Hugo! (17 page)

That morning similar protests broke out in nineteen cities across
the country. Television networks broadcast images of the disturbances
in the capital, helping to spread the unrest.

Shortly after noon in Caracas, a crowd of students gathered in front
of the Central University of Venezuela. They denounced not only the
transportation hikes but also Pérez's entire shock package. They placed
cars across the road to the Plaza Venezuela and Plaza Las Tres Gracias,
blocking traffic at another of the city's nerve centers. By about 2 P.M.
they descended on the nearby Francisco Fajardo Highway, the capital's
main roadway, and blockaded it with branches, empty crates, and other
objects. They stopped food trucks, unloaded the cargo, and ordered the
drivers to park the vehicles across the road.

For the most part police were nowhere to be seen throughout the
city; others stood by idly, overwhelmed by the protestors. Part of the
force was on strike in a wage dispute. Complicating matters, government
leaders were caught off guard. Pérez was in Barquísimeto, one
hundred and seventy miles away. He apparently was either unaware
of the mayhem in Caracas or dismissed it. In Barquísimeto authorities
called out the National Guard around noon, so that city was not as
hard hit.

By late afternoon in Caracas, though, public buses and jeeps had
vanished. The subway system was shut down. Hundreds of thousands of
people were walking miles to get home from their jobs while cars and
buses burned in the streets. As Caracas descended into a state of almost
complete anarchy, a final barrier was passed: Mass
looting broke out.

It started downtown sometime around 4 P.M. The first targets were
bodegas, supermarkets, and stores stocked with people's most critical
needs — food and clothes. Looters smashed windows or broke down
doors and metal gates, and rushed into the businesses. To their astonishment,
they found that many of the products that had been missing from
store shelves for weeks were hidden in back storerooms. In an orgy of pillaging,
they grabbed anything they could get their hands on: pasta, rice,
corn flour, powdered milk, bread, butter, ham, cheese, meat, chicken,
pants, shoes, diapers. Many people ran down the street with their booty.
Others pushed it in shopping carts. Some even lugged sides of beef
almost as big as a man on their backs.

The riots spread like wildfire. The sprawling barrios of Catia in
western Caracas became engulfed. So did Petare in the east. Businesses
owned by Chinese, Portuguese, and Lebanese immigrants were
attacked with special viciousness because many residents blamed them
for hoarding products and creating shortages. While they trashed the
businesses, rioters also built bonfires in the streets, setting tires, cardboard
boxes, and other debris on fire, blocking traffic. They stopped
cars, ejected drivers, and burned the vehicles. Television networks
broadcasting the mayhem live helped spread the disturbances by
showing where the latest break-ins were and emboldening people to
loot. Hundreds of motorcycle messengers who usually spent the day
delivering packages, checks, or letters also helped spread the word,
zooming from hot spot to hot spot with the latest news.

It was the dinner hour.
Caracas was in a state of unprecedented
pandemonium.

As night fell, the looting turned massive, and more organized.
Residents and overwhelmed police had the looters line up outside stores,
and then let women and children enter first. The men followed. Some
looters waved Venezuelan flags and sang the national anthem. Others
shouted slogans or scribbled them on walls: THE PEOPLE ARE HUNGRY. THE
PEOPLE ARE ANGRY. NO MORE DECEPTION. Many people joined in because
they feared there would be nothing left for them.

After the bodegas and supermarkets were largely cleared out, the
rioters turned their attention to appliance outlets, furniture stores, and
other businesses that dangled big-ticket items in their windows and on
television. The throngs carted away televisions, stereos, refrigerators,
washing machines, stoves, beds. For many, with prices soaring and salaries
stagnant, the riots represented what might be a last chance to grab
a new bed, sofa, or TV. Residents carried the goods down the streets
or pushed them in shopping carts or wheelbarrows stolen from hardware
stores. Some pulled up with cars or station wagons. Others lugged
refrigerators on their backs. One television reporter called it "collective
madness."

Police could identify with the pillaging residents. Most came from
the barrios themselves, received meager wages, and had not been paid in
weeks because of a labor dispute. Badly outnumbered, they let the hordes
loot. But as the hours passed, they became looters, too. Armed groups
including some in police uniforms with their faces covered by handkerchiefs
arrived in trucks or even police vehicles and hauled away the entire
stock of some stores. News reporters saw some police fire tear gas at crowds
to keep them away from establishments they were raiding. They also fired
indiscriminately at looters running away from them. As Charles Hardy,
then a Roman Catholic priest working in a barrio as a Maryknoll missionary,
put it: "Stealing spaghetti suddenly merited the death penalty."

That night the looting spread from the main commercial avenues
at the foot of Caracas's valley into the hillside barrios themselves.
Hoping their businesses would not be entirely trashed, some owners
simply threw open their doors to the crowds, who often respected the
buildings but carted away the goods. In the barrio of San Augustin,
residents stole fifty cow carcasses from a butcher shop. They took the
scales, too. In middle-class Palo Verde and La Urbina, "pistol-armed
mobs" descended from nearby Petare, sacking grocery stores and a
Portuguese restaurant, and burning its furniture in the street. Some
protestors yelled, "We prefer to be killed by bullets than to die from
starvation."

The orgy of pillaging became known as "the day the poor came down
from the hills." It turned into an escape valve for the long pent-up anger
of a massive
underclass. For years they had watched impotently as a tiny
group of elites grew ever wealthier while they struggled to eat. Although
the rioters left the wealthy neighborhoods untouched, the rich were
terrified. In exclusive sections of eastern Caracas, residents formed
armed defense brigades, roaming the streets with submachine guns,
rifles, pistols, and machetes. To the elites of Venezuela, the country was
descending into a state of barbarity.

But to many in the barrios, the spontaneous upheaval was an act
of social justice. Just eleven days earlier, newspapers had run front-page
accounts of the "Wedding of the Century," an ostentatious affair put on
by two of Venezuela's richest families. It featured a reception for at least
thirty-five hundred guests including two hundred flown in at their hosts'
expense from as far away as Tahiti. The marriage of Mariela Cisneros
Fontanals, the daughter of
Oswaldo Cisneros, and Gonzalo Fernández
Tinoco y Zingg put the nation's high-class life on full display. Oswaldo
Cisneros was president at the time of Pepsi-Cola's Venezuelan subsidiary
and a member of one of the richest families in the world. Tinoco y Zingg
was the scion of a prosperous business family.
El Diario de Caracas
ran
a front-page story and nine more pages inside detailing the lavish affair.
According to news reports, the guests imbibed imported scotch, thousands
of bottles of vintage French champagne, and "the finest delicacies
from abroad" including a buffet overflowing with caviar, lobster,
and salmon.

On top of Pérez's "coronation" two weeks before that, the IMF-backed
austerity package, which called for little sacrifice from the
wealthy, was more than the country's underclass could stomach. For
years the elites and the
government "had kept telling us we had to tighten
our belts. But there were no holes left," commented community organizer
Xiomara Tortoza. Like Hardy, she was working with Maryknoll in
Nueva Tacagua, where people lived in tin shacks, defecated on newspapers
they tossed into the hills because they lacked toilets, and drank
parasite-infested water out of barrels that got filled by trucks as infrequently
as once a month. "The poor and the working classes had been
putting up with it and putting up with it and putting up with it until that
day arrived and we said, 'Enough,' " Tortoza recalled. "This was how the
people expressed their rage. A person who could not even afford to eat
a piece of meat, that day could eat for free, that day could dress for free,
that day could get their capitalist dream for free."

The looting raged on the night of February 27 and into the morning
of February 28. By noon it petered out in many areas. Downtown Caracas
turned into a ghost town. Schools, banks, and stores were closed. Public
buses and taxis were nonexistent. Radio stations warned people to stay
inside.

Up in the hillside barrios, people spent the rest of the day either
locked up in their homes in fear or enjoying their booty. In Tortoza's
barrio in Catia, a massive fiesta broke out
.
Residents in Isaías Medina
pulled grills out onto cement patios, and the smell of broiling steaks
wafted through the air. Neighbors shared or traded their loot with one
another, bragged about what they had grabbed, and drank beer, whiskey,
and even champagne. It was a day of triumph, a day of justice.

But it soon turned into a night of terror. Pérez had arrived back in Caracas
from Barquísimeto at about 8 P.M. on February 27. Apparently he was surprised
by the mayhem he encountered in what until that day was known
as Latin America's model democracy. He spent the night trying to figure
out what to do. At one point he flew over the city in a helicopter to see
the anarchy for himself. The government was in a state of shock.

It wasn't until 2 P.M. on Tuesday, February 28, that an official,
Interior Minister
Alejandro Izaguirre, finally appeared on television. He
appealed for calm and declared — obviously too late — that violence
would not be tolerated. In the middle of his address the elderly minister
grew ill, and the transmission was cut. It left the public even more rattled.
Two hours later he returned to finish.

Two hours after that Pérez finally appeared, accompanied by his
cabinet. He gave a rambling and angry address. It was shortly before
6 P.M. Even though most of the looting was over, Pérez announced he
was declaring
martial law, imposing a 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. curfew and suspending
a raft of
constitutional guarantees including freedom of speech
and assembly. In effect, it meant the military had the right to detain
anyone on sight without any particular cause. Those detained had no
right to see a lawyer or relative. All bets were off.

Earlier that day Pérez had ordered
federal troops into the streets
to "restore order." Now he was in the process of flying in nine thousand
more from around the country. It was a fatal decision. During
Betancourt's administration, Pérez had served as interior minister
and brutally repressed the leftist guerrilla movement backed by Fidel
Castro. He had to know that sending troops into the streets of Caracas
with instructions to restore order was risking a bloodbath. They were
trained for war, not to establish public safety and order, and had never
been in the city to control disturbances of this magnitude.

After Pérez announced the suspension of guarantees, rumors started
flying in many barrios that inhabitants of other barrios were going to
invade their neighborhoods and steal their looted goods. Gang members
and ordinary residents organized
self-defense brigades. Pistols,
rifles, shotguns, even machine guns and bazookas appeared on the
streets seemingly out of nowhere. Others produced knives, clubs, sticks,
and machetes, or concocted Molotov cocktails. The armed groups gathered
on street corners or hid on roofs or behind abandoned vehicles,
waiting for the enemy.

The outsiders soon arrived. But they weren't rivals from other
barrios. They were soldiers. The first trucks full of them rumbled up
the hills and into barrios such as Isaías Medina in the middle of the
night, followed by tanks. Their orders were simple: Shoot anything that
moved, and shoot to kill. "They didn't say raise your arms or anything,"
Tortoza recalled. "But everything that appeared, they killed." Some of
the young men who had pledged to defend Tortoza's neighborhood
were on the streets or hiding on roofs. Like many Venezuelans, they
didn't fully understand the curfew or think it was serious — one hadn't
been imposed in Venezuela for decades.

Down the street from Tortoza's house, soldiers started shooting like
crazy, "like they were in a war." They mowed down several young men
and left them dead in the street. Even closer to her home, a twenty-two-year-
old neighbor was shot dead and left in the street for a day. It was
illegal to move a corpse; you had to wait for authorities to take it away.
The only thing neighbors could do was cover the body with a sheet and
light some candles around it.

In the San Martin barrio near downtown Caracas, bookstore
worker
Wolfgang Quintana was standing on his second-floor balcony
near a window overlooking the street. He was holding his three-month-
old daughter Estefania in one hand and a glass of lemonade
in the other. Suddenly he felt a stinging pain just below his heart
and said, "Ayy!" He dropped the glass on the floor, put the baby in
a stroller, and started to walk toward a stairwell heading down to the
first floor. He was still talking, but when he reached the stairwell and
put his hand on the handrail, it was full of blood. He made his way
down the steps, reached the last one, and fell on his knees. Then he
collapsed onto the floor.

His wife, Iris Medina, ran out of the house screaming and looking
for help. Relatives who lived nearby rushed Quintana to a hospital, but
it was too late. He was dead.