Well, well, well… how about that? Days after publicly denying it, Caracas Transformation Minister Ernesto Villegas is supervising the eviction of La Torre de David this morning, along with Interior Minister Miguel Rodriguez Torres.
Looks like his view of “dignification” really means “Pack your bags. You’re out of here at the end of the week.”
So, the report from TalCual was legit. I guess the Chinese wanted the building right now, barely hours after Xi Jinping left the country. I guess the Central Government wanted to get rid of both the tower and the bad reputation it had. My question is why they didn’t do so before he arrived.
The residents are being transferred to Ciudad Zamora housing complex in Cua (Miranda State). Sadly for them, the locals are not happy about that. The tower will be in the hands of the National Guard until further notice.
If this is indeed final, then farewell, Torre de David. For a few years, you were the true symbol of today’s Venezuela.
UPDATE: Thanks to Kepler, we can somehow confirm that our Chinese overlords are indeed taking the building. In this article from the website Archidead, looks like the Bank of China will turn “La Torre de David” as its South American HQ. The post is in Chinese, but thanks to the Internets and its online translators, you can read it for yourselves.
Caracas Chronicles 
this is such bad journalism on such an important subject… if you want to be taken seriously you need to do better than this!
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I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but this is not a digital news website, its a blog.
If you want top-notch journalism you should visit aporrea,Russia Today or Correo del Orinoco
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Where is that “irony mark” when you most need it…?
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“Is not an eviction, is a reubication”.
-Ernesto Villegas.
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Aren’t all people who are “evicted” also “relocated”?
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Don’t ask me to understand chavista newspeak.
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No – if I’m evicted from my home in the USA it’s up to me to find a new place to live.
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Well, technically you are “relocated” to the sidewalk!
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Not sure if i’m glad they’re doing this.
I want to think those are good people that need a home, but after i think about everything i don’t really care what happens to them, they were begging for it.
They will vote for Maduro on 2019,gladly.
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This incident highlights how chavistas simply do not understand incentives. These people occupied something that was not theirs, broke the law, and as a reward they get to jump the line and are “relocated” to prime government housing. The message that sends is “get yourself a highly visible rancho, invite Jon Lee Anderon over, and in no time, you will get a house.”
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They’re only being relocated because the chinese wanted the building, otherwise they would still be there on that grotesque exhibition of venezuela.
But i get your point, moan loud enough and you might catch the attention of the red gods.
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So after years of being first encouraged by Chavez to do things like occupy the Torre de David, and years of their residence being implicitly accepted, now the Ripe government decides it wants them out and it gives them, what, a week? The least it could have done was give them a couple of months; I’d give the government credit for the ‘reubicacion’ but I don’t have enough faith in its competence to believe that they will end up very well-served by that.
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The TalCual report indicated that the central government was negotiating with the people living there and that the relocation was planned for December. Last week, Ernesto Villegas denied this openly and said they’re going to fix the tower instead. Today, he basically dismissed his own words and kicked them out. No schedule, just move them by the end of the week. P.S. Sorry, Ernesto. This is an eviction, pure and simple.
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I always thought that this would have been a very interesting social project: consolidate the slum, fix it, not only with engineers and architects but from the social point of view, with social workers and sociologist, turning it into a real cooperative system.
But I guess the value of the land and the existing infrastructure is too high for that socialist dream. Capitalism always wins, money over the people, right? :-)
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Well, there´s that, and also the fact that the building was not built for residential purposes anyway. There are implications to that, ones which make it difficult to transform the place into a residential area.
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Not really. Everything is doable with the right planning. I’ve done many renovations projects to buildings that were not originally planned for a different use.
Take the opposite case: a residential building turned offices (the CC Bello Monte is an example). Houses turned into pre-schools, offices, retail.
This tower had been subdivided already into residential. plumbing and electricity don’t have to be embeded into the concrete either, so it’s doable.
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Carolina,
I know you are an architect, but with all due respect, just because something is possible, does not mean it is wise. The cases in which it makes sense to take an existing building and convert it to a different usage occur because the economic circumstances of the zone have changed. An example of this is old warehouse districts that have been converted to high-end housing and chic restaurants. The demand for housing for urban dwellers made if economically feasible. The Torre de David is not such a case. No realistic economic analysis could have justified the change of usage for this building.
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And I don’t disagree with you, but that was not Juan’s point, which was about the tecnical point of such a renovation.
There are other factors to consider, urban impact, traffic, parking, green space, etc.
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In any case, regardless of all that, the point of my originally comment is that, for such a government that prides itself to be socialist, they took the most capitalist approach to this issue.
I would like to see what would they do when the chinese say they like the view of La Charneca and they’re planning to build their residences there…..not too different.
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And there’s also the fact that we Venezuelans love to use things for purposes they weren’t designed for in the first place. That’s the reason we can find doctor’s offices, schools, shops, restaurants, cultural centers and so forth in single-detached dwellings or in condos.
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It was kind of already heading that way. They paid “condominio” (homeowners association fee?), which they used to put up electronic locks in the front gate, they painted the walls, set up some kind of kid’s park, etc.
It also reached a modus vivendi. There wasn’t much internal violence anymore, so I guess any thug living in there, carried out their deeds outside (23 de Enero style).
Not that I’m sorry it’s being evicted.
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These people were squatters.they neither owned nor paid rent. this is your blog so you can write whatever you want.and who believes anything that Russia Today has to say. That’s not news its socialist propaganda paid in full by the Russian government.
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“Hey, we also want to be relocated!” Oh wait…
http://orinoquiaphoto.photoshelter.com/image/I000067M25xrEcv0
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I wonder what our Chinese overlords will do with the building now. Will it be the new headquarters of the China Development Bank?
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I’m willing to bet they will demolish it and build new.
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Just google and ye shall find:
http://archidead.net/week-report-20140720/
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Just in case, use Google MT engine and go to the bottom.
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Great find Kepler!
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Well, it doesn’t say much and they are basing themselves on a Venezuelan newspaper, which I haven’t found. But by all means, it’s the Bank of China that is interested.
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Voila, en cristiano tenemos más:
http://www.talcualdigital.com/nota/visor.aspx?id=104788&tipo=AVA
Ya me imagino la gente: y tú vas al piso 12?
Sí, yo tengo mis ahorritos en el Banco Tomate.
Yo no, yo soy socialista hasta la muerte y por eso tengo mi plata en el Banco Nacional de China.
Chicas, pero yo les digo: el Banco Asiático en el séptimo piso ofrece mejores intereses.
And they will probably want to build a casino on top, with a red dragon and all, the kind of thing where Arné Chacón will feel totally relaxed.
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The TalCual article mentioned the whole “International Financial Center” plan, but didn’t say it was the Bank of China. The Archidead post you linked is the first one that explicitly said it so.
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Yeah, but I think both articles complement each other. I imagine the Bank of China will be the coordinator, to give the presence of the Chinese government, but other Chinese banks will join in and they all will form that consortium
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“My question is why they didn’t do so before he arrived.”
My answer would be: PSUV elections. Last time around, Torre de David had enough PSUV sympathizers to be a voting center for PSUV primaries.
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It could be possible. Thanks for the tip.
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La torre de David had become a potent, much publicized symbol of the mess that Venezuela has become , where a would be posh business centre becomes a surreal horizontal slum thanks to the erratic conditions that a clownish revolutionary regime creates . its exotic horror has been filmed , photographed written about by a huge host of international publications .
La torre has called the atention of the world to Venezuelas chaotic economy ( a huge business tower becomes an abandoned ruin) , the existence of extreme poverty ( the slum full of crime and squalor which has taken over the tower) . Its an eyesore for the image the govt wants to present to the world .
Then China steps in and offers to transform this symbol of failure into a symbol of triumph. putting civilized order where a savage unlawful place now exists . China comes to the rescue of Venezuela with its generous help while at the same time proyecting its image of might and order onto Latin America , the failed dream of a grand architectural building being restored by Chinese municifence to house the emblematic financial businesses of the rising new power of China.
It all fits in , everybody wins , every body except of course those people who now inhabit the power and who have made efforts to make it into a livable place . theyve now become desplazados !!
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I, for one, don’t mind one bit if China wants to come into Venezuela and transform La Candelaria into Shenzhen. Anything that takes power away from these clowns is a good thing.
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Or Angola?
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So, no preference on whose master we get! you are neutral to Cuban or Chinese, or Russian rule.
Not just chavista clowns.
…did I get your comment right Juan?
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LuisF,
Venezuela is not a sovereign country. Yes, we are thrown around between overlords since our own people
refuse to choose a governor with at least a bit of common sense, wich is very hard to find given the cesspool of corruption and moral bankrupcy in out country.
This is going to happen since that 70% of the population still think chavismo is the best for us. Many are even afraid to lose chavismo, since they think Capriles will destroy the country, kill all our babies,bomb our cities and give us away to the USA.
The country is mostly destroyed, our death rate is war like and we’ve been passed around like a vietnamese hooker to the russians, chinese, cubans, french, spanish and even some iranians.
So what the hell do you do? You shut up,take it in the butt and describe how good or bad it is.
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oh wait for it, we could have the possibility that USA could become another socialist country thanks to Obama!, and then only then, Chavistas will be more than happy to sell us out to the Americans…
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Sure, after 6.5 years of a president that is barely center-left socially and center-right economically, with a hyper-obstructionist House, the USA is practically Cuba. Cue the Internationale! It is hard to take people seriously even about Venezuela when they say things like this.
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you must be truly a blink liberal follower… there is no difference between you and chavismo… for all intent and purposes chavismo and american liberalism are truly exactly alike.
center right economically? pleeeease
I’m just gonna let this sink in…
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Jctt,
See, you have the right to hold that position on economics and ideology but bear in mind
it is only common among some sectors in the USA and a tiny tiny (I would say <1%) proportion of people almost anywhere else in the rest of the world.
I'm sure for you the US is everything. Still: most people, including economists who grew outside the US and a lot in the US, would consider Obama definitely centre right.
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I don’t know what a ‘blink liberal follower’ is but I encourage you to expand your intellectual horizons and sense of curiosity to understand people (not me – that’s not important – but people like chavistas, etc.) a little bit and also perhaps learn a little bit about what terms like ‘liberal’ have historically meant, and presently mean. Chavismo may be many things, but one thing it is decidedly not is liberal, in any sense. And don’t imagine that even those whose political leanings are counter to yours exist in some kind of ideological uniformity; I have a friend who is an honest-to-God Marxist and even he thinks that Chavismo is ridiculous, albeit admittedly on the basis of news that I share with him, as he is not Venezuelan. And yes, the US Democrat party is in practice center-corporatist. The left (a real left, not the boogeyman of the right) has no political power whatsoever and hasn’t for decades.
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sorry I meant blind liberal follower…
I’m getting concerned about the rising of the left wing in the democrat party, and the left became more relevant when Obama was elected president.
Still I would not consider the democratic party as center corporatist, but more in the line of a corrupt and clientelar party, whose only goal is to seek power and profit as much as they can.
I consider that American Liberalism, has somewhat fused together with the core principles of European Socialism, so when I say that Chavismo and American Liberalism are truly exactly alike, is because both movement are the greatest advocates of big government, welfare programs designed to put people under the control of the government, they wants apply taxation to almost everything, and when they have poor economic records, they blame everyone but themselves.
Add the the targeting of conservatives by the IRS, and you have the Tascon List. The increasing rhetoric of the Obama Administration against the rich, when they are enjoying all the perks that comes with being president. At least we could say the rich and business are working to earn money. But how about an elected official, with poor Economic record? does he deserve to have those perks or paid vacations?
There are clear examples of what a liberal is capable of, when they get elected, suddenly they want to change everything, and silence and oppress anyone who opposes their path.
Still not convinced that Chavismo and American Liberalism are exactly alike??
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until something goes horribly wrong… and there is the possibility that the money allocated for this project could, and by “could” I mean “will”, be stolen.
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Sorry, people, but right now I’m laughing more than the Joker at knowing this.
They got kicked just after the fabled PUSV elections??
Hoo, boy, way to reward the people’s faith in masburro and disociado, I could imagine what was said there:
“Okay, folks, the voting is closed, the people has chosen its delegates for the upcoming congress, now GTFO here!”
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Anything that they build there from now on would be better than those people squatting… i hate to say it but it was a good move by the goverment, regardless of their hidden intentions….
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Good for the regime, they just tossed the settlers into Miranda state, aka “caprilesland”, so the crime wave that’ll rise there’ll serve as a nice diversion from the other problems, and as another excuse to attack him, and terrorizing “escuacas apátridas” is an added bonus.
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The Chinese are not afraid to go all in to crazy, resource rich places, but buying a giant monument to multi generational failure like this one does not seem like good feng shui to me. I am skeptical.
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I’ve been reading some reports about how thankful the inhabitants are to be relocated. Of course, the reports are from VTV so who the hell knows, but well… on one hand it would be logical to be happy to get out of that thing, but on the other … didnt they all made a self-directed community that blablabalbala and all that stuff? Sure all of them are happy about being moved so far away?
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Everytime I think chavismo finally did something right, they manage to crew it up.
Taking people from Torre de David and putting them in a housing program makes perfect sense, as the tower was unfit for residential uses.
Then it was leaked that the Chinese will be buying it, and I thought that was great, more investment, more offices, more jobs and a productive building.
Now, Ernesto Villegas comes forward with a plan to possibly demolish it to make a public space. That translates as: leave the building to rot until it is re-invaded, as the Chavernment is notoriously unfit to carry out these kind of projects.
http://www.ultimasnoticias.com.ve/noticias/ciudad/parroquias/video—en-consulta-nacional-se-decidira-uso-de-to.aspx
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