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Daily hell for squatters in Caracas’s poorest areas
CARACAS, May 29, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Erick Hurtado wants to escape the
abandoned Caracas building that has been his home for eight years, but
despite his daily nightmare, he prefers to wait there for the abode promised
to him by Venezuela’s embattled government.
That’s the dream shared by 120 people living in Jehovah Gire — the name
the residents have given the unfinished building that was initially supposed
to house the justice ministry in Petare, one of the capital’s poorest
neighborhoods.
Most of those living in the building have been victims either of natural
catastrophes or Venezuela’s crippling economic crisis.
“I’ve had enough of living here … if I had somewhere to go, I’d leave
this hole,” Hurtado, a 42-year-old moto-taxi driver, told AFP at the
building, which offers a view over Petare’s immense slums.
There’s been no water in the building for the last four months.
The residents improvised by digging a hole in the asphalt road outside to
create a makeshift tub where they could wash themselves and their clothes.
A plastic bucket serves as a toilet, there’s electricity only on the
ground floor and illness is widespread.
“There are epidemics, mosquitoes, cockroaches, rats,” complained Roni
Aranguren, a 42-year-old builder who came to live here with his wife and four
children after losing his job and his home.
He has a simple dream: “A worthy house.”
Some 80 children live in Jehovah Gire, but only around 50 go to school and
even then they’re often absent due to a lack of transport and food, said
Stephanie Marcelot from the Rayiluz NGO, which is helping the residents.
Many children suffer from bloated stomachs, a sign of chronic
malnutrition, while cases of dengue fever, scabies and bronchitis are not
uncommon.
Over the years, people have forgotten why the building was abandoned. Some
say the civil servants refused to work in a neighborhood considered
dangerous, says Rayiluz’s Katiuska Camargo.
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There is hope — some former residents have managed to obtain apartments
thanks to a government program that has provided 2.6 million homes since
2011, but the opposition claims that figure is inflated.
According to Roberto Orta, president of the Caracas real estate board, 155
mostly private buildings were occupied by squatters between 2003 and 2007,
with 241 more expropriated “without compensation” between 2006 and 2008
during the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez’s presidency.
The most infamous illegal occupation was of the Tower of David, a
skyscraper that housed 1,150 families between 2007 and 2014 but has since
been abandoned.
That building was so notorious as a haven for squatters and gangs it was
depicted in the US TV series “Homeland.”
But the Jehovah Gire residents say they don’t want to be viewed as
squatters and have formed a cooperative to be recognized as victims.
And they hope to soon be transferred to a housing complex in the Caracas
suburbs.
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