Berita Luar Negeri

Chávez Opens His Palace to Flood Victims

Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press

Streets were awash on Tuesday in Higuerote, Venezuela, on the Caribbean coast east of Caracas.

CARACAS, Venezuela — Miraflores Palace, designed in the 1880s by an Italian count for one of Venezuela’s 19th-century dictators, has been home to presidents here for more than a century. In recent years, it has welcomed a lively medley of foreign leaders, including Presidents Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.

But on Wednesday, Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, opened the doors of the neoclassical building to a new set of residents: flood victims.
Appearing on state television at Miraflores clad in an olive drab military uniform, Mr. Chávez welcomed 26 families who had been displaced by torrential rains in recent weeks. The rainfall has caused flooding and landslides that have killed 25 people and forced more than 30,000 Venezuelans to flee, civil defense officials said.
“I have a proposal for you families: stay here for a year,” the president told the refugees who became his housemates on Wednesday. He then led them on a brief tour of a palace wing where beds and cribs had been set up next to a barbershop. “When you leave,” he said, “it will be to an apartment of your own.”
Beyond offering a helping hand, Mr. Chávez was once again displaying his facility at taking hold of the public discussion during a time of crisis, and he blunted criticism over his government’s handling of flood-prevention measures and its response to the rains.
His offer to allow families into Miraflores also plays into the fierce debate over a housing shortage that has forced many Venezuelans to live in hillside shacks that are vulnerable to the rains.
Mr. Chávez has seized housing tracts to alleviate the shortage. Private developers, in turn, have been hesitant to invest in new projects out of fear that they could be taken by the government.
If the rains continue, a great deal more could be at stake. A similar period of rainfall in 1999 led to landslides near Caracas, the capital, killing thousands of people. Ruins of buildings near the Caribbean coast that were destroyed in 1999 serve as testament to the destruction.
The president’s critics, pointing out that thousands of the flood victims will not have the chance to move into the palace, responded to his move with reactions varying from amusement to outrage. “Philanthropy can be virtuous,” the columnist Simón Boccanegra wrote in the newspaper Tal Cual, “but it can also be demagogic, exhibitionist and when taken to its extreme, truly grotesque and tacky.”
Mr. Chávez first raised the possibility of taking in refugees at Miraflores during his regular television broadcast on Sunday, saying that the palace kitchen alone had space for “about 20 families,” and that the chambers where his cabinet convened could be remodeled into about two apartments.
Fuerte Tiuna, a top military garrison, and Telesur, the regional Spanish-language television network supported by Venezuela, have also opened their grounds to flood victims. Officials have closed schools, opened more than 250 shelters and deployed 10,000 troops to provide aid.