Fino

It's just gone 10 oclock in the morning. I've been up since 7. Last night i was drinking tequila with this girl called Kelly and my friend Lisa who was sitting in a hammock in Kellys flat. We went out and brought back a pizza. We listened to the Clash, Calexico and Silvio Rodriguez, none of which are bands i especially like.
Lisa and Kelly live in Caracas, which is the capital of Venezuela which is at the top of continental south america and is in the news every now and again because of its ebullient president and the inappropriate things he says to international leaders.
C is a city of about 5 million people, which by Latin American standards is pretty insignificant. It doesn´t have any pretty colonial architecture due to earthquakes, 1950's city centre remodelling under the perez jimenez dictatorship, and what remains is streaked with exhaust fumes, bulletholes and city grime on account of it being in the centre which is now a slum.
When you go abroad you always feel safer than you do at home. It has alot to do i think with not hearing the stories that make you paranoid. It's like the first time you got mugged you didn't walk down that street again. At home your phone is filled with text messages about how pete got stabbed the other night in the park and you can turn it into gossip if you like, but it still makes you think twice.
I think this is the problem with Caracas. Rumours. For starters, the TV is filled with surgically perfect presenters, dripping jewllery, tans and smiles, talking about killings, politics and how generally fucked the country is. I am sure that the country for those people is fucked. But nowhere near as fucked, cut, sobbing and ripped up as it is for the people who have to deal with the majority of the crime. The vastly disproportionate poor.
I have next to no interest in talking about how the poor are a direct result of the widespread cultural racism and exploitation at the hands of the upper class and middle class elite. From what i understand the argument runs that the number of poor has risen under the present government. But so has migration to the urban centres and immigration from surrounding latin american countries. Which is probably a sign of a relatively strong economy.
the next argument talks about living conditions. Slums are dangerous cramped and living conditions are terrible. Right. And call me a postmodern liberal tourist, but the question seems to be about aesthetics. Slum housing is self constructed, but the same capitalist rules apply to it as any kind of housing. THe more money you have, the bigger and better that house will be. With the government turning a blind eye to the robbing of electricity, and taking direct action to provide water, the slums seem a cheaper alternative to providing housing for the urban poor. It's worth asking how much the visual impression these developments have upon the 1950's upper class generation has in terms of generating fear is down to their aesthetic departure from the ideals set forth under perez jimenez.
What does exist is crime. Caracas has one of the highest proportional murder rates in the world, and yet the violence is mainly focused within poor urban areas.
What i'm getting at here is how the fear of crime contributes to the perpetuation of crime. The response of the relatively well off classes is to retreat into gated communities, shopping centers and TV, leaving the centre to the slums and negating any possible dialogue between the classes. I'm not saying senora rosales should walk into the centre dressed in prada, but the point is that people always take precautions about their environment and it's a great feature of people that they adapt to the environments they find themselves in. And this goes across the social and economic spectrum. It seems to me that the isolationist hysterical approach of the U/M class contributes to the problem, and expresses a collective fear which has guilt and hypocrisy at it's root, and continuing inhumanity as it's result.

This is a discourse that i feel is shared by the people i met and liked in Caracas. Photographers, Fixers, Students and Cinematographers who took it upon themselves to confront and experience disparity first hand, placing it under the banner of experience and seeing it as necessary. It's worth saying though that Kelly still carries mace when she goes out after dark.