EXCERPTS

When Things Started Happening

It was in late 1988 that I realized something was going to happen in Venezuela. I had just returned from a furlough in the United States and had received some funds with which the Nueva Tacagua pastoral team decided to buy a Jeep Wrangler. The problem was that there were none available. There were no new vehicles of any kind for sale. The showrooms were empty!
It was election time in Venezuela and the party in power, Acción Democrática, wanted to be sure that they won the elections, so prices were strictly controlled. One dealer finally referred me to an agency that had two Jeeps. I went there and bought one for about five thousand dollars. It seemed to be an excellent deal. Within a few days, I discovered that the odometer cable had been cut. It wasn't a new vehicle after all, but there was nothing I could do about it. A great scandal developed in Venezuela at that time about the use of some Jeeps by the Lusinchi government during the election campaign. I think I bought one of them.
But buying a car wasn't the ordinary Venezuelan's main concern. There were shortages of rice, corn flour, black beans, and other commodities that make up the basic Venezuelan diet. Just as the car dealers and manufacturers were holding back their products waiting for the prices to go up again, so were the owners of grocery stores and supermarkets.
In January and February of 1989, one could feel the tension rising. I remember standing in line to use a public telephone when a heated discussion erupted over some insignificant matter.
The price of bread went from three pieces for one bolï¿½var to one piece for two bolï¿½vars in a matter of a few weeks, an increase of about six hundred percent. I have often asked U.S. citizens to think about how they would react if the price of a loaf of bread suddenly went from two dollars to twelve dollars.
On February 2, 1989, Carlos Andrï¿½s Pérez assumed the presidency. Many saw it as a coronation ceremony because of its extravagance. Dignitaries from throughout the world were present. The vice-president of the United States, Dan Quayle, was sitting in the same row as Fidel Castro.
In his inaugural address, Pérez spoke a lot about world diplomacy and hardly referred to the problems within the country. Lusinchi had left very little money in the nation's treasury. A famous Venezuelan, José Ignacio Cabrujas, wrote that Pérez was expected to be a magician. His job was not to pull just one magic rabbit out of a hat but a multitude of rabbits that would change the course of the economy.5
During his first term as president, there was an abundance of money from oil. Everyone had a job. That did not mean that everyone had work, however. Aristï¿½bulo Istï¿½riz did not belong to either of the two major parties. When he was unexpectedly elected mayor of the Libertador district of Caracas in 1993, it is said he discovered that there were about eighty doorkeepers for the city hall. There was only one entrance and only one or two doorkeepers on duty at any moment, but every two weeks eighty doorkeepers showed up for their pay.
When I shared this story with a health insurance salesman, he asked if I remembered the situation in the Pérez Careï¿½o Hospital where there were sixty ambulance drivers for one ambulance. Then he added, "But the worst thing about it was that the ambulance had been out of service for years, in need of repairs!"
But now the financial situation of the country was different. On February 16, Pérez announced his new economic policies and on Sunday, February 26, the price of gasoline went up.
Then, the morning of February 27, Caracas exploded. It seems to have started in a suburb of the city as people began boarding buses to go to work. The drivers had raised their fares because the price of gasoline had increased the day before. They had not been officially authorized to do so, but they said they could not wait.
There had been no leaders, no planning, and no organization. But within hours tens of thousands of people were in the streets, and looting began. First it was food, then clothing, then anything one could get. There are photos of people carrying televisions and even refrigerators.
Not all stores were looted. In one barrio, a newspaper reporter noted that the local hardware store was left untouched. The neighbors said that the owner was a Venezuelan who always charged low prices and even sold on credit.
The reaction of the police was interesting. Many, being underpaid and from the poorer classes, identified with those who were looting. I spoke to one policeman afterwards who said he fired only one shot during those days of looting. He was trying to maintain order outside a supermarket, insisting that the people stay in line to enter and do their looting. A woman approached him and reprimanded him for not stopping the people. He replied that he was doing what he could to preserve lives. "Then I'm going in too!" she said. He pulled out his revolver, shot it into the air, and answered her, "No way! Get out of here."
As the day went on, the attitude of the police changed. They too became looters. Reporters saw them firing tear gas to scare others away from stores. Then they entered and filled their police vehicles with merchandise.
They also became assassins, firing indiscriminately into crowds running away from them. The looters discovered the rice, beans, cornmeal, etc., which had not been available for weeks, hidden in storerooms. Stealing spaghetti suddenly merited the death penalty. The situation became worse when the president ordered the army into the streets.
In a newspaper interview some months before, I had said that I had been taught in moral theology classes that if someone has no food, it is not stealing if he takes some from someone who has too much. My words had no effect on what was happening, though it was good moral theology in practice. Nevertheless, I hoped no official would recall my words.
But it wasn't only looters who were killed. In Nueva Tacagua a young man left his home dressed in shorts and a t-shirt to visit his girlfriend a few houses away. There were no places to loot in that area, but he was killed.
In another part of Caracas, a father left home to go to work at 5:50 a.m., ten minutes before the curfew was to end. He was shot dead. Another father was killed in bed with his child in his arms as a stray bullet entered the apartment.
Stories also abounded of street people who were eliminated.
In one barrio, a dog barked at a soldier. The soldier shot her. The young master of the dog protested. He, too, was shot. The master died. The dog survived and later gave birth to pups. I know this story because my family became the owner of one of the pups.
No one knows the number of deaths that occurred in Venezuela during the tumultuous days of February and March, 1989. I would not be surprised if the number surpassed that of the massacre in Tianamen Square in China three months later. The China event received extensive press coverage, and the date is still remembered every year. But what happened in Caracas received little coverage and was quickly forgotten.
Numbers at such moments get elevated or diminished, depending on their political value. The World Almanac and Book of Facts 19936 spoke of an estimated five thousand who died and ten thousand who were injured in Tianamen. There was no mention of the deaths in Venezuela. Three years later, the 1996 Information Please Almanac7 mentioned only "several hundred deaths" in China and, again, said nothing about those in Venezuela.
Originally, there were rumors of thousands dead in the streets, information that was relayed by people in positions of responsibility. The Venezuelan government said that there were 276 deaths. But by 1990, human rights groups were able to give the names and identity numbers of 399 people who had died, and even that was an incomplete listing.
That many people disappeared was a reality, but a reality that the government denied. There were rumors of secret burial places, but it wasnï¿½t until November, 1990, that a judge had enough information to order the excavation of some ground in an isolated part of the West Cemetery of Caracas in an area called La Nueva Peste, 'The New Plague.' There, sixty-eight bodies were discovered in plastic garbage bags. Medical experts were able to identify three of the cadavers as those of youths who had disappeared during the February-March days of 1989. Then the identification process stopped.
While the unearthing of the bodies proceeded, volunteers were asked to be present twenty-four hours a day so that the government could not damage the site. One day two teenage girls appeared at the cemetery. They had seen on television what was happening there. That day, they had skipped school and were carrying a photo of their brother who had disappeared. Their mother had told them never to speak of him again in order to avoid problems for the family. They had disobeyed their mother's instructions.
How many other families carried the same burden as this one? Were there other such sites elsewhere in the cemetery? Elsewhere in the country?
For months afterwards, any small explosion, such as a large firecracker, would set people running. Some shopkeepers closed their doors and moved back to their native countries. Most opened again, but the country was not the same.
Thousands of people had lost family members. Every barrio of Caracas had felt the repression of the police and armed forces. Many of those living in the wealthier parts of the city had their business establishments destroyed, but the deaths they witnessed were mostly on television, and they cheered the police who were chasing the barrio dwellers.
The economic injustices and racial divisions that had existed for years in Caracas and in Venezuela as a whole had surfaced. Ten years later, political opponents of President Hugo Chávez would accuse him of dividing the country. But in 1989 Chávez was just another soldier. Like many Venezuelans, he probably wondered why soldiers should kill hungry people for stealing spaghetti.

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