VENEZUELA: 8 Injured In Caracas University Protest.

AP/ :56 YOUTUBE English Language report

    At least 8 were injured in an anti-Chavez student-led protest at a Caracas university.

VENEZUELA: Desperate For Housing, Squatters Take-up Residence In Unfinished Highrises.

NYTIMES / S. ROMERO
2 Screen Read...Combined

    Caracas suffers a housing shortage of about 400,000 units that breeds squatters occupying empty buildings of all sorts.

ROMERO:  "Architects still call the 45-story skyscraper the Tower of David, after David Brillembourg, the brash financier who built it in the 1990s. The helicopter landing pad on its roof remains intact, a reminder of the airborne limousines that were once supposed to drop bankers off for work.
   The office tower, one of Latin America’s tallest skyscrapers, was meant to be an emblem of Venezuela’s entrepreneurial mettle. But that era is gone. Now, with more than 2,500 squatters making it their home, the building symbolizes something else entirely in this city’s center.
   The squatters live in the uncompleted high-rise, which lacks several basic amenities like an elevator. The smell of untreated sewage permeates the corridors. Children scale unlit stairways guided by the glow of cellphones. Some recent arrivals sleep in tents and hammocks."

Squatters on the Skyline

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VENEZUELA: Thousands Wait For Housing Promised By Chavez.

AP/ M.HERALD/ 2 screen read / 
I. JAMES /

   Tens of thousands driven from their Caracas homes by deluges and landslides last November and December are still waiting for housing relief promised by President Hugo Chavez.
    "We don't really know how long we're going to be here. I have no idea. Some people say 18 months, others say 16 months," said a displaced woman living in a shelter. "It's really very uncomfortable waiting so long to get out of here."
    President Hugo Chavez has promised to speed-up construction and build 150,000 new homes this year.
    His re-election success in 2012 may depend on it.

VENEZUELA : 100 Squatters Invade Caracas Properties; 37 Arrested.

LAHT/

   About 100 "well organized" squatters invaded properties in Caracas's Chacao residential area resulting in 37 arrests and injuring 2 police.
    The area's mayor called it “a coordinated political action,” and that “PSUV members were calling for operations of this kind and asked people to take over these real estate properties illegally.”
   Recently, President Chavez has promoted expropriations of supposedly unoccupied lands, even asking the public to identify vacant land, empty buildings and unused areas so they can be “recovered” to cope with a deficit of 2 million homes in the country.

VENEZUELA: As The Middle-Class Exits, New Immigrants Arrive.

NYTIMES/ SIMON ROMERO/
    Many of the middle-class and wealthy are leaving as takeovers of private businesses increase, with 207 just this year.
    But hundreds of thousands of foreign merchants and laborers have arrived to take their place.
   “I feel like I can finally breathe again,” said a boat maker, who moved his operation to Colombia, creating more than 100 jobs there. “I’ve gone from a country where fear is constant over crime and state takeovers to a place that actually welcomes companies involved in something other than oil.”
   But the immigrants only see opportunity and continue to arrive, including about 4 million Colombians. “There’s work in Venezuela for those who want it,” said a Colombian laborer who moved to Caracas last year, finding jobs as a watchman and at a chicken-processing plant. “This place isn’t perfect, but it’s better than what I left behind.”

VENEZUELA: Caracas Morgue Foto Stirs Controversy.

LAHT/      El Nacional, a Chavez-opposition newspaper, is under attack by the government for publishing a photo of bodies piled up in the Caracas morgue. El Nacional put the photo on its front page showing naked and half-naked bodies, bloody and piled on tables and on the floor of the morgue. It says the foto was taken last December to show growing violence in Caracas. The paper is “playing with other people’s suffering” in publishing the picture and ignores “the effort” being made by state security forces in fighting crime, which is diminishing “progressively” in Venezuela, said police official Wilmer Flores.The newspaper reports that Caracas' only morgue “has received in the six first months of this year 2,177 bodies whose cause of death was homicide.”

VENEZUELA: Chavez Backs Graffitti And Street Art To Promote Ideology.

NYTIMES/   Venezuela's government is expanding the use of street art to promote ideology by financing graffiti artists and muralists to cover Caracas' walls with politicized images. Not surprizingly, demonizing the U.S. is a popular subject.

VENEZUELA: Chavez Purging Some Loyalists With Cuban Help.

NYTIMES ANALYSIS/   A purge is underway in Venezuela, a power struggle at the highest levels powered by information from Cuban intelligence agents. "We are witnessing the battle between competing mafias who prospered at Chávez’s heel,” said Ismael García, a leftist legislator. Chavez is consolidating power during an economic crisis with secret-police raids and expropriations of powerful supporters’ businesses.

VENEZUELA: Chavez Prepares To Seed Clouds For Rain.

MERCOPRESS/
“I’ll be on one of the aircraft and any cloud I come across, I’ll attack her with lightning so we can have rain”, said Hugo Chavez. Weather forecasts predict at least three more dry months before the rainy season returns to the Caracas area.

VENEZUELA: Twitter Helps Drivers Outwit Caracas Traffic Jams.

BLOOMBERG/
Caracas motorists, with the world’s cheapest gasoline and more cars than its roads can handle, may be the leaders in using Twitter to avoid traffic. Their forum called Trafico is growing 10% a week. Venezuela’s per-capita use of smart phones even outpaces Europe. “Venezuela has the penetration of smart phones we see in countries like the U.S. and Canada,” says one expert.

VENEZUELA: Slum Dwellers Suffering Even More From Water Shortage.

AP/MIAMI HERALD/
The slums around Caracas lack access to water because of sprawl and inadequate infrastructure investments.
But it has been made worse by a drought brought on by the El Nino weather system that has left reservoirs at low levels and forced water rationing.

Caracas Hit by 6.4 Quake.

LAHT with Map/
Caracas and central Venezuelan cities were shaken Saturday by a magnitude-6.4 earthquake at 4:06 p.m. local time. It was most powerful around the city of Valencia.

Surviving In High Cost Caracas.

GLOBAL POST.COM.
Another take on yesterday's report about the high cost-of living in Venezuela's major city.
"Foreigners can change their currency on the black market, so Caracas is not as expensive a vacation destination as the survey ranking would suggest. But for the middle class and the poor, who have little to no access to foreign currencies, their pockets are hurt each time they step in a supermarket or clothes store."

Caracas Is World's 15Th Most Expensive City.

LAHT.
Caracas is more expensive than London in a new survey.
While London slipped out of the world's top 10 most expensive cities for the first time since 2001 -- sliding to 16th place from third--Caracas surged from 89th to the 15th most expensive city in the world.
Mercer's Cost of Living Survey reports that the strong US dollar and a Venezuelan bolivar that is fixed to it, made Caracas more expensive than London.

Caracas Crime Update: Murders Increasing.

From the LAHT.

60 Murdered In Caracas...In One Weekend!

From the LAHT.

Detailed Report On Why Caracas Is So Expensive.

From The NYTimes.

An excellent discussion about Caracas and its rise to the top...as Latin America's most expensive city.

A box of Fruit Loops costs $54 at the official exchange rate!

Caracas- The Most Expensive City In Latin America.

From The Latin American Herald Tribune.

Now Numero 15...more expensive than London, Madrid, Tel Aviv or Miami.

Harrassed Venezuelan Mayor Plans Hunger Strike.

Caracas...the World's New Murder Capitol?

Unofficial estimates are that at least 1,300 people have been killed in Caracas so far this year.

The numbers come from reports of crime reporters since the government does not provide statistics...nor describe the role of police in the killings.

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