Caracas can deceive a visitor initially. Despite a horrifically debilitating decade under Hugo Chavez’s negligent despotism, some things remain the same. The city still has a range of excellent restaurants. If you look over the city from the hills — better yet, peer down from an elegant condominium balcony — by day or night, Caracas can seem like the energetic, exciting city of yore.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ADVERTISEMENT

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It isn’t. The drive to Caracas from Maiquetia airport is dangerous at night and unsightly by day. By night thugs, many dressed as police, stop vehicles, rob their passengers and often steal the cars. The hills are filled with squalid ranchos — shack-filled ghettos — populated by a million or more desperately poor Venezuelan peasants, who have become the most solid core of Chavez’s steadily eroding support. Once inside Venezuela’s capital, it’s clear the street network has not been expanded for years, and its pothole-filled lanes are blocked around the clock.

Caracas is on a downward slide that seems unstoppable. The rural poor have invaded and endangered the city of six million as never before. The wealthy — those who have not fled to southern Florida, Colombia, or Spain — lead a surrealistic existence, smiling through ever-increasing gloom and believing that somehow, some day Venezuela will be rid of Chavez, socialism, corruption, and insecurity.

THOUGHTS ON THE GROUND
During a two-week visit, I attended a major conference sponsored by Veneconomia.com, the country’s premier economic, political, and social analytical group, conducted 37 interviews and encountered just three individuals who believed the opposition should do anything more than wait out Chavez’s demise.

The overwhelming sentiment is that Chavez is doing so much damage to himself and the economy that he will self-destruct. November 23 state and municipal elections will indicate just how low Venezuela has sunk in ten years of erratic rule, and its president with it.

Entrepreneur Jorge Redmond thinks positive change is coming: “Cubans run extraordinarily inefficient ministries, and 80 percent of the population does not want a Cuban-style government.” A former president of the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce, Redmond runs Chocolates El Rey, whose 250 employees produce extraordinarily fine chocolate that is exported to 30 countries.

Commenting on bureaucratic interference and inefficiency, Redmond notes, “In 1999, there were fours steps required to export; today there are literally 50. Not one of them has any value.”