El vigilante

Today was one of those few days I when I thought about these people that are in every corner of my life. I was looking for a key to our stairway door, and popped by the security guard’s window on the way out of the apartment.

You’ll have to ask the concierge, I can’t go up those stairs. Or even go into the lobby or the parking lot. They barely even let me in here, he said, pointing to the small, cramped security guard booth.

It’s the sort of job most likely to go to Venezuela’s most luckless. These are folks that live in and don’t have highschool degrees or marketable skills. It’s a clear isolation on the other side of the luxurious office towers and swanky apartment buildings to industrial warehouses and buildings in construction. With crime an increasing concern in Venezuela, the vigilante is a fixture of life.

Fifty years ago maybe they would have been cutting cane, lifting blocks or hauling salt. Today that manual labor has been replaced with constant boredom, texting and fiddling with a cell phone, and the struggle to stay awake on shifts that often last 24 hours at a time – one day on, one day off. A one-liner I heard not long ago summed it up fairly well – Ando mas ladillado que un vigilante sin saldo … I’m in a worse mood that a security guard with no credit on his phone.

I’ve always thought it questionable what sort of security they can really provide under these circumstances, particularly given that they’re going to be the first in the line of fire if something does happen. Nobody with any means would consider living in a building without a vigilante, but almost nobody trusts them.

“Whenever something goes wrong, the first one they blame is the vigilante,” said the security guard at my mother-in-law’s lower-middle-class gated community after a house was robbed a block away. The kid’s got a technical degree and trying to finish highschool but he can’t get his studies done while on the job. My in-laws get along well with him and his coworkers, taking them food on holidays and cracking jokes on the way in and out of the gate.

That’s not the usual relationship. In one apartment I lived in, the landlord was shocked when I asked him to leave the key with the security guards. “With those criminals? Are you crazy?”

Trouble is I can understand the mistrust. These are folks at the edge of poverty and simultaneously at the edge of opulence. They live in hillside slums that generally function as little villages, everybody knows everybody and everybody knows everybody’s business. My gut instinct says it’s not the security guards themselves that get mixed up in crime. But something tells me it’s only a matter of time before some true criminal approaches them and asks them for some small piece of information that would enable a break-in, a car theft, a kidnapping. Many would probably back away. I can imagine many others would not.

Investigations of apartment break-ins nearly always turn up evidence that the people who did the hit had some kind of inside information that helped them do it. That is almost always followed by genuine shock and consternation that such information could have gotten out. People in Caracas do all sorts of other things to take their security seriously – a battery of car alarms, triple locks on doors, electric fences and security cameras. Rarely does anyone mention the idea of paying for security guards whose social conditions might allow them to live further away from the criminal elements they are supposed to protect folks from.