Venezuela infrastructure hurting

CARACAS, Venezuela — Rodolfo Jimenez, 22, loves baseball, but his barrio on the outskirts of Caracas does not offer much in the way of playing fields. This month he and his friends found an unlikely place for pickup games — the two northbound lanes of the carefully engineered highway connecting the mountainous capital to the airport and the port city of La Guaira.

Usually a bustling thoroughfare that rumbles with 18-wheel cargo trucks, cars and vans, the highway has been virtually empty since early this month when the government shut down a bridge — a half-mile span over a dizzying canyon — that it said showed signs of imminent collapse.

"The highway is like a sports arena now," Jimenez said.

The highway, which opened in 1953, allowed cars to reach Caracas — close to the shore but tucked behind an 8,500-foot mountain called El Avila — in 45 minutes. The trip now takes 3˝ hours along a winding, 80-year-old strip known as "the old road to La Guaira."

Authorities recently approved a shortcut through the dirt-poor slum of El Paujm. Confused drivers try to follow hand-drawn cardboard signs through the labyrinth of run-down zinc shacks.

Venezuela, a country awash in cash from a wave of a high oil prices, is also mired in infrastructure problems. Its leader, President Hugo Chávez, has been spending the billions of dollars in annual oil profits to provide education, health and social services to millions of poor Venezuelans.

Meanwhile, Venezuela's roads and electrical grid have been suffering. Government statistics show the number of major electricity blackouts jumped to 80 in 2005 from 49 in 2004, despite increased government spending in each year.

The main highways linking Caracas to the eastern and western parts of the country also are in disrepair, and bridges on those routes may face collapses as well. News media are reporting that the government reduced its budget for road maintenance in 2006.

And in the coastal state of Vargas, residents say the government never completely repaired the roads damaged by huge mudslides in 1999.

Infrastructure was a forgotten issue during Venezuela's 30-month political crisis, which included an oil-industry shutdown and botched coup as part of opposition efforts to force Chávez from office. Now, the possible collapse of the bridge — known as Viaduct No. 1 — is a major issue for Venezuelans from all walks of life.

Hospital workers in Vargas are working overtime hours because commuting doctors cannot arrive on time. Fishermen along the coast say the price of bait has tripled and fewer trucks are available to ship their catch to Caracas.

Maiquetia International Airport officials say the number of arriving flights has fallen by 9 percent. The cost of transporting merchandise to the capital from the coast increased 30 to 40 percent within two weeks of the bridge closure.

Engineers discovered in 1987 that the pillars of Viaduct No. 1 were moving as a result of soil erosion. Successive administrations, however, did nothing about the problem. Erosion worsened as thousands of poor families built homes on the precarious hillsides.

By Jan. 5, engineers found that the bridge pylons were slipping at a dangerous rate and that they could no longer guarantee the bridge's safety.

Chávez's critics have blamed him for the problem.

"This government has not had any specific plan for maintenance of public works, and the result is that the country's road system is facing a serious crisis," said Enzo Betancourt, president of the Venezuelan College of Engineers, the country's main engineering group and a critic of Chávez.

Chávez insists that previous governments are equally responsible for the declining state of the roads and that opposition leaders exaggerate the extent of the problem.

"Some perverse and wretched minds take this as a good thing so they can blame the government, and most of all Chávez," he said during his weekly Sunday broadcast after the bridge was closed.

Chávez has approved a $24 million tax exemption for coastal businesses, and has promised that an alternate route around the bridge will be completed by February.