Magnum Photos Blog

Caracas post Chavez 

July 12, 2013 
by Jerome Sessini 
"Are you for the Revolution or against the Revolution? ". After a few hours spent in the capital of Venezuela, the question reaches the ears of the Western visitor quite quickly. For the inhabitant of Caracas, it is not a rhetorical question, but rather a need to know which camp the other person belongs to. Recently, an announcement by Maduro has fractured Venezuelan society a bit more. To cope with the economic crisis gripping the country, the government announced its intention to challenge the Vivendas Mission, the program of free housing for disadvantaged people. Yet it is one of the pillars of Chavist doctrine. After a failed coup in 1992, Chavez founded his rise to power on aid to the poor, to which he dedicated major programs over the course of his four mandates. And while poverty went from 49.4% of the population in 1999 to 27.8%, in the eyes of many Venezuelans, a person who in 2013 lives in an apartment that does not belong to the state and has a job is an "anti-revolutionary bourgeois."