Russian poet and intellectual Joseph Brodsky once said that he liked cities because “everything is king-sized, the beauty and the ugliness.” In cities, the politics is also king-sized. City governments have the most influence on day-to-day lives: Without city governments, there would be no police, no trash pickup, no public transportation. Urban politics influence the built environment beyond day-to-day life, and debates over political incorporation determine which people live in the city and which do not.
From Buenos Aires to Mexico City, Latin America’s cities are certainly king-sized as well; Latin America is the most urbanized region in the world, and more than 260 million people live in Latin America’s large cities. Studying the politics of Latin American cities matters simply because that politics has the power to determine how millions of people live their lives.
Sometimes, though, national politics subsumes urban politics. In the case of Caracas, Venezuela, the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez used its control of the built environment to make a claim to national political legitimacy. In the end, Pérez Jiménez transformed the city, but he did not transform hearts and minds. Although the buildings still stand, his government’s legacy most certainly does not.
Public Works in Dictatorship
Pérez Jiménez took sole power in Venezuela in 1952 after the ruling military junta cancelled elections on the grounds that the opposition led in the polls. At this point, Pérez Jiménez had a tenuous grip on power. Going beyond the dictator’s usual playbook, the Pérez Jiménez regime undertook numerous building projects to bolster his domestic and international legitimacy. Understandably, the regime built many of those projects in Caracas, the country’s political and economic hub and largest city. In doing so, it could appeal to both the international community and the urban popular masses.
To gain legitimacy with the international community, Pérez Jiménez looked towards the Iberoamerican International Conference, scheduled to be held in Caracas in 1954. In search of a vehicle for that influence, he settled on an extant project: construction of the central campus (known as the Ciudad Universitaria) for the Central University of Venezuela, headed by noted modernist architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva. With the administration’s desire to project Venezuela as a bastion of modernity, this made sense; the avant-garde design would certainly accomplish this aim. According to architectural historian Valerie Fraser, Villanueva’s idea for a grand “synthesis of the arts” served as a “metaphor for the cultural integration of Venezuela into the modern world.”
Ironically, the Ciudad Universitaria proved antithetical to the dictatorship’s intention. Even though Pérez Jiménez authorized the project, the architectural design adopted the viewpoint of cultural critics known as the “Disidentes” who opposed the art community’s general stodginess and conservatism. As Fraser writes, “Villanueva was planning to make the university into a sort of Trojan Horse which would introduce the abstract enemy into the heart of the city.” Since Villanueva’s synthesis of the arts required the equal collaboration of many artists rather than the top-down dictation of a singular artist, it became a symbol of democracy rather than a symbol of authoritarianism.
After the Iberoamerican Conference came and went, the urban popular masses occupied more of the Pérez Jiménez regime’s attention than the Ciudad Universitaria. Since Pérez Jiménez rose to power through a military junta that counted on the support of urban residents upset at the previous government’s focus on issues important to the rural peasantry, the regime wanted to focus primarily on urban issues. Indeed, this coup marked the growing primacy that Caraqueños exerted on national politics. At this point, Caracas housed nearly 1 million people, double its population a decade prior. As a result, the junta initially sought to cement this base by paying attention to Caracas’ housing crisis.
However, after the 1952 elections, political motivations took a backseat to Pérez Jiménez’s “New National Ideal,” which sought to radically modernize the country using its oil wealth. As part of this ideal, the government proposed a radical change to the urban environment: it sought to end Caracas’ ranchos, or slums. Here, the regime saw itself as benefiting the popular interest, even as it had abandoned its previous commitment to placating the urban masses. In short, the regime intended this goal to modernize Caracas at any cost, even if it would invite popular disapproval.
To accomplish this goal, the Pérez Jiménez regime collaborated with Villanueva’s architectural workshop Taller del Banco Obrero to design the “December 2” housing complex, celebrating Pérez Jiménez’s ascension to power and putting the new national ideal into physical form. The housing complex took the form of 37 superblocks, each more than 40 meters tall and 80 meters long. In January 1958, the superblocks sat mainly empty as the dictatorship waited to celebrate their completion, a triumph over the ranchos and poverty in general.
The Failure of Building Politics
On January 23, though, Pérez Jiménez was not celebrating: A military coup overthrew him, forcing him to flee to the United States. Indeed, popular protests from the few residents of December 2 played a significant role in triggering the military coup. As the coup progressed, residents of Caracas’ ranchos rushed to fill the vacant apartments, figuring they could get away with squatting amidst the chaos. One woman recounted, “Well, everyone started running. I came here too, with several other women. This was full of people moving, you have no idea.”
They were right. The new government had little desire to maintain the superblocks, so the squatters remained in place. In celebration, they renamed the superblocks the “January 23” housing complex to recognize the date of Pérez Jiménez’s ouster. As Alejandro Velasco writes in Barrio Rising, “The same neighborhood built to embody the ideals of the ousted regime now stood as the emblem of a nation held up by a new spirit of unity.” However, the pent-up demand for housing far exceeded the number of vacant apartments, so squatters took whatever they could find to build new dwellings. Ironically, the housing complex that the Pérez Jiménez government had built to combat the slums had become a slum itself.
Tensions began almost immediately between previous residents and the new squatters. The complex’s administration immediately faced problems with rent delinquency, but the political power of January 23 residents and their appeals to the January revolution forced the new administration to accept the squatters and maintain relaxed rent collection policies. By December 1959, the government had abandoned efforts to kick out squatters and aggressively collect rents; slum residents had again carried the day.
In the end, the Pérez Jiménez regime could not construct legitimacy — or a legacy — by constructing buildings. When urban residents reclaimed the January 23 housing projects, they transformed a symbol of the regime to a symbol of the regime’s collapse. When those squatters forced major concessions on the part of the new government, they demonstrated the political power that urban residents could wield over city bureaucrats and the national government.
The superblocks were king-sized, but their residents were kings.
Image Credit: “23 de enero Miraflores” by pantxorama is licensed for use under CC By-SA 2.0.
