End comes for notorious vertical slum
Govt moves to empty ‘Tower of David’
CARACAS, Venezuela, July 23, (Agencies): The beginning of the end came for the world’s tallest slum Tuesday as officials began evicting thousands of squatters from a haphazard community inside the half-built Caracas skyscraper known as the Tower of David.
Police in riot gear and soldiers with Kalashnikov assault rifles stood on side streets as dozens of residents boarded buses for their new government-provided apartments in the town of Cua, 23 miles (37 kilometers) south of Caracas.
Ernesto Villegas, the government minister overseeing Caracas’ redevelopment, told reporters the residents could not be allowed to stay indefinitely because the 45story building in the heart of the capital is unsafe.
He said children have fallen to their deaths from the tower, which in some places is missing walls or windows. The damp, foul-smelling concrete lobby attested to the lack of working plumbing.
Meant to be the crown jewel of a glittering downtown, the building was abandoned amid a 1990s banking crisis. It later was nicknamed the Tower of David, after its financier David Brillembourg.
Villegas said the tower started its life as a symbol of failed capitalism,
Opponents say the drumbeat of alleged conspiracies helps the administration shift attention away from domestic problems such as soaring prices and rising crime.
The charges against local critics are “one way that the Maduro administration has added extra paranoia to its strategy,” said Gregory Weeks, a political science professor specializing in Latin America at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “Chavez went after local opposition, too, but he didn’t feel the need to use conspiracy theories to do so.” and later came to represent the power of community. The squatters’ invasion was part of a larger appropriation of vacant buildings encouraged by the late President Hugo Chavez.
By 2007, the “invaders,” as they’re called in Caracas, had claimed everything from the parking garages to the rooftop helipad. They rigged up electricity, opened stores and barbershops, and created a sophisticated internal management system.
On Tuesday, Maria Sevilla, manager of the 28th floor, looked wistfully at the sooty concrete skeleton, with its steep ledges and incomplete stories stippled with satellite dishes.
“What I’ll miss the most is the community we built here,” she said.
A former street vendor, Sevilla said the 50 neighbors on her floor had become like family to her and her teenage children.
For outsiders, the tower symbolized the height of anarchic dysfunction. The surreal-looking highrise was widely believed to harbor criminals as well as working families, and it was sometimes raided by police looking for kidnapping victims. The US television show “Homeland” depicted the building as a lawless place where thugs participate in international conspir-
To outsiders, the allegations can seem far-fetched. Chavistas have accused conspirators of using newspaper crossword puzzles to communicate with enemies of the state, of developing tools to give leftist leaders cancer, and of plotting to “ruin Christmas” with a coup. They rarely provide much evidence.
But the charges don’t seem that wild to many government supporters, who are well-versed in the history of American plotting against leftist governments from Chile to Cuba during the Cold War and are a quick to recall Washington’s endorsement of a coup acies and kill with impunity.
The building’s neighbors celebrated the eviction Tuesday. Retiree Antonio Farias looked on with glee, saying the slum had brought the constant threat of kidnapping, rape and robbery.
“It was so beautiful at first,” he said.
Inside the tower, the mood was subdued even as dozens of children ran about. Young men talked about families they heard were going to refuse to leave.
Residents complained that they did not want to move so far away. They worry about losing the million-dollar views, and their easy access to supermarkets, public transportation and, possibly, employment.
“I don’t know how I’ll be able to find a job out there,” said Yaritza Casares, 28, leading her 4-year-old daughter through a soaring courtyard. “We were lucky to live here.”
In related story, an estimated 3,000 people live in the real Torre de David, walking up through unlit stairwells to their homes in the complex.
Its inhabitants have created a communal organization to maintain order within the building, taking turns keeping floors polished and common areas clean and secure. that toppled Chavez for two days in 2002.
With independent Venezuelan media sources dwindling, people getting their news from television and radio are unlikely to hear much questioning of conspiracy theories.
Fruit vendor Herman Acosta believes the allegations and says the government should do more to protect itself from those who conspire against it.
“I believe the government, because there have been coups all over Latin America and the US has always been the prime actor,” he said.