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Authors: Tom Kratman
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too.”
“Good,” Reilly said, “because neither of my babies are getting on a plane any time soon. And forget about going by what passes for roads here.
“Singh, eh? Good. Probably means he’s a Sikh. I approve of Sikhs.”
CHAPTER FIVE
There never was a new prince who has disarmed
his subjects; rather when he has found them disarmed he
has always armed them, because, by arming them, those
arms become yours, those men who were distrusted
become faithful, and those who were faithful are kept so,
and your subjects become your adherents.
—Machiavelli, The Prince
Caracas, Venezuela
It was easy to understand how someone like Chavez could end up as effective dictator of the country. What was hard was to understand what had taken so long. Most countries in Latin America had vast inequalities of wealth and little in the way of a social safety net. For most of the previous century, Venezuela’s oil had made these inequalities even vaster than the Latin norm. Worse, nowhere was the difference between the have-everythings and the have-nothings quite so glaring, and quite so galling, as they were here.
In most places, the rich were out of sight and away from the view of the poor. Here, the poor huddled in unsanitary and unsafe—mudslides might without warning kill thirty-thousand and render a million more homeless overnight—barrios up on the hills surrounded the city, with the sight of gleaming skyscrapers and the mansions of the rich an ever-present and continuously insulting reality. Safe behind their guarded gates, what did the rich know or care of the city’s murder rate, five times greater than that of New Orleans at its pre-Katrina worst? And the middle class had begun to emulate the rich, with their own walls and private guards.
Of the rest, the great masses of unwashed and miserably poor, more than half saw some member of the family the victim of a crime every few months.
And the police? Of Caracas’ respectably proportioned, indeed bloated, police force of thirteen thousand, most—as much as eighty percent in some areas—were in administrative jobs rather than walking a beat. That meant a mere six or seven percent of the police forces available were at any given time actually doing something active and visible to combat crime. Outnumbered, often outgunned, and demoralized, of those who were walking a beat, that tiny, tiny percent, most simply didn’t care anymore …if they ever had.
The sun was beginning to set behind the hills and shanties to the west. Moving from bright, tropical light to darkened shadows, cutting across broken sidewalks and potholed street, walked Carlos Villareal, aged nineteen. Carlos wore a red T-shirt and a rifle slung from one shoulder. Walking past the gutted ruins of the la Dolorita police station on his way to the meeting, he spared the ruin barely a glance. So much had it become a mere and accepted part of the landscape. He’d been little more than a boy the first time the residents of the barrio had attacked the thing with sledgehammers, axes, and homemade Molotov cocktails. It had been wrecked at least twice over again since that day. Now, windowless and with the scorching of gasoline-fed flames marking the walls over the holes that had been windows, it was abandoned and ignored by residents and police alike.
Most places in what passed for the civilized world, mobs attacked police stations in protest over police brutality, often enough with racial undertones. Here, the station had been ruined not over brutality, but over sheer indifference and incompetence. Nor had it made the slightest negative difference. Once the police gave up and moved away, the citizens of la Dolorita had taken matters into their own hands. They’d also taken into their own hands the rifles passed out with free abandon by the Chavez government in aid of developing a force of citizen militia. These arms had been given notionally to deter or combat a gringo invasion. In intent they were
“Good,” Reilly said, “because neither of my babies are getting on a plane any time soon. And forget about going by what passes for roads here.
“Singh, eh? Good. Probably means he’s a Sikh. I approve of Sikhs.”
CHAPTER FIVE
There never was a new prince who has disarmed
his subjects; rather when he has found them disarmed he
has always armed them, because, by arming them, those
arms become yours, those men who were distrusted
become faithful, and those who were faithful are kept so,
and your subjects become your adherents.
—Machiavelli, The Prince
Caracas, Venezuela
It was easy to understand how someone like Chavez could end up as effective dictator of the country. What was hard was to understand what had taken so long. Most countries in Latin America had vast inequalities of wealth and little in the way of a social safety net. For most of the previous century, Venezuela’s oil had made these inequalities even vaster than the Latin norm. Worse, nowhere was the difference between the have-everythings and the have-nothings quite so glaring, and quite so galling, as they were here.
In most places, the rich were out of sight and away from the view of the poor. Here, the poor huddled in unsanitary and unsafe—mudslides might without warning kill thirty-thousand and render a million more homeless overnight—barrios up on the hills surrounded the city, with the sight of gleaming skyscrapers and the mansions of the rich an ever-present and continuously insulting reality. Safe behind their guarded gates, what did the rich know or care of the city’s murder rate, five times greater than that of New Orleans at its pre-Katrina worst? And the middle class had begun to emulate the rich, with their own walls and private guards.
Of the rest, the great masses of unwashed and miserably poor, more than half saw some member of the family the victim of a crime every few months.
And the police? Of Caracas’ respectably proportioned, indeed bloated, police force of thirteen thousand, most—as much as eighty percent in some areas—were in administrative jobs rather than walking a beat. That meant a mere six or seven percent of the police forces available were at any given time actually doing something active and visible to combat crime. Outnumbered, often outgunned, and demoralized, of those who were walking a beat, that tiny, tiny percent, most simply didn’t care anymore …if they ever had.
The sun was beginning to set behind the hills and shanties to the west. Moving from bright, tropical light to darkened shadows, cutting across broken sidewalks and potholed street, walked Carlos Villareal, aged nineteen. Carlos wore a red T-shirt and a rifle slung from one shoulder. Walking past the gutted ruins of the la Dolorita police station on his way to the meeting, he spared the ruin barely a glance. So much had it become a mere and accepted part of the landscape. He’d been little more than a boy the first time the residents of the barrio had attacked the thing with sledgehammers, axes, and homemade Molotov cocktails. It had been wrecked at least twice over again since that day. Now, windowless and with the scorching of gasoline-fed flames marking the walls over the holes that had been windows, it was abandoned and ignored by residents and police alike.
Most places in what passed for the civilized world, mobs attacked police stations in protest over police brutality, often enough with racial undertones. Here, the station had been ruined not over brutality, but over sheer indifference and incompetence. Nor had it made the slightest negative difference. Once the police gave up and moved away, the citizens of la Dolorita had taken matters into their own hands. They’d also taken into their own hands the rifles passed out with free abandon by the Chavez government in aid of developing a force of citizen militia. These arms had been given notionally to deter or combat a gringo invasion. In intent they were
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