CIUDAD CARIBIA, VENEZUELA, Oct 4: Hovering over a sun-baked mountain one day in his presidential helicopter, Hugo Chavez had a dream: to build a utopian city that would showcase socialism in Venezuela.
Slowly and chaotically over the years that followed, the late president’s pet project – conceived a decade into his rule and named ‘Ciudad Caribia’ for the country’s indigenous Carib people – began to take shape on the mountain 10 km northwest of the capital, Caracas.
‘This was his dream. Now it is his legacy,’ said hairdresser Yalmy Rumbo, 39, watching her children play and laugh in a public square where Cuban instructors were organizing games.
Rumbo is among the first 1,600 families, almost all refugees from floods and mudslides around Caracas, to have been given homes in new apartment blocks covered in Chavez imagery. Eventually, Caribia is intended to house 20,000 families, although critics complain at the slow pace of construction, the collapse of some shoddily-built walls and the lack of transparency over huge sums invested.
Caribia is a hotbed of pro-Socialist Party government sentiment in a country that otherwise was deeply divided in electing charismatic Chavez’s handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro as president in April.
After Chavez’s death from cancer in March at the age of 58, the popularity of ‘El Comandante’ has grown and taken on even deeper religious undertones among the support base that kept him in power for 14 years.
While that helped Maduro, a former bus driver, union activist and member of parliament win a six-year term as president, it is also making it near-impossible for him to step out of Chavez’s shadow.
‘As long as Nicolas maintains Chavez’s route, the people will be with him. If he deviates from Chavez, everything will change, he’ll be finished,’ said Rumbo.
Therein lies Maduro’s dilemma.
He owes everything, from his political inheritance to his election, to his late mentor. So, unsurprisingly, he parrots Chavez at every turn, be it thundering at the U.S. ’empire’ or trying to prove himself a man of the people during his daily, televised walkabouts.
Yet to solve a daunting array of problems, from the highest inflation in the Americas and embarrassing shortages of basic goods to rampant corruption and shoddy infrastructure, many feel Maduro needs to become his own man and tweak some policies.
‘I feel sorry for him sometimes. He’s trying so hard to be like Chavez, but that’s simply an impossible task. I can understand why he’s doing it, but he can’t spend his entire six-year term like that,’ a senior government insider told Reuters.
‘It’s almost heresy to say it, but we know there were mistakes under Chavez, and it’s time to fix them. If we’re to survive, if ‘Chavismo’ is to survive, that is essential.’
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was an emerging view in the ruling Socialist Party that major policy planks such as nationalization and currency controls may have run their course. (agencies)
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