled guns on passengers and drove off with their luggage, the Associated Press bureau chief, returning with his family from vacation, among the victims. The women’s baseball world championship was suspended after a stray bullet hit a Hong Kong player. A mother in Petare wailed that she had lost three sons in two years. Solidarity tours from the revolution’s foreign sympathizers evaporated. With police overwhelmed, lynch mobs doused criminal suspects with gasoline and burned them alive. A neighborhood in Catia, one witness told the newspaper El Universal, became exasperated with a criminal nicknamed El Evangélico. “They ran him down until he got tired, then they killed him. Everybody was fed up with the police doing nothing. Sometimes they’d arrest him, take his cash, then release him a few hours later so he could rob us again.”
—
Normally, all this would devastate a president’s support, especially if he was left-wing and could be painted as “soft on crime.” Chávez, to his credit, did not lunge for the death penalty and violent crackdowns, perennially popular but ineffective remedies in Latin America and the Caribbean. And still he managed to escape political damage. It was astonishing. His ratings held up while voters were held up, tied up, cut up, broken into, held down, gunned down, and buried. Chávez achieved this feat by doing something against his nature: he shut up. On crime, which polls said concerned voters more than any other issue, his lips were sealed. Caracas could endure a particularly grisly weekend, more than sixty dead, convoys of funeral corteges, and he had nothing to say. Thugs could abduct ranchers in Táchira, shoot police in Zulia, and rape in Amazonas without presidential comment. Grieving mothers with banners and whistles could block motorways in Valencia demanding justice for slain children, and from Miraflores silence. The comandante simply refused to own the problem. In muteness he sought and found refuge. Opponents tried in vain to cast him as Nero fiddling while Rome burned, but most Venezuelans blamed gangs and local authorities. The comandante was absolved.
The government’s media dominance helped to play down the crisis. No matter that high-ranking officials traveled with multiple guards—several were involved in shoot-outs with would-be muggers—they smothered news, withheld statistics, massaged numbers. A newspaper was banned from showing violent images (it upset children), a television station was fined for covering a jail riot (it alarmed the public), and radio stations were warned against reporting ransom payments (it encouraged kidnapping). Ambulances waited for crime-beat reporters to leave their posts at Caracas’s main morgue before delivering corpses. All the while state media trumpeted the latest advances in the Great National Moral and Illuminating Journey—new school computers, a ban on violent video games, a publication of Bolívar’s quotations—as proof of deepening “humanization.”
—
Nowhere was the gap between rhetoric and reality wider or crueler than in jails. “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails,” Nelson Mandela once wrote. “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Judged on words, the comandante, who like Mandela went from prisoner to president and knew squalid conditions firsthand, was a champion of reform. Upon taking power in 1999, he announced a “dignity plan” to clean up jails that he called “among the worst and most savage in the world.” Every subsequent year he solemnly repeated the importance of humanizing facilities that were renamed “centers for the holistic attention to people deprived of their liberties.” Plans were announced, strategies devised, commissions created, initiatives hailed. “We must substitute this punitive system for a humanist system,” the comandante said in 2011. “Prisons must be centers of formation of the New Man.” By then jails had gone from being merely appalling to stinking, fetid, overcrowded, disease-ridden abominations where a decade’s worth of five thousand inmates had been stabbed, bludgeoned, burned, strangled, and shot to death. Many died in gladiator-type contests known as the Colosseum—fights to the death observed by guards, documented by local media, and denounced by human rights organizations. The prison population tripled to almost fifty thousand inmates, all packed into facilities designed for twelve thousand. Almost three-quarters were held for years without trial.
Chávez built no gulags or torture chambers and was doubtless sincere in wanting an enlightened penal system. The officials he appointed were largely well-meaning. Yet barbarity resulted. The banal truth was he cared, but not enough. His focus was always the next election, and there were no votes in rehabilitating jails, so it slipped down the agenda. In a state that revolved around one man—ministers and institutions were stripped of initiative—his sporadic attention proved fatal. A particularly bloody riot would briefly focus his gaze. How did this happen? Fire minister whatshisname! Put so-and-so in there to sort it out. Here, that’s $120 million for a new jail. Hop to it! The new minister, replacing senior officials with his own team, would wade into the mess and devise quick fixes to placate the comandante only to find the boss’s attention—and budgetary approval—had wandered to other topics. A few months later another riot would erupt, and an indignant comandante would fire the minister for incompetence, starting the cycle again. In twelve years the penal service went through seventeen vice-ministers for corrections and was overhauled eleven times—declared autonomous, folded into a ministry, unfolded, merged, moved, spliced, consolidated, expanded, renamed, co-opted, amalgamated—leaving officials dizzy and despairing. It would have been comical were the consequences not so diabolical.
—
You think it can’t go on like this but it does every week some new mad instructions and if you say anything you’re branded a troublemaker and sent to tour the jails on the border and trust me you don’t want to tour the jails on the border so you keep your mouth shut and just get on with it but when you hear the stories about what’s happening dear God it makes your skin crawl and to think you’re part of it is just intolerable, intolerable but at my age I’m not going to get another job am I so I just sit there at my desk with a silent scream all day processing reports and photographs that make me want to throw up my lunch I’m telling you it’s bad bad bad.”
The mid-ranking official in the penal service whom we shall call Sarah paused for breath and took a sip of papaya juice. She always spoke in torrents after leaving her office as if the words had dammed up all day and demanded sluicing. It was a tic common to many mid-ranking officials, men and women in their forties and fifties who had never particularly liked the comandante and were now squeezed between Chavista superiors and young graduates from the Bolivarian universities. They loathed being part of the system but stayed for the salaries and perks. By her second papaya juice Sarah would slow down.
“The office is ridiculous, far too many people, all these kids with diplomas, and half can’t write or spell; they just sit there all day waiting for something to happen and wondering when they’ll get their free holiday to Cuba. I went, enjoyed it, but didn’t think much of the place. At my grade a Mercedes takes you to the airport. T
he directors get an SUV with bodyguards. Enjoy it while you can, that’s what I tell them, because none last long. If they’re incompetent, they get fired, eventually, and if they’re good, they get poached for other jobs. Ysmael Serrano, one of our best directors, a lawyer, serious, engaged, understood the problems; he’s just getting to grips with things when the president scoops him up to head the presidential Twitter account. Twitter! And we’re dumped with a successor who has to learn everything from scratch.” A television on the wall of the café showed the president at that moment in ebullient form addressing an auditorium of workers in red T-shirts. A young girl with cerebral palsy was carried to the stage. “We are going to deliver justice so that nobody suffers,” he said, hugging the child. “This is a revolution for everybody, above all the weakest and most vulnerable.” The audience applauded. Sarah barely registered it. A television in her office was tuned in to state channels all day, beaming one presidential event after another, and she had learned to zone out.
“The worst of it,” she continued, “is that we have built new jails but they’re barely used. The pranes [the name for prison gang leaders] won’t let us transfer their members. We can’t force them. They control the inside. They’ve got grenades, machine guns, telescopic sights, computers, mobile phones, money, contacts. No director wants to mess with that. At this point the government cares only about appearances. We invite TV crews when we’re inaugurating a soap factory or orchestra or something; the rest of the time it’s about keeping bad numbers down. You know the latest trick? Strangling. A strangled inmate can be registered as suicide. In some jails there’s a tacit encouragement to do business this way. It takes pressure off us and gives the pranes a free hand. There was one this morning in Los Teques, another a few days ago in Barinas, José Obeimar Roa Cárdenas. A thief who offended one of the gangs, don’t ask me how, so they throttled him and dumped the body in the yard. José Obeimar Roa Cárdenas, twenty-six years old, write that down because you’ll never hear his name again. He’s not even a murder statistic.” Sarah turned defensive. “I want to speak out. I’ve kept records at home, pictures, horrible stuff, it’s all in files. But how can I use it? If I do, I’ll be fired, lose my pension, and be prosecuted. I’ve got the muzzle.” She inflated her cheeks and pretended to chew. El bozal de arepa. The arepa muzzle. An expression signifying loyalty, in the form of omertà, to those who pay your livelihood. It shamed her, but Sarah, like so many others in the revolution, kept chewing.