The Lights Are Still On in Venezuela

We spent Christmas Eve driving around Caracas, revisiting familiar places, such as San Agustín del Norte, the neighborhood where my grandfather grew up, and Bellas Artes, the picturesque museum district. My grandfather, despite nearing his centenary year, insisted on driving—his way of retaining a sense of control among the local and geopolitical chaos. During the crisis years, in the second half of the twenty-tens, when poverty, violent crime, and civil unrest reached a fever pitch, my grandparents had purchased an armored Toyota Camry, the only bulletproof vehicle they could afford. But the car—small, low to the ground, and exceedingly heavy, owing to the ballistic steel and glass—is not suited to a city like Caracas, which is rife with steep inclines and deep potholes, and is best travelled in a four-by-four. The car was surely designed for a foreign diplomat to drive down one straight road between an embassy and a hotel; instead, it suffers greatly at the twists and turns of this city, and at the hands of my grandfather, who drives boldly.

When my grandparents felt that Caracas was at its most dangerous, around 2src19, they rarely left their neighborhood at all. In recent years, as violent crime has declined, they’ve become more willing to venture out, eager to reconnect with a place that, for years, they felt they could not explore. On Christmas Eve, we looked through the car windows with awe at a city that my grandparents had almost forgotten, and that I had never got to know in the first place—a mosaic of colorfully painted houses and narrow favela streets, loud with the sound of motorbikes and music, interspersed with walkways wrapped in Christmas lights.

There was something slightly comical about the aesthetics of Christmas, shaped as they are by the colder global North, being superimposed on this tropical landscape. But the humor quickly turns dark when you cross the Río Guaire into San Agustín del Sur, the hillside favela near my grandfather’s old quarter, and arrive at a pyramidal building called El Helicoide. A wildly ambitious brutalist project, the structure was intended as a luxury shopping mall, complete with a four-kilometre ramp that loops around it, allowing vehicles to drive right in and park inside. It is now one of the most notorious political prisons in South America. For the past three months, it has also been a Christmas tree. An L.E.D. star sits atop the pyramid, and strands of colorful lights encircle the structure, like tinsel.

Inmates have reported cruel and inhumane treatment: electrocution, beatings, and simulated executions, among other horrors. Many were arrested for protesting Maduro’s regime, after he stole the Presidential election, in 2src24. Some were detained for simply sending texts questioning the government’s legitimacy—messages that were uncovered during the phone searches that have become a routine part of law enforcement in Caracas.

Trump’s aggressive actions toward Venezuela only worsened the Maduro regime’s paranoia, and, in turn, its authoritarian grip on power. A common slogan, written on the armored personnel carriers that could be seen coming and going from El Helicoide at all hours of the day, translates to the declaration “To Doubt Is Treason.” The city’s most ubiquitous image, painted all over Caracas by government-commissioned muralists, is of the eyes of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, watching us.

In September, after the Trump Administration had begun striking boats off the coast of Venezuela, I was out photographing the local flora, a few streets down from where my grandparents and I live. After taking a picture of an unusually overgrown kapok tree—which, my neighbors later told me, was near a property owned by a high-ranking government official’s daughter—plainclothes officers approached me. They asked fairly banal questions about my employment and my reasons for taking photographs, and they looked through my phone, where they discovered that I had some text messages in English, further arousing their suspicion.

After roughly half an hour of sitting with the officers in the shadow of the kapok, being interrogated about my thoughts on the government, a four-by-four pulled up. Officers from SEBIN, the country’s intelligence service, dressed in black balaclavas and combat gear, with semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, emerged from the vehicle and said that they were going to take me somewhere for questioning. They explained that, for my own safety, they were going to have to restrain me, and, in a gesture painfully symptomatic of the fact that I have spent far too much of my life in England, I made sure to shake the officers’ hands before they zip-tied my wrists.