- Total Collapse: Venezuela after Chávez
photographs and essay by alejandro cegarra/native agency
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This is not what our leaders promised us. We were told that we’d be safe walking the streets, that we’d have jobs, that we’d be able to buy groceries from a well-stocked store.
The local media is afraid to report the obvious truths, because it could anger the government. But, four years after Hugo Chávez’s death, Venezuela is more dangerous, more unequal, and poorer than ever before.
The state has failed us. [End Page 63]
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People queue for hours to buy subsidized food. Families are starving in the countryside and often malnourished in the cities. Markets are nearly empty. And the 526 percent inflation rate that Venezuela endured in 2016 has wiped out people’s savings. [End Page 64]
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Amid this economic hardship, a culture of violence has taken hold. The government spends seven times as much on weapons to defend itself from a hypothetical U.S. invasion than on civilian safety. The real battles, of course, are inside the country. Every year, about 24,000 Venezuelans are murdered. Despite 27 security plans enacted over the last 17 years, violence keeps increasing, and [End Page 66] Venezuela remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Somehow the 110,000-strong Venezuelan security forces are not enough, and fearing death has become a part of daily life.
No matter how hard you try to avoid them, violence, death, and tragedy will find you in Caracas.
In the 23 de Enero neighborhood, a Chavista stronghold in Caracas, a pair of gangsters were running from the police and threw a grenade behind them. Instead of throwing off their pursuers, it exploded next to a 5-year-old named Gabriel, who later died from his wounds.
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During his funeral, a crowd gathered around a small hole where his coffin lay. His baseball teammates sang, and his mother—in a wheelchair because of injuries she sustained while shielding her daughter from the blast—wept. For the first time while photographing, I couldn’t help but cry, too.
Later, in Carapita, a slum in west Caracas, I met “The Johnny.” He wore a bulletproof vest, hid his face, and held a shotgun. In Caracas, Johnny is the personification of death, the person we have all learned to fear. Johnny is a malandro, a gangster like the one who killed Gabriel.
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