sloths in Caracas

8 july

Sloths in Caracas

Caracas exists in a valley, a long stretch of asfalt and concrete between two mountain ranges. It is a hyper dense city, with buildings and highways and millions of cars, also sourrounded by a tropical rain forest, always there, always growing. Caracas has always been a city of extremes. I remember a tree that fall and cut, for a whole day, the traffic of the Avenida Miranda, the main artery of the city, running along the middle of the valley and connecting the east half of the city with the west half of it. It was a great tree, perhaps 40 meters tall, one of the few remaining in Los Palos Grandes -the big poles- a neighborhood named by the abundance of those giant trees in earlier ages. Also, the fallen tree had its own inhabitants. I remember people opening space for a sloth, and then another, to crawl out of the green mess and slowly find another tree to live in. My parents gathered few wild orchids from between the branches, an unforeseeable luxury for migrants from the cold south. What stayed with me was the obvious contempt of the animals, looking at us without understanding any of our histrionics, and walking on to the next trunk to climb. 

So it is not too much of a surprise that today The Guardian brings an article about a couple that, seeing an injured sloth once upon a time in Caracas, now they run an asylum for them, a place that collects the ones that unsuccessfully mix with our civilization, caring for them until they are capable of climbing back to their old life. Being Venezuela a small world, I actually know some of the biologists that are interviewed to shed light on the plight of the sloth and their interactions with modernity. And of course, they do refer to the abysmal state of the country, their lack of funding for anything, let stand a refuge for sloths. 

So, mutatis mutandi, it is the same issue of The Guardian that brings another article over Caracas, the city that still haunts my dreams with her huge trees and the close by wilderness. This other article is about something else entirely, yet a bit like a sloth, something that should not have any space in any contemporaneous city. The second article reports on the ongoing war in between the (more or less) organized criminality and the army. It turns out that in the past years of total meltdown of whatever used to be called government, armed gangs have taken direct control of zones of the city. This, in itself, is nothing too new. Already in the eighties, when the government existed and was actually democratically elected, there were plenty of slums where the police did not patrol. What is really new is that the current confrontation has implied days without end of open shoot outs between the army, finally ordered to reign into the gangs, and the gangs that have taken full control of a relevant percentage of the city. 

I know that you might run with me, and imagine the capital of a tropical country inhabited by tropical animals. It is a bit weird, but is possible. So it is also possible that there is people good enough, or with enough time and resources to create an asylum for those animals. But just stop and think for a while about the other part. Just try to dimension a city that has a neighborhood controlled by an armed gang, that the army can not control. A city, not Bagdad or Aleppo, where the army and the gang sustain a pitched battle in the streets, without clear winner. And now realize that this city is the capital of the country. 

I say that Caracas is capable of harbor the extremes and the unthinkable. I grew up there, so I know. Now and then I wonder. How could this kind of news be possibly digested by anybody else, anybody that did not grew in Caracas? How could they possibly join, let alone understand, the unbelievable violence and the border less wilderness. How could they? 

Now and then I wonder how can I.  

Mijao is the local name of Anacardius excelsus.