Barrio Rising by Velasco Alejandro;
Author:Velasco, Alejandro;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
“CLEAN BY CHRISTMAS”: RESURGENT RADICALISM AND PUBLIC SERVICE COLLAPSE
In late November 1981, officials at IMAU announced that after over a year of bidding, negotiations, and scandal, they had leased trash collection services in Caracas to four independent firms.37 It was an unprecedented move toward privatization in Venezuela, promising to bring efficiency to an area of everyday life that had come to symbolize the state’s administrative incompetence. But much as confusion had marked most of the process, it would also eclipse this final stage. Just days after the announcement, the Caracas city council convened to discuss ongoing trash problems afflicting the city. According to press reports, an otherwise “lukewarm debate” was “revolutionized” when Lino Álvarez, councilman for MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement), read IMAU’s charter. According to Álvarez, the charter gave the council oversight of the institute even though they had long since “relinquished” that role, assuming IMAU to be autonomous.38 Embarrassed, the council quickly summoned both IMAU’s director and private company chiefs. In the ensuing days each would add drama to what was already, by one reporter’s account, an “enthralling” circumstance. For instance, after his meeting with the council, an exasperated IMAU director all but begged to be rid of his post, saying “they would be doing me a favor” by asking for his resignation.39 Meanwhile seeking to bring some measure of calm and optimism, owners of the newly hired companies vowed to have Caracas “clean by Christmas.”40
Two weeks later, a group of Monte Piedad residents in the 23 de Enero reported that fifteen days had passed since the last time trash was collected in the area—a stunning lapse in a neighborhood of over 100,000 residents. “Right now most of the chutes are totally full and the trash has rotted, bringing as a result the proliferation of rats and a strong stench” said Ednio Rosales of Block 13. They had repeatedly called the company newly charged with waste management in the area, to no avail. “It seems,” he said, “that we will spend Christmas surrounded by trash.”41 Meanwhile elsewhere in the 23 de Enero other residents reported water shortages even as a broken pipe, and a botched effort to repair it, spewed tons of water daily.42
Twenty-five years after the founding of the 23 de Enero, these were just the latest examples in a long list of grievances that had been accumulating throughout 1981. In August, for instance, a sewer-pipe leak months earlier in Monte Piedad had unleashed a “river” of waste, and despite repeated pleas to the agency charged with administering the blocks, no repairs had come.43 At the same time residents in Blocks 42–43–44, in the neighborhood’s western edge, alerted media that besides perennial water shortages, only one of six elevators servicing 450 apartments was in working order, some having broken down seven years earlier.44 In September, mud slides in Monte Piedad claimed several of the neighborhood’s main access roads, again with no repairs in sight despite repeated efforts to contact authorities.45 By early December, just as contractors promised to
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