From official terror to article 350 - 1) life in Caracas
Two and a half months of nearly continuous protests have passed. The only thing we can say for certain is that internal divisions of chavismo are being exposed, and that the country is falling apart.
Living in Caracas is now an ordeal. You need to try to do your business either early in the morning or on Tuesdays and Thursdays, days with, in general, lower intensity protest. After all, you need to get food, work enough to make sure your business does not go under, take your SO to his weekly treatments, etc. It does not matter how much you would like to protest and beat up a Nazional Guard, you still need to attend some of the basic life needs.
Taking care of these needs have taken a nasty downward turn in these months.
Potholes are looking like bombed Syria since repair squads, deficient at best, have disappeared altogether. Sidewalks are not fit even for normal people.
If you are living in opposition areas your Internet and light and water services have noticeably decreased in "quality", as if they ever had any in the first place.
There is no bread. I kid you not. On occasion you can find some sliced bread, awfully expensive, one per person. If you are out of money then you need to stand for hours in line at some bakeries that still produce a handful of loaves. But you can still find some pastries, which would rejoice Marie Antoinette. but not much , not very good and quite, quite expensive.
Some items are showing up again, on occasion, like milk of laundry detergent. But their prices have been updated at international levels so they just leave the shelves slowly. I did find a pound of wheat flour the other day, at 6% of my paycheck. It stayed on the shelf.
Medicine is getting dramatic. International press reports abound. You have HIV epidemic on the rise, no to unaffordable condoms and thus people dead from an opportunistic diseases simply because there is no antibiotic available.
Kids are so malnourished that in the pediatric wards of public hospitals you have measles epidemic. Yes, there is no more vaccines either. And let's not talk about oncogenic medicine...
If you are about to give birth a public hospital will hand you a list of all that you need to bring if you want to be taken care of. Basically everything as the hospital can only provide its hands, without gloves.
So, when you dealt with all of that crap, including maneuvering all sorts of back roads to bring back home your SO post treatment (amen of driving slow to avoid as many potholes as you can, a source of pain), when you have refilled the fridge and shelves for at least a week, when you got that pill for your mother in law, then you can go and protest. Only to be tear-gassed more and more. Even people of a certain age like me that stay well away from the front lines are now reached by the violence, gas and injured people around them.
You get home and reach for your tablet and Twitter, the lone source of information these days if you know who to follow and then you need to go to bed with an anti depressant. Which of course you had it brought from overseas because in Venezuela there are none left.
And I will spare you the anarchy, from the stores where people are fighting again to be first in line, to the lawless driving as red lights are either broken or plainly ignored. Amen of garbage strewn all around as now you see every fucking day people looking for food in garbage.
This is a fast sinking country, and that adds to the violence, makes the final outburst closer and closer.
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Mix and shake |
Living in Caracas is now an ordeal. You need to try to do your business either early in the morning or on Tuesdays and Thursdays, days with, in general, lower intensity protest. After all, you need to get food, work enough to make sure your business does not go under, take your SO to his weekly treatments, etc. It does not matter how much you would like to protest and beat up a Nazional Guard, you still need to attend some of the basic life needs.
Taking care of these needs have taken a nasty downward turn in these months.
Potholes are looking like bombed Syria since repair squads, deficient at best, have disappeared altogether. Sidewalks are not fit even for normal people.
If you are living in opposition areas your Internet and light and water services have noticeably decreased in "quality", as if they ever had any in the first place.
There is no bread. I kid you not. On occasion you can find some sliced bread, awfully expensive, one per person. If you are out of money then you need to stand for hours in line at some bakeries that still produce a handful of loaves. But you can still find some pastries, which would rejoice Marie Antoinette. but not much , not very good and quite, quite expensive.
Some items are showing up again, on occasion, like milk of laundry detergent. But their prices have been updated at international levels so they just leave the shelves slowly. I did find a pound of wheat flour the other day, at 6% of my paycheck. It stayed on the shelf.
Medicine is getting dramatic. International press reports abound. You have HIV epidemic on the rise, no to unaffordable condoms and thus people dead from an opportunistic diseases simply because there is no antibiotic available.
Kids are so malnourished that in the pediatric wards of public hospitals you have measles epidemic. Yes, there is no more vaccines either. And let's not talk about oncogenic medicine...
If you are about to give birth a public hospital will hand you a list of all that you need to bring if you want to be taken care of. Basically everything as the hospital can only provide its hands, without gloves.
So, when you dealt with all of that crap, including maneuvering all sorts of back roads to bring back home your SO post treatment (amen of driving slow to avoid as many potholes as you can, a source of pain), when you have refilled the fridge and shelves for at least a week, when you got that pill for your mother in law, then you can go and protest. Only to be tear-gassed more and more. Even people of a certain age like me that stay well away from the front lines are now reached by the violence, gas and injured people around them.
You get home and reach for your tablet and Twitter, the lone source of information these days if you know who to follow and then you need to go to bed with an anti depressant. Which of course you had it brought from overseas because in Venezuela there are none left.
And I will spare you the anarchy, from the stores where people are fighting again to be first in line, to the lawless driving as red lights are either broken or plainly ignored. Amen of garbage strewn all around as now you see every fucking day people looking for food in garbage.
This is a fast sinking country, and that adds to the violence, makes the final outburst closer and closer.
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