Relevant Science: Babel Tower in Venezuela: La Jornada

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Babel Tower in Venezuela: La Jornada

Saturday March 24, 2012

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Momentum Bolivarian

The new Tower of Babel Venezuela

Intense cross-building in the South American

In the last nine months of 2011 were built 146 000 houses

Several buildings built under the current Venezuelan government policy Picture Great Mission Housing Venezuela

Luis Hernandez Navarro

Envoy

Newspaper La Jornada
Saturday March 24, 2012, p. 2

Caracas. Venezuela is upside down.Feathers, backhoes, cement mixers, forklifts and an army of thousands of construction workers and engineers work day and night to build hundreds of housing units across the country. Within the great old cities built new cities. Out of them, in the middle of nowhere, new cities rise.

The constructive crusade continues.In a country of just under 30 million were built during the last nine months of last year, 146 thousand homes, aiming to settle a historical social debt. The goal is to build, in seven years, three million. The project, dubbed Great Mission Housing Venezuela, is run personally by President Hugo Chavez, coordinated by the Minister Rafael Ramirez has built eight ministers, including the Environment.

Great Mission Housing Venezuela arises, in part, by the need to solve the housing problem of thousands of victims who suffered the environmental disaster of late 2010: 35 000 families, 27 thousand of them in Caracas, lost their home and had to move to shelters.

Real estate fever has appeared repeatedly in Venezuelan history. On two occasions President Rafael Caldera had the dream of lifting 100 000 homes a year. But the dream never materialized.Moreover, not even prepared a register of housing needs or had information of the problem, or know what land was available, nor how many machines are counted.

Great Mission Housing Venezuela is an adventure that resembles a modern Tower of Babel. More than a dozen languages other than Spanish are spoken in the works. The constructor frenzy has led to the Venezuelan State to partner with countries and companies as diverse places as China, Iran, Spain, Russia, Turkey, Cuba and Portugal. All have brought their engineers, their own machinery and architectural techniques, which, far from being a new Babel have enriched the country's infrastructure.

The nationalization of the cement company Cemex, for years in the hands of Mexican Lorenzo Zambrano, was prompted precisely by the need of the Venezuelan State to allocate all the cement to this project possible.

Fighting speculation

The combat mission of urban land speculation, which he considers a liability.Across the country the urban poor have staged a wave of invasions of hundreds of idle land to which the government has responded with expropriation for a public purpose. Shocked, the upper classes claim that it is an assault on property rights.

Popular mobilization has been supported by the government. President Chavez urged to occupy warehouses, vacant and abandoned facilities in industrial areas, whose value grew in the heat of speculation. "If you see a shed full of old machines, abandoned, that we must take it , that's a national asset. [...] The party, patrols, go, Batten down, seek information, take pictures, record. "

To advance socialism, said the president-is necessary to recover the space. These are the debts that we have, we are timid, slow to make decisions. That has to be taken, úsenme to me, I have powers, Chavez used more to advance in the construction of socialism.

The frenzy has raised builder living daminificados buildings, single mothers, workers, professionals and residents of poor neighborhoods in areas that traditionally lived the middle and upper classes. The poorest inhabitants of homelessness, who traditionally lived in areas of higher risk, they begin to have spaces in the city to live with dignity.

The new zoning that reconfigures the urban fabric and seeks to build an egalitarian city, without privileges, has caused great indignation among the affluent, living social recomposition of its habitat as unacceptable transgression.The arrival of MANY POOR to live in what they considered their neighborhood has turned on the warning lights of the middle classes.

Apartments equipped

The National Housing Bank and Habitat (Banavih) is responsible for fixing the prices of housing solutions that are built as part of the Great Mission Housing Venezuela, from funds invested in the construction of housing, income relatives of the beneficiaries and other conditions.The departments are equipped with stove delivered, refrigerator, washing machine and in some air conditioning.

This is the largest civilian undertaking of Chavez, the most effort, the largest mobilization of people. A sustained INITIATIVE also in popular self-organization and self-construction.

The Venezuelan opposition has sought to make invisible the new housing developments. They refuse to acknowledge the existence of the projects. Its journalists and TV commentators have said that the houses are just models.

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