Opinion: Halting America’s road to becoming Venezuela By Lisa Pierce Flores
A newspaper with Lisa Pierce Flores in the front row.
In 1989, Caracas, Venezuela, was loud and angry and joyful. It was the cosmopolitan heart of the most successful and stable economy in Latin America. At night the lights of mansions perched across the mountains that wreathed the capital’s sunken center shone like a manmade constellation.
But so too did the glow of TV screens in the homes of rancheros, shacks built of salvaged tin and metal and wood planking that housed the country’s poorest citizens in unsanctioned cities along the Cerro El Avila mountains (the northern edge of the Andes), where the industrious but largely unemployed inhabitants risked their lives to loop steel lines to the live wires above to illicitly access TV screens.