Confidante of 'Tyrants' by Eva Golinger

Author:Eva Golinger [Golinger, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780264684
Publisher: New Internationalist
Published: 2018-10-15T05:00:00+00:00

Putting down roots in Caracas

I had no plans to return to New York: Gustavo and I had finally divorced and I had moved my cat Lola with me to Caracas. I was already working on a second book, so I decided to try my hand at home ownership. I found an amazing apartment in a building where I had visited friends and the price was just right. The owners were also willing to include almost all of their furniture in the purchase price, which was vital for me since I had none of my own. I had just enough money for the downpayment and secured a mortgage from a local bank for the rest. On 31 October 2006 I became the proud owner of a beautiful and spacious apartment in the La Florida neighborhood, a central location in Caracas. The unit had floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the breathtaking Avila Mountain.

Caracas was a chaotic city with no planned urban design, a lack of sidewalks and no traffic laws (at least, none that were enforced). As in Merida, though much worse because Caracas was more than ten times the size, cars zoomed through red lights, motorcycles rode up on sidewalks, in between cars and even traveled in the wrong direction. Accidents were a daily occurrence and the traffic jams were brutal. The metro worked well but didn’t reach all parts of the city and was so overcrowded during rush hour that you could barely breathe, if you were even able to squeeze inside in the first place and risk being groped by another passenger.

The absence of sidewalks in Caracas always amazed and frustrated me. The weather in Caracas was perpetually perfect – low 80s in the day and under 60 at night. Even in the rainy season the downpours were generally short and tropical, tapering off enough to allow for walking in the drizzle. But almost no one walked. In part this was because of the outrageously cheap subsidized fuel, but it was also due to the way the city had been designed, or, rather, not designed at all.

The historic quarter of Caracas was a basic grid with streets and avenues crisscrossing as in most cities. There, it was preferable to walk because it was too congested to drive through, though many did. But that was just a very small part of the city, a mainly commercial area with little or no nightlife. The rest of the city, including where I lived in La Florida, had sporadic sidewalks that were generally not maintained and therefore were broken and unsafe. You would be walking along the sidewalk and it would end, just like that, with no other sidewalk in sight. So you would be forced into the road, where it was extremely unsafe because, if cars didn’t stop for red lights, they definitely did not stop for pedestrians. It’s a miracle that I survived walking in Caracas, because I did a lot of it, everywhere.

I had decided early on that I would

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