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OTHER SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Infrastructure and Insurrection: The Caracas Metro
and the Right to the City in Venezuela
Donald V. Kingsbury
University of Toronto, CA
donald.kingsbury@utoronto.ca
This article envisions the Caracas Metro as infrastructure that forms and is formed by political
subjectivity and urban space. The rst section provides a brief history of the metro as conceived
by modernization-minded politicians in the twentieth century. Here the Metro is seen as playing
a pedagogical function in accordance with a larger tradition of Venezuelan positivism. The
second section examines a shift in the social and political composition of Caracas after El
Caracazo of 1989. In response to neoliberalization, social movements reshaped the terrain of
politics and the city in a way that can be usefully conceptualized as demands for the right to
the city—that subjects have the right to access, shape, and themselves be shaped by the urban
environment. I conclude with an analysis of 2014’s violent antigovernment protests. The tactics
and targets of these protests—barricades and direct attacks on public infrastructure such as
the Metro—illustrate the perceived threat democratized urban space poses to traditional elites
in the context of social change.
Even before its inaugural journey in January 1983, the Caracas Metro shaped Venezuela’s capital city. It
has in turn been shaped by the desires, frustrations, and identities of caraqueños (residents of Caracas).
More than a technical structure of public transport or a response to the traffic and congestion of the city,
the metro has always been a social project. It produces and directs both urban space and the political
subjectivity of residents in an open-ended and sometimes antagonistic sequence. It is an object of political
contests and one of the principle terrains on which struggles that define Caracas, and Venezuela more
generally, are fought.1
By the twenty-first century the stakes of these struggles could hardly be higher. Economic collapse in
the 1980s and 1990s triggered the implosion of Venezuela’s once praised Punto Fijo system of pacted
democracy.2 After a neoliberal 1990s, the return of record oil prices and a series of key victories by popular
and especially urban social movements opened space for the Chávez government to carry out sweeping
changes to Venezuela’s political, social, and human infrastructure. The expansion of the Caracas Metro
(hereafter, MetroCCS) is a key example of these reforms, providing a way to productively invest windfall oil
revenues while altering the physical terrain of politics in Venezuela for years to come. The twenty-first-century
1 Nota bene: This article was written and revised prior to the opposition protests and government crackdown in Venezuela that began
in April 2017.
2 After the overthrow of the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958, Acción Democrática and COPEI signed the Punto Fijo Pact,
establishing an exclusionary power-sharing agreement that would define Venezuelan politics until the impeachment of the
last president elected under the system, Carlos Andrés Pérez, in May 1993. Fernando Coronil (1997, 229) describes Punto Fijo
as an “agreement to make pacts” in order to avoid “structural change” and “control the transformation of political identities.”
Throughout its tenure, observers held that Punto Fijo resulted in a Venezuela “free of acute class and racial conflict and cleavages
that threatened political stability elsewhere” with a “democratic system and political culture [that] were healthy and solid” (Ellner
and Tinker Salas 2007, 5). This narrative remains popular among a significant portion of the opposition in Venezuela, who contend
that violent racial, class, and geographical conflict in the country was either triggered or uniquely intensified by the polarizing
discourses of Hugo Chávez (see, e.g., Briceño-León 2012; Kozak Rovero 2007). While violent crime indeed continued and steepened
its upward trajectory in the early twenty-first century, a growing body of critical scholarship contends that the Punto Fijo years
were far from halcyon days of social harmony (see, e.g., Ciccariello-Maher 2013). According to this latter line of inquiry, the Punto
Fijo years were marked not only by the structural violences of Venezuela’s highly unequal society but also by regular instances of
repression against student and peasant movements. The system itself, finally, was so circumscribed and exclusionary—banning not
only the Partido Comunista de Venezuela (Venezuelan Communist Party, PCV) but also and increasingly any heterodoxy within
AD and COPEI—that ink had scarcely dried on the pact before party youth and dissidents joined ranks with the country’s guerrilla
campaigns of the 1960s.
Kingsbury, Donald V. 2017. Infrastructure and Insurrection: The Caracas
Metro and the Right to the City in Venezuela.
Latin American Research
Review
52(5), pp. 775–791. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.244
The Caracas Metro and the Right to the City in Venezuela776
expansion of the MetroCCS system to include modernized buses, extended subway routes, light-rail networks
throughout the Caracas area, and a series of cable-car routes linking precarious and informal districts along
the hillsides of the capital to the city center are not merely public works projects. They are also projections
of an ethical stance vis-à-vis the collective life of the city, democratizing space and amplifying the mobility
of caraqueños. That is to say, the MetroCCS not only functions as a pedagogical apparatus oriented toward
the behaviors of passengers and citizens. It is also, importantly, an egalitarian vector of a right to the city for
all who inhabit and traverse it.
For the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city extends classical concepts of political, civil,
and social rights. Lefebvre, whose theorization was “more provocative than careful” developed the term in
response to the global—but especially Parisian—uprisings of 1968 as a way to assert the increasingly social
and spatial aspects of capitalist accumulation and antisystemic struggles for equality (Marcuse 2012, 29).
The right to the city demands access to what the city has to offer, but also, and more important, a voice in
how the city is defined; it is a demand for both appropriation and participation (Purcell 2014, 150). Since
its original formulation, the demand for a right to the city has been asserted in fights against gentrification,
privatization, police and private surveillance, socioeconomic inequality, and political exclusion. It has, in
short, crystallized a multitude of demands and movements against the late-capitalist tendency to fragment
and commodify collective life (Harvey 2008; Mayer 2009; McCann 2002; Mitchell 2003; Purcell 2014).
Academic treatments of the right to the city in Venezuela for the most part center on questions of land
ownership and infrastructural support in the urban periphery, or on participatory—protagonistic is the
preferred adjective of the Bolivarian Revolution—aspects of twenty-first-century democracy (Fernandes
2010; Humphrey and Valverde 2014; Lajoie 2010; Madera 2010). However, significantly less has been written
concerning the role of urban transport infrastructure in extending and facilitating these new rights, perhaps
because of the extent to which “the expansion of the right to the city through citizen participation has been
restricted by urban segregation and social polarization. The city is not a shared space for social integration
and transformation but an increasingly divided one between rich and poor, Chavistas and anti-Chavistas”
(Humphrey and Valverde 2014, 158). The MetroCCS cuts across these frontiers physically, carrying with it the
potential to open settled spaces and substantiate the right to access, appropriate, and transform the city. This
is precisely why it has become a preferred target of the more violent sectors of the Venezuelan opposition.
This article examines the MetroCCS as an infrastructural assemblage and result of contests over space
and power across three sections. The first provides a brief history of the Metro as conceived by elites in
the mid-twentieth century. In this moment the pedagogical function of urban infrastructure corresponds
with those positivisms that see citizens as raw materials for the modernizing designs of technocrats and
experts. The second section examines a shift in the composition of Caracas and the social relations that
define it after El Caracazo of 1989. Here I suggest that the politics enacted by social movements in response
to the neoliberalization of Venezuela can be usefully interpreted as a demand for a right to the city—that
subjects have the right to access, shape, and themselves be shaped by the urban environment (Harvey 2008;
Marcuse 2009). These demands in turn laid the groundwork for a newly conceived role for the MetroCCS
in the twenty-first century. While the metro continues to act as a social engineer in Caracas and to display
vestiges of the past’s positivisms, its interventions reflect a reconfigured and often contradictory balance of
forces in Venezuelan politics between the government and the opposition and between forces of order and
more democratic tendencies among the government and its allies. I conclude with a brief analysis of 2014’s
violent antigovernment protests. The tactics and targets of these protests—barricades and direct attacks on
public infrastructures such as the metro—illustrate the perceived threat democratized urban space poses to
traditional elites.
La Gran Solución para Caracas:
Planning, Social Engineering, and the
MetroCCS (1926–1983)
The use of infrastructure as social project has a well-established history in Venezuela. Military and civilian
governments throughout the twentieth century adhered to a positivist social philosophy that aimed to
transform Venezuelans whose “effective constitution” was stunted by history, geography, climate, race, and
the built environment into subjects responsible enough to enjoy the “written constitution” of a modern
liberal democracy (Bautista Urbaneja 2013, 8; Vallenilla 1980, 369). Urbanisms have played key roles in
these attempts at modernization, and city life was imagined as a means by which elites could “discipline
the barbarity” they saw in their co-nationals (Cartay 2003, 192). Even still, in Venezuela, as in much of
Latin America, most urbanization has been unplanned. The pace of urban growth has far outstripped
the ability, or desire, of planners to provide for the basic needs of a majority of the population (López
Maya 2011, 44); by some estimates more than half of caraqueños currently reside in informal and often
precarious settlements (Ocaña and Guardia 2005, 165). As late as 1992, Aristobúlo Istúriz (then newly
Kingsbury 777
elected mayor of Libertador, the largest of Caracas’s five municipalities) noted with dismay that his office
all but completely lacked even basic information about the city. The absence of zoning codes, an accurate
census of residents, or even a reliable map of streets and services all contributed to what he described as
the “special anarchy” of Venezuela’s capital city (Harnecker 2005, 24).
The planning and construction of the MetroCCS was part of a series of attempts to bring order to this
situation. It originally followed in the path of previous modes of pedagogical developmentalism that
stretched from the French-inspired and Hausmannesque Plan Monumental de Caracas (Monumental Plan
of Caracas, PMC) of 1938 (Almandoz 1999) to the no-less-Eurocentric architectural vision of the Nuevo Ideal
Nacional (New National Ideal) of the midcentury Pérez Jiménez dictatorship (1948–1958). In these schemes,
planners and policy makers insisted that order, stability, and a conquered environment were prerequisites for
the “moral, intellectual, and material” improvement of the people and the country (Pérez Jiménez, quoted
in Ramos 2010, 30). Public infrastructure projects like the MetroCCS were not only “concrete embodiments
of progress … transplanted from metropolitan centers to the national soil”; they were also considered
endowed with the power “to bring progress to Venezuela” (Coronil 1997, 173). As a result, most urban
planning in Caracas focused on monumentality and automobility as markers of progress, while geography
and demographics conspired to make traversing the capital an increasingly arduous ordeal for its 3.2 million
residents—nearly a fifth of the national population—when construction of the MetroCCS began in the late
1970s (Marcano Requena 1979).
Given the layout of the city, plans for subterranean transit settled on a major east-west conduit shortly
after the World Bank published a position paper in 1959 recognizing urban transport as key to economic
growth, with explicit reference to Caracas (Padrón 1990, 11–14). It was only with the oil bonanza of the
1970s that construction began. By 1978, ten stations and connecting tracks were under construction, as
were massive public works and arts projects, such as the expansion of the Bulevar de Sabana Grande and
the water-fountain complex at the Plaza Venezuela (Metro de Caracas 1982). Plans also included two future
north-south lines, eventually opened in 1987 at El Silencio-Zoológico and 1994 at Plaza Venezuela-La
Rinconada (Metro de Caracas 1979, 19–35). In 1986 the MetroBús fleet was incorporated into the MetroCCS
as a subsystem, with a service map initially limited to future subway routes (Metro de Caracas 2007, 47).
In the two years immediately preceding its opening in 1983, a massive campaign—La Gran Solución para
Caracas (The Grand Solution for Caracas; see Figures 1–3)—sought to train residents for what planners
Figure 1: Viajar en El Metro es muy fácil … siguiendo estas sencillas instrucciones. (It’s very easy to travel
on the Metro … following these simple instructions). (Metro de Caracas n.d.).
The Caracas Metro and the Right to the City in Venezuela778
Figure 2: ¡En El Metro estamos seguros! El Operador del Metro es la autoridad que cuida por su bienestar
y le informa acertadamente. Respételo y siga sus instrucciones. (We’re safe on the Metro! The Metro’s
conductor is an authority that cares for your well-being and wisely guides you. Respect him, and follow his
instructions). (Metro de Caracas, n.d.).
Figure 3: Sienta orgullo de El Metro … ! Y ayude a conservarlo limpio: Respete las normas del usuario y así
estará colaborando a mantener El Metro en buen estado. Recuerde no botar basura en el suelo ni entrar
al Sistema con alimentos o bebidas. (Feel pride in the Metro … ! And help keep it clean: by following the
rules as a user you’ll be contributing to the upkeep of the Metro. Remember not to throw garbage on the
ground, or to enter the system with food or beverages). (Metro de Caracas n.d.).
Kingsbury 779
promised would bring about the most “radical and beneficial changes to daily life that the city had ever seen”
(Padrón 1990, 161).
The designers of both the MetroCCS and the Gran Solución campaign were explicit in their belief that
theirs was an endeavor of civic and social as well as civil engineering. These were not merely step-by-step
instructions on how to use a new technology. They were rather key elements of a coherent vision for Caracas
and Venezuela as a whole. Indeed, official MetroCCS publications are explicit in this regard, elaborating a
five-point program for its role in this new social project:
1. Urbanism—The MetroCCS is a key element of the modern city for reasons both practical (the circulation
of people and goods) and symbolic (the overcoming of the city’s natural limits, and a means to secure
membership among the ranks of world class cities).
2. Urban regeneration—The MetroCCS would open the city for new waves of economic growth (construction
of the metro itself, but also of secondary effects in real estate markets and cross-sector increases in
efficiency), and a means by which to transform “the cultural life of Caracas.”
3. Stable source of work—The MetroCCS promises a steady source of income for future operators, support
staff, and construction workers. It would also create new economic hubs around stations that would also
stimulate employment.
4. Testimony of progress—The MetroCCS illustrates Venezuela’s national development and progress.
5. Acts of government—The MetroCCS shows the “institutional commitment on the part of the state to
benefit the collectivity, but especially for the popular sectors” (adapted from Padrón 1990, 163).
The MetroCCS was meant to be a political and civilization-defining achievement, a tool of economic
intervention and, perhaps most important, a means to transform the city and its inhabitants. As a
disciplinary apparatus it altered the behaviors and consciousness—the very subjectivity—of bodies
“accustomed” to what planners described as the reigning “casual lawlessness of urban transit” into
manageable, orderly, and rule-abiding citizens (Padrón 1990, 164–165). The MetroCCS was thus at one
and the same time conceived as a practical solution to traffic, a symbol of national progress, the means of
achieving said progress, and a motor for the production of modern subjects.3
What is most striking about the Gran Solución campaign is not so much its content—safety advisories,
instructions for use, anti-graffiti and -litter messages, cues on how to navigate the mechanical and physical
environments of the subway—but rather the way in which it updated existing grammars of power for a
new configuration of infrastructure and subjectivity. New regimes of authority and affect were grafted
onto the city, with smiling and uniformed conductors ensuring an orderly and almost familial extension
of the pedagogical state-citizen dynamics of the past. The Gran Solución incorporates riders as responsible
and autonomous individuals and as part of a collective endeavor, but it does so treating them as passive
bodies in need of instruction, called on to obey as beneficiaries of a massive technological feat. Thus,
while its egalitarian aim of easing access for all caraqueños can be said to have potentially democratizing
effects, at this stage the MetroCCS cannot be said to be democratic or participatory. It operates on citizens,
and perhaps it looks to operate through them. At this stage, the MetroCCS does not attempt to act with
caraqueños.
The Gran Solución would be the last attempt of the Punto Fijo state in Venezuela to pursue development
through massive infrastructural investment. By 1981 the project neared financial insolvency, requiring
another round of emergency funding and another opportunity for the siphoning of public funds (Padrón
1990, 133). When it opened in 1983, the total cost reached more than US$1 billion (in 1983 dollars)
(Diehl 1983, A16). Beyond the perhaps predictable fiscal issues surrounding such a massive endeavor, the
MetroCCS opened as the social, political, and economic order disintegrated. With iterated crises of the
1980s and neoliberalization in the 1990s, long-simmering social tensions along fault lines of race and class
dominated urban and national imaginaries. The poor were increasingly cast as threats and as the vectors of
the barbarity and ungovernability that elites had been working to discipline, redirect, and stifle for decades
(Cartay 2003; González 2005; Rotker 1993). The MetroCCS sought to rationalize traffic and transit in the
capital and to impose a more modern and metropolitan mode of life among caraqueños. These aims and
3 This modernity was a wholly imported entity. As one observer from the New York Times put it in 1983, “Nothing in Caracas
compares with this. It is the mark of a big league city. It is Venezuela’s piece of space-age technocracy … the Metro, you see, is not
just a beautiful new national toy. It is also the one thing in this great urban tangle that really seems to work.” As if to drive the
developmentalist narrative home, and to underline the position of Caracas, of Venezuela, and of Venezuelans in the global circle
of civilized nations, he concludes that “it is as if such a Metro, in Caracas, could only ever be borrowed from another place” (Diehl
1983, A10). Or, as President Carlos Andrés Pérez said to a North American researcher a few years earlier, “Some day soon … we will
look like you” (quoted in Karl 1999, 32).
The Caracas Metro and the Right to the City in Venezuela780
the political order they reflected would not survive the coming crises that began a few short months after
the pomp and ceremony of the inaugural journeys of the Gran Solución para Caracas.
From Pedagogical Infrastructure to a Right to the City: The Caracazo
and After (1989–2000)
After nearly fifty years of plans, proposals, and half starts, the MetroCCS opened in 1983 amid a slow-
burning economic collapse. The oil bonanza of the 1970s dissipated with alarming speed due to a toxic
cocktail of mismanagement, predatory lending practices from abroad, and notorious corruption across
every level of government (Díaz, Cipriano, and Villegas 1996, 96–101). With this deteriorating political,
economic, and social situation elites were dislodged from their traditional roles as “messengers of the
future” and “brokers between Latin American and the ‘civilized’ or ‘modern’ world” (Coronil 2011, 245). So
too was their positivist-pedagogical program for top-down modernization.
Piecemeal austerity accompanied a global fall in oil prices, nullifying the “right to have rights” of the
growing ranks of Venezuela’s poor and rendering democracy a “pantomime” of itself (González 2005, 113).
Cracks in puntojismo became increasingly unmanageable.4 By the early 1980s elite consensus had emerged
on the need to open the system, but the proposed reforms—for example, allowing for the direct election
of mayors—never matched the scale of the mounting crisis. The inadequacy of these proposals was laid
bare with the Caracazo (the explosion in Caracas). In its aftermath, popular pressures accelerated the rate
and scope of change—moving from reforms to the Punto Fijo system of pacted democracy to calls for the
convocation of a constituent assembly and an overhaul of Venezuela’s socioeconomic order (Denis 2001;
López Maya 2011, 22).
Before reconstruction, implosion: almost immediately after assuming office for a second, nonconsecutive
term in February 1989, Carlos Andrés Pérez announced one of the region’s most orthodox neoliberal reform
packages—despite running an anti-neoliberal and anti–International Monetary Fund (IMF) campaign. In
response, a massive, nationwide, and spontaneous uprising caught the government off guard. After its
initial inaction and disorientation, the reprisal was brutal. While the figure varies, at least three hundred
and up to three thousand people were killed in a five-day police and military crackdown.5 Writers on the left
(Araujo et al. 1989; Beasley-Murray 2010; Coronil and Skurski 1991) and the right of the political spectrum
of Venezuela observers (Briceño-León 2006, 2012) agree that the Caracazo tore up the social contract of the
Punto Fijo era. More fundamentally, however, the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s confirmed and
intensified already circulating anxieties around class, race, and violence that were increasingly expressed
spatially in the segregation of the city itself (Rotker 2002b).
The Caracazo was a catalyst—radical and irrevocable, but one that multiplied rather than created social
antagonisms—that left in its wake a city composed of islands of relative familiarity and security surrounded
by a menacing sea of “others” (Zubillaga 2013, 109). As state and social institutions continued to deteriorate,
both violence and the fear of violent crime grew—further undermining what faith remained in constituted
authorities like the police and judiciary to guarantee the rule of law (Briceño-León 2006, 321; Sanjuán
2002, 93).
The Caracazo also extended beyond the uprising itself—the rioting, the looting, and the state
repression—into competing demands for the future of the city. An isolating and increasingly militarized
fear of violent crime and the “other” (Rothker 2002b) met with countervailing and democratizing forces
that attempted to break down barriers, to move, and to interact with the city and its inhabitants. Pitched
battles were fought and continue to be fought over access, over transport, over visibility, and over
participation—in short, over the very meaning and practice of shared urban life.
Whereas models of urban life and governance based on private property, accumulation, and
developmentalist designs reinforce the familiar exclusions of capitalist societies—all of which become
intensified with neoliberalization—the right to the city envisions the urban as a constantly revising work
in progress “in which all citizens participate” (Mitchell 2003, 17). The “all” in this formulation is of central
importance. To assert a right to the city is also to ask continually, “Whose right? What right? What city?”
As Peter Marcuse (2009, 191) insists, “It is not everyone’s right to the city with which we are concerned ….
4 See, for example, Gott (2008) and Ciccariello-Maher (2013).
5 Tragically, if inevitably, it is difficult to say with exactitude how many were killed in the nationwide Caracazo. State estimates put
the number of dead at 276, whereas third-party accountings have suggested as many as three thousand killed in late February and
early March 1989. The politics of remembering the dead have taken on an increasingly politicized hue since then, as the Caracazo
has become a key referent for defining political identities not only between the government and the opposition but among
factions within the Bolivarian movement as well (Kingsbury 2013).
Kingsbury 781
There is in fact a conflict among rights that needs to be faced and resolved, rather than wished away. Some
already have the right to the city, are running it now, have it well in hand …. It is the right of the city of those
who do not have it now” that animates right to the city movements. The demand for the right to the city is
transformative and antagonistic. It is a demand to be part of a future city that will necessarily supplant the
unequal city of the present (Marcuse 2009, 193).
David Harvey adds that to demand this right is to pose a fundamentally dialectical relation between the
city and its inhabitants. He writes that “the right to the city is an active right to make the city different,
to shape it in accord with our collective needs and desires and so remake our daily lives … to define an
alternative way of simply being human” (Harvey and Potter 2009, 49). The right to the city is thus “far more
than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is the right to change ourselves by changing the city.
It is … a common rather than an individual right …. [It] inevitably depends on the exercise of a collective
power to reshape the process of urbanization” (Harvey 2008, 23). The right to the city is more than a demand
for access to an actually existing polity: it demands an inclusive and collective process to transform social
relations and urban space.
The most obvious expressions of a right to the city emerged as local projects in autogestión and cogestión
(self-management and co-management) as well as growing incidences of protest over deteriorating public
services, police repression, and access to the city (López Maya 2005). Innovative responses to economic
decline and political implosion—such as the Mesas Técnicas de Agua (Water Working Groups), the Comités
de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees), the Círculos Femininos (Women’s Circles), and the Asemblea
de Barrios (Neighborhood Assemblies)—elaborate different aspects of a collective right to appropriation
and participation that is vital to any articulation of a right to the city, even when that specific framework is
not invoked (Azzellini 2010; Ciccariello-Maher 2012; Fernandes 2007; Grohmann 1996; Martinez and Fox
2010; Motta 2013). These movements were by their nature intensely local and were born of the necessity of
structural adjustment rather than ideological preference. Furthermore, they were often only tangentially
unified, especially prior to the coagulating effects of chavismo at the end of the century (Denis 2001). In
this respect, the 1999 constitution—particularly articles 26, 82, and 182 concerning popular participation
in municipal and regional affairs and a fundamental human right to housing—recognized and concretized
but did not create demands for greater autonomy and cogestión.
These calls to transform the unequal city of the 1990s would not have grown in strength and volume
were they not consistently faced with countervailing economic, political, and social tendencies. As the
crises of neoliberalization deepened, security increasingly became a preoccupation, and the wealthy
especially developed a festering siege mentality in the face of what they saw as threatening and racialized
“hordes” menacing their civilized parts of the city (Duno-Gottberg 2013). Violence—and the fear of
violence—increasingly shaped an urban and national imaginary haunted by highly publicized murders,
kidnappings, and robberies, all shadowed by a proliferation of walls, security checkpoints, and armed
guards (Ciccariello-Maher 2007; Rotker 2002a; Sanjuán 2002; Zubillaga 2013).
In the decade between the Caracazo and the election of Hugo Chávez, the social role of the MetroCCS,
of urban transit and planning, and of the pedagogical state moved in contradictory and ultimately
untenable directions. While Venezuela certainly followed the regional trend toward the decentralization
of administrative functions (García-Guadilla 1997), this was also the moment—in 1989 and 1991—that the
central government implemented integrated national transportation plans for the first time. While these
plans ran against trends toward decentralization, they were nonetheless neoliberal in orientation and were
directed by the architects of key privatizations, such as that of Cantv—the national telecommunications
company—in late 1991 (Ocaña and Guardia 2005, 166). Urban transit plans, furthermore, were increasingly
marked by buzzwords of marketization and a general freeze in construction due to fiscal constraints. Plans
prioritized “efficiency” and piecemeal improvements to existing infrastructure while allocating funds for
private-sector operators in the hybrid public-sector and informal-sector transit systems of Venezuelan
cities (Ocaña and Guardia 2005, 168). In one such plan, the state offered loans and grants to entrepreneurs
and public-private enterprises in the hillside communities inaccessible by conventional means of mass
transit like buses and subways (Ocaña and Urdaneta 2005, 172, 198). However, these initiatives tended
to replicate rather than replace entrenched patterns of bureaucratic bloat, inefficiency, and clientelism,
particularly in the capital (Ocaña 2005, 174).
As the MetroCCS transformed itself in step with the rest of the Venezuelan state, it also exhibited traits
of what María Pilar García-Guadilla (1997, 47) has characterized as a process of decentralization without
democratization, even demobilizing some democratizing movements of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Adding to this potentially destabilizing moment of fiscal austerity and administrative overhaul, internal
The Caracas Metro and the Right to the City in Venezuela782
and international immigration patterns to the capital city took on a more impoverished and precarious
character as privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization evaporated middle-class jobs (Portes and
Roberts 2005, 76). In Venezuela, the artificially large public sector shrank as oil prices dropped throughout
the 1990s, contributing to an explosion of the informal sector to over half of the working population and
what had become a generalized cross-class obsession with insecurity (Humphrey 2014, 256).
In response to growing concerns around insecurity and violent crime, already car-cultured caraqueños saw
private autos as a refuge, and urban space was increasingly defined in terms of exposure and vulnerability
(Angotti 1998, 106). As in most other Latin American cities of the time, privatization and the securitization
of public space marched in lockstep. The perceived and real dangers of life in Caracas were exacerbated
by the jurisdictional fragmentation of decentralizing reforms that multiplied police forces—one for each
of the capital’s five municipalities as well as an overarching Metropolitan Police—moves that confused
responsibilities and opened new spaces for corruption, a legacy of which can be seen in the persistence of
record-breaking murder rates and police complicity with criminal syndicates (Humphrey 2014, 257).
The demand for a right to the city in Caracas emerged in response to these social and political crises of
neoliberalization. Just as economic adjustment rolled back the project of the city as a shared (if hierarchical
and managed) space, new social movements created counterpublics and new visions of collective life. With
the electoral successes of the Bolivarian Revolution and Hugo Chávez in 1998, this uneven and contested
process of negotiating life in the city entered a new stage, as the state attempted to reassert its historically
strong position in Venezuelan polity and society by capturing and institutionalizing expressions of
autonomous constituent power (Azzellini 2010; Beasley-Murray 2010; Kingsbury 2013). These processes can
be observed in the reconstruction of the built environment of the city of Caracas and the reimagined role
of the MetroCCS in processes of social transformation that pick up pace by 2006. Just as important, we can
appreciate the stakes of Caracas’s spatial reorganization by witnessing the forceful counterattacks of those
who, recalling Marcuse’s diagnosis, have historically already enjoyed a privileged access to the city, and who
are doing everything in their power to maintain that exclusive prerogative.
Bolivarian Infrastructure?
Un metro en revolución
(2006–2015)
The demand for a right to the city has been implicit but constant across the actions of a number of
urban social movements since the 1990s. Expressions of autogestión and cogestión resulted in renovated
practices of civic identity and participation beyond the circumscribed representative system of Punto
Fijo. Many of these political transformations were institutionalized in the 1999 constitution of the now
Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Even more fundamentally, the new constitution acknowledged its basis
in a constituent power characterized by Joel Colón Ríos (2011, 368, 378) as “unlimited” and “popular,”
where “democracy … trump[s] constitutionalism.” The same forces reflected in Venezuela’s new juridical
scaffolding have also been at work reshaping the physical environment of the capital.
As I have argued, concretizing political visions through massive public works and construction projects
is nothing new to Venezuela. Indeed, one could plausibly argue that converting oil profits into spectacular
feats of social engineering has been a preferred mode of public policy since at least the mid-twentieth
century (Coronil 1997; Velasco 2015). However, if construction was in many ways predictable given the early
twenty-first-century flush of oil money, its direction and new social role were not. While elements of the
MetroCCS’s expansion were “shovel ready” before Chávez and the oil boom of the early 2000s, priority was
given to housing and transit policies and projects that facilitated access to the city for its poorest and most
vulnerable residents. Public transit fare schedules of the MetroCCS and MetroBús—as in other cities—remain
far below market price for transport, even by the low standards established by Venezuela’s almost-free
consumer gasoline. Perhaps the most emblematic of these policies and projects—the MetroCable in
Caracas—operates at a loss and has never sought to justify itself in economic terms, citing instead the need
to provide access to the city for those with the least resources (Urdaneta 2012, 458).
The MetroCCS has entered a new phase in its role as social project. In response to opposition attacks on
transit infrastructure as part of extraparliamentary attempts to overthrow the government from 2002 to
2004, the MetroCCS initiated a series of internal reforms and took on a more protagonistic role within the
wider Bolivarian process. In accord with national reforms to the military, its employees formed a worker
militia (Metro de Caracas 2007, 151). In the typical fashion of Bolivarian iconography, the MetroCCS revised
Simón Bolívar’s maxim and proclaimed that “all of the metro is a classroom” (Metro de Caracas 2007, 170).
Workers convened reading groups on socialism and Latin American History, among other topics (Metro de
Caracas 2007, 175). In addition to monies invested in social and cultural infrastructure around subway and
MetroCable stations, the public company also developed mobile libraries to serve less accessible corners
Kingsbury 783
of the capital (Metro de Caracas 2007, 133). These projects took place at the prerogative of the MetroCCS’s
Gerencia de Corresponsibilidad Social (Office of Social Coresponsibility), which was created in 2006 with
the aim of integrating riders, workers, and residents in the shared management of urban and transit spaces
“according to principles of cooperation, solidarity, knowledge, and shared social responsibility” (Metro de
Caracas 2007, 128).
While the MetroCCS has always seen itself as a “cultural and social system” embedded in the greater urban
environment, what this means has changed over its lifetime (Metro de Caracas 2007, 57). By 2006, as the
system expanded to include cable cars, light-rail, and regional transit, the metro outlined four orienting
goals for itself in relation to the larger processes of the Bolivarian Revolution:
1. To produce functional public spaces and order to their constitutive elements.
2. To produce cultural public spaces that provide urban landmarks and shared protected sites.
3. To conceive of public space as an instrument of social redistribution, of community cohesion, and
collective self-esteem.
4. To promote public space for the formation and expression of the collective will of the citizenry
(adapted from Metro de Caracas 2007, 92).
In contrast to the previous mission statement of the metro and its role in the life of Caracas that
emphasized modernization, economic growth, and a symbol of government prowess, the “Bolivarian”
metro emphasizes social justice, the formation of shared public space, and participation. As opposed to
the monumental approach of public works of previous models, new stations along the expanded network
were to serve as cultural and educational hubs for community participation and empowerment. Along
the San Agustín MetroCable line, for example, the metro built sports fields, communal kitchens, meeting
spaces, and schools directly adjacent to its five stations. Before, during, and after the construction process,
the metro sought out the direct participation of local communal councils and other grassroots assemblies
for planning and grievances and to fully integrate the community not only as passive beneficiary of public
works but also as an active participant in an ongoing process of urban cogestión (Metro de Caracas 2007,
98–100).
Starting in 2006, the MetroCCS expanded both within the city of Caracas—through a relief line in the
east, light-rail lines around Petare (Latin America’s largest barrio), more stations, and a series of MetroCable
gondola lines linking hillside settlements to the center of the city (see Figure 4). The first MetroCable
installation linking the area of San Agustín to the Parque Central district was inaugurated in 2010. A
second line was opened at El Mariche in the east of the city in 2012, and several other cable-car projects
are currently in development. The MetroCCS has also worked toward integrating the Caracas region, with
commuter rail service to satellite cities such as Los Teques, Guarenas, and Guatire. The company has
finally expanded its MetroBús fleet with vehicles that meet contemporary safety, emissions, and disability
accessible standards, in an attempt to ease the perennial congestion of the capital and rationalize its
anarchic and aging network of private buses (Metro de Caracas 2007, 48). By 2007 there were no fewer
than ten new public mass transit projects—subterranean metro lines, light-rail, cable-car routes, and
buses—in the works (Urdaneta 2012, 458).
Of course there have been bumps in the road. The stated goal of cogestión has often held more in
principle than practice, and the overbearing role of the state persists into the present. Justin McGuirk
(2014, 162–173) contends that corruption, petty politics, and government paranoia have contributed to
projects going over budget, opening late, or not happening at all. The construction of the cable cars and
the expansion of subway routes have all but universally been carried out by foreign firms—Swiss, Austrian,
and especially Brazilian—thus missing a potential opportunity to meet the need to develop and diversify
domestic industry. Finally, MetroCable projects inevitably find themselves inserted into larger issues that
have an impact on the city as a whole. By 2014, for example, residents in San Agustín expressed fears for their
safety when walking home from MetroCable stations after dark for lack of adequate lighting, malandros
(delinquents) preying on tired commuters, or absent or equally untrustworthy security forces. Special
operations of the Guardia Nacional Bolivariana (Bolivarian National Guard) were launched periodically to
address these concerns, but in the climate of persistent and generalized insecurity in Caracas, such steps
can only hope to be temporary and episodic in nature.
These are in many ways, however, inherited and unavoidable problems in the present conjuncture.
Attempts to transform Caracas physically in order to ensure a lasting right to the city occur in spite of
entrenched corruption and worsening insecurity, and these blights are by no means caused by attempts
The Caracas Metro and the Right to the City in Venezuela784
to democratize space in Venezuela. More enduringly, the very concrete nature of expanded public transit
infrastructures extends the democratizing potentials of the present moment into an uncertain future.
The demand for a right to the city—implicit but forceful and prior to the Bolivarian moment—becomes an
emplaced fact on the ground. In this way it outlives a given regime, affecting the mobilities, expectations,
and behaviors of subjects far into the future.
If infrastructures force future reactions and form subjects in ways that cannot be predicted, the way
in which the MetroCCS figured in antigovernment protests of 2014 is far less open and ambiguous. On
January 23, 2014—the anniversary of the 1958 fall of Pérez Jiménez—two leaders of Venezuela’s opposition,
Leopoldo López and Maria Corina Machado, denounced the “dictatorship” of Nicolás Maduro and called
for Venezuelans to take to the streets until the fall of the regime. At a press conference ready made for the
Twitter age, they launched their brand, #LaSalida (“the exit,” or alternatively “the solution”) and distanced
themselves from the electoral strategy of the mainstream opposition Mesa de Unidad Democrática
(Democratic Unity Coalition, or MUD). Over the following months, Venezuela’s major cities were rocked by
violent street protests called guarimbas, which included barricades of burning cars, tires, and trash, as well
as pitched battles with police and national guard forces, the intimidation of government supporters, and a
media campaign that had both sides claiming fraud and misrepresentation.6
The MetroCCS was consistently a target of these protests. In the first weeks of the protests, at least
forty buses were singled out for attack by protesters (Padrino 2014). From February to May, stations were
often closed in response to the protests. Kiosks, stations, and bus stops in the opposition strongholds of
eastern Caracas—the municipalities of Chacao, Baruta, and El Hatillo—were regularly vandalized and set
6 The guarimbas of 2014 are a reboot of a 2004 campaign with which López was also implicated, called for by Cuban émigré Robert
Alonso (which were themselves a reboot of a tactic utilized by Communist Party youth during the Punto Fijo years). Guarimbas,
as Alonso (n.d.) outlined, aimed to “totally paralyze the country” and precipitate a terminal crisis for the Chávez government
(Alonso n.d.). The 2004 wave of guarimbas left nine people dead and more than two hundred injured (López Maya 2006, 41). In
the aftermath, Alonso fled to Miami (TeleSur 2012).
Figure 4: Caracas Metro and MetroBus System Map, 2015.
Kingsbury 785
ablaze (Noticias 24 2014). By April, guarimberos had attacked a number of MetroBús vehicles with Molotov
cocktails—often with passengers aboard, hospitalizing two drivers in May alone. On May 6, Haiman El Troudi
(minister of transport) reported that more than one hundred buses had been firebombed (YVKE Mundial
2014) and at least fifty-seven employees of the MetroCCS system suffered various injuries (Correo del Orinoco
2014). Protesters also attacked the Parque del Este (Miranda) subway station during operating hours with
flaming tires and Molotovs (Noticiero Digital 2014).
Opposition mayors in East Caracas condemned specific incidents—for example, the May 26 attacks on
the Ministry of Housing and Habitat in Chacao (Bautista 2014)—and publicly exhorted their residents
to engage in peaceful protest (Smolansky 2014). Indeed, by late 2015 the guarimbas and the #LaSalida
campaign exposed divisions among the tenuous opposition coalition when Henrique Capriles Radonski—
former presidential candidate and governor of Miranda, the state in which a majority of Caracas’s
guarimbas occurred—described the protests as “a massive national failure” (fracaso) (Amaya 2015). Most
government officials and supporters, however, maintained that opposition mayors like David Smolansky
in El Hatillo, Carlos Ocariz in Sucre, and Ramón Muchacho in Chacao contributed to disturbances at the
very least by validating protesters’ claims that they were fighting a dictatorship and dragging their feet
when it came to enforcing the law (Correo del Orinoco 2014). By the time the wave of guarimbas ebbed
in late May, forty-three people from both sides of the political divide were left dead, hundreds more were
seriously injured, López was jailed for inciting violence, millions of dollars in damage was recorded, and
the sharp polarization of Venezuelan politics was once again forcefully underlined.
Of course, guarimberos burned and attacked anything associated with the government and its social
programs. Antigovernment protestors burned food delivery vehicles, medical facilities, schools, cultural
centers, and the headquarters of the Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela (Great Venezuelan Housing Mission),
betraying their opposition to any attempt to expand access and democratize consumption. However, the
destruction of metro stations, kiosks, and buses not only struck at visible representations of the government.
They also asserted a specific configuration of intraurban territorial sovereignty, refusing right of passage to
citizens of other zones.
On April 16, MetroCCS workers initiated a campaign against the guarimbas, calling for protestors to
respect their right to a safe work environment as well as the right of all caraqueños to safely traverse
the city (see Figure 5). They distributed flyers that included photographs of masked protesters burning
a metro kiosk, illustrating the competing projects of the opposition and the MetroCCS. In a statement
marking the start of the campaign, Edinson Alvarado, president of the MetroCCS workers union said,
“While the opposition is destroying buses and attacking our workers and other public institutions, we are
making a call for peace and love. We say to them that the only road is that called for by President Nicolás
Maduro, that of dialogue and peace” (quoted in Venezolana de Televisión 2014).
The tenor and trajectory of actions carried out in response to the guarimbas by the MetroCCS reflect
a highly politicized institutional culture. Most obviously, statements in support of the president against
the La Salida campaign are partisan, explicitly taking sides in struggles between the opposition and the
government. It should be little surprise that a public company integrated into the national government
would follow the orders of the chief executive.7 More interesting is the way in which the MetroCCS responded
directly to attacks by mobilizing ridership in defense of the transit infrastructure and publicly shaming
opposition officials it deemed responsible for the violence. By directly entering the fray, the MetroCCS
acted more as a protagonist in complex social struggle than inert infrastructure. It was defending not only
itself but also the vision it had adopted for its role in a present and future Caracas.
In a country that is more than 90 percent urban, it borders on banality to suggest that protests shape
and are shaped by cities. What is striking about the opposition protests of 2014, however, is the degree to
which they both physically exemplify the content of their demands and the way in which they appropriate
and redeploy tactics often associated with more progressive ends. First, the protests universally took
place in opposition and affluent sectors of the city (Neuman 2014). The barricade, a tactic perhaps most
romantically associated with the New Left of Paris 1968, was in Caracas of 2014 explicitly framed as a means
of protecting established zones of privilege from government supporters. They are symptomatic of a deeper
7 In addition to a cabinet-level Ministry of Land Transportation, on March 16, 2014, the government announced the formation
of Misión Transporte (Transportation Mission), one of the government’s trademark misiones bolivarianas that promised to
“revolutionize public transportation and to offer … inclusive, dignified, safe, high-quality, fair-priced forms of collective mobility”
(Faoro 2014).
The Caracas Metro and the Right to the City in Venezuela786
siege mentality, a blocking off of a protected zone from a dangerous invasion or contagion.8 The guarimbas
extend a decades-long practice of erecting policed borders at the internal—racial and class—borders of the
city. Protesters sought to destabilize the government, but in actions such as burning dark-skinned and red-
shirted effigies at their barricades, they also betrayed a more crassly racist motivation to their desires to
interrupt ongoing social reforms (Ciccariello-Maher 2007, 2014a, 2014b; Tinker Salas 2014).
The events of 2014 highlight the degree to which the city of Caracas has become both the object and
terrain of political struggle in Venezuela. They also illustrate the importance of transit infrastructure in
this conflict. The MetroCCS has served to physically shape and transform the city and to provide access to
its processes and services in accordance with the desires of inhabitants previously excluded from the life
of the metropolis. It has also become a prominent and representative site of contestation and antagonism,
in the military-strategic sense of opposition actions as well as in the imaginary of a city that has been
struggling to redefine itself for generations.
Conclusion: Infrastructure and the Right to the City
Like most Latin American cities, Caracas is often a traffic nightmare. Bound by geography and demographic
pressures, the city is congested, polluted, and difficult to traverse via surface transportation. The MetroCCS
was thus in many ways a natural solution to the practical difficulties of urban life.
However, in each of its three dominant modalities since planning and construction began in the 1970s,
the MetroCCS has also been a social project. In the early moments of planning and the Gran Solución
campaigns, the MetroCCS extended a postivist-pedagogical relationship of the state to the citizenry
established in the early twentieth century. The cultural politics of the subway, like other public works,
8 Perhaps the most grisly and medieval manifestation of this mentality occurred around retired General Ángel Vivas. Vivas is a vocal
critic of the Bolivarian Revolution, which he likened to a “Cuban Invasion.” On February 20, 2014, he tweeted instructions on
how to “neutralize criminal hordes of motorizados” by stringing razor wire across streets at head level. At least two people were
decapitated at the barricades as a result; after an armed standoff with police, Vivas remained barricaded in his home until his
capture in April 2017.
Figure 5: ¡Queremos paz! En el Metro los trabajadores y usarios decimos NO a la violencia. (We want peace!
Workers and riders of the metro say NO to violence). http://www.vtv.gob.ve/articulos/2014/04/02/con-
actividades-culturales-y-entrega-de-volantes-trabajadores-metro-iniciaron-jornada-por-la-paz-4079.html.
Kingsbury 787
followed familiar developmentalist hierarchies in which the inhabitants of Venezuela’s capital were seen
as raw material, wanting in the cultivation and training necessary for modern citizenship.
The second moment of the MetroCCS stepped away from this emphasis on training. During the economic
downturns of the lost decades, the traditionally interventionist Venezuelan state followed regional trends
in privatization and decentralization, and while the MetroCCS remained a public company providing a
vital service during this era, it did so in a larger discursive environment dominated by the language of
efficiency, entrepreneurship, and austerity. It was also during this moment that Venezuelan politics saw a
long-standing national project—the Punto Fijo state—collapse. The resulting vacuum was increasingly filled
with local projects in autogestión and cogestión and the demand for access and inclusion characterized
thematically by the right to the city.
With the electoral success of the Bolivarian Revolution, the MetroCCS again played a key role in a
statist project contoured by an ultimately developmentalist worldview, but in importantly different if
incomplete ways. First and foremost, the positivistic consideration of passengers as passive pupils has
been realigned according to principles of cogestión. Even in moments where this realignment has been
carried out in word more than deed, the shift to a more participatory, democratic, and protagonistic
metro is striking. The MetroCCS has become more overtly politicized, reflecting changes that have
shaped Venezuela since the 1990s. The MetroCCS increasingly acts as a guarantor of a right to the city,
and as such, it should be recognized as a terrain, object, and indeed, a protagonist in processes of social
transformation.
Transit lines, public services, and the built environment shape the time and space of daily life. Strategies
of users and the demands they make on planners and operators shape these vital aspects of the built urban
environment. The movements of the 1990s levied political and ethical demands for a future—more inclusive,
accessible, and open—city. The backlash to the Bolivarian Revolution in the twenty-first century is also a
reaction to these demands.
With each new sequence in the political life of the city, the MetroCCS has been recast as a component
in this struggle. However, unlike social relations and political positions—which, to be sure, engender
inheritances, identities, and worldviews that structure politics in real and often seemingly immutable
ways—there is something about the quite literally concrete nature of these infrastructures that projects a
present ethical commitment into the uncertain future. This is why opposition attacks on the MetroCCS have
been so violent. An attack on the metro is an attack on the principle and practice of the right to the city.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks are in order to the librarians at the Biblioteca del MetroCCS and the Instituto de Urbanismo,
Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad Central de Venezuela, for their assistance in locating
planning documents and official publications. Also to Gregorio Darwich and Beate Jungemann at CENDES,
Froilán José Ramos-Rodríguez, Franco Vielma, Victor Rivas, and especially to Theresa Enright for their
insights, assistance, and criticisms along the way. Any errors in the finished product are of course solely
the fault of the author. Part of the research for this article was made possible by a research grant from
Department of Political Science, University of Toronto.
Author Information
Donald V. Kingsbur y lectures in the Department of Political Science and the Latin American Studies Program
at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Only the People Can Save the People: Constituent Power,
Revolution, and Counter-Revolution in Venezuela (SUNY Press, 2018) as well as articles on contemporary
Latin American politics and thought. His work can be read in the Bulletin of Latin American Research,
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Radical Philosophy Review, New Political Science,
and Historical Materialism.
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Kingsbury 791
How to cite this article: Kingsbury, Donald V. 2017. Infrastructure and Insurrection: The Caracas Metro and the
Right to the City in Venezuela.
Latin American Research Review
52(5), pp. 775–791. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25222/
larr.244
Submitted: 14 July 2015 Accepted: 11 July 2016 Published: 12 December 2017
Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
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