Vendors’ Removal Brings a Venezuelan Gem Back to Life

“They made Caracas into Calcutta,” the Venezuelan writer Fausto Masó lamented in the epilogue of a recently reissued memoir of bohemian exploits in the 1970s and 1980s along Sabana Grande, the boulevard that once symbolized this city’s effervescent intellectual life.

Until recently, it was hard for anyone with the nerve to exit a subway stop on Sabana Grande to disagree with that assessment. About 3,000 street vendors associated with black-market sales and crime had taken over the boulevard since the start of the decade, and the area had become emblematic of the city’s decline into lawlessness and neglect.

But at the beginning of this year, buoyed by President Hugo Chávez’s re-election victory, the local government allied with him responded to the many complaints about the area and cleared the vendors out. Pedestrians have flowed back, giving hope of renewal to many people in the area.

“This place has gone from being an area in which you risked your life to something approaching pleasurable,” said Ramón Martínez, a waiter at a restaurant on the boulevard for the last four years.