Simon Romero

The sprawling metropolis of Caracas is known for its traffic congestion, which has been a boon for the motorizados who ferry packages and people around the city. (JG Illustration)

Motorizados, A Law Unto Themselves

Caracas, as seen from Mount Avila.

Motorists despise them. Pedestrians fear them. Highway bandits lie in wait for them. Leftist leaders call them unsung heroes.

And this anarchic city, its love affair with the car notwithstanding, would collapse if not for them: the thousands of daring motorbike couriers who make life here treacherous and viable at the same time.

Known as motorizados , they carry passengers and deliver packages, zipping between the lanes of shiny Jeep Cherokees and dilapidated Ford Country Squires that guzzle subsidized gasoline and clog roads in monumental traffic jams.

With a rebelliousness that flourishes amid Caracas’s concrete chaos, they hop curbs and speed down crowded sidewalks to deliver their fares. They ignore red lights and consider turn signals a custom for meeker urban tribes. Traffic officials estimate their number at 5,000, but that accounts only for those who bother with registration papers.

They are prepared, at the prompt of a text message, to drop everything to aid a comrade felled in traffic. Many carry handguns and have been known to set fire to cars that hit one of their own. Some advice for drivers tempted to lash out at a motorizado for scratching the paint of their SUVs or lopping off a side-view mirror: Don’t.

“I know we’re considered the scum of the earth, but life is never so simple,” said Jesus Malave, 45, who became a motorizado two years ago to support his wife and two daughters. He earns about $500 a month, twice what he used to make as a handyman.

“The truth is that we provide a service that is in high demand,” he said. Describing himself as a born-again Christian, he added, “Who else but God could make Caracas such a hell, and then choose us to carry out little miracles on its streets every day?”

The motorizado lore includes noble deeds. Riding what are usually small-engine street bikes, they have rushed pregnant women to delivery rooms and carried the injured from the Vargas mudslides of 1999 to hospitals. But, as Malave put it, the story is complex.

“I wish the police would find and arrest the motorizado who did this to me, but I know that will never happen,” said Maria Hipolita Beloni, 46, whose shinbone was fractured after she was struck by a motorizado driving without lights one night this month near her slum on the city’s western fringe.

Caraquenos, as residents here are known, classify various subsets of motorizados by degrees of industriousness and delinquency.

Most common are the mototaxistas, who carry passengers or documents and usually break nothing more serious than traffic laws. Then there are the motobanquistas, who carry out bank robberies on motorbikes. Most feared are the sicarios, paid assassins who often use motorbikes for their work and who pursue victims like Pierre Fould Gerges, a newspaper executive shot dead here by sicarios last year.

Other cities in Latin America boast their own motorbike-courier subcultures. Sao Paulo has its motoboys and Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, its motoconchos. But the motorizados of Caracas may be a cut above the rest when it comes to their level of politicization and the dangers inherent in their profession.

Motorizados have emerged as a pillar of support for President Hugo Chavez, with many forming groups with names like Motorized Force, Motorized Front of Socialist Integration and the Motorized Command of the United Socialist Party.

Among other duties, they take voters to the polls, intimidate Chavez’s critics in street protests and, at times, carry out vandalism attacks on targets like the Globovision television network and the Vatican’s diplomatic mission here.

“We’re not anyone’s cannon fodder, and the government doesn’t see it like that,” said Gustavo Martinez, 40, president of the National Association of Socialist Bolivarian Motorizados, an umbrella organization representing 3,300 motorizados. “Authorities see us as another social group formed within the cradle of the revolution.”

Others view the pro-Chavez bikers in a different light. Manuel Caballero, a prominent Venezuelan historian, compares their tactics of intimidation with those of Hitler’s SS motorcycle squadrons. Still, it is undeniable that Chavez’s political movement has given the motorizados something they had lacked: a sense of belonging.

“The way in which the motorizados have reshaped themselves is a reflection of the reshaping of Venezuela’s economy since the 1980s,” said Luis Duno-Gottberg, a professor of cultural studies at Rice University in Houston.

The number of the motorizados, who are largely self-employed, climbed in recent decades as the informal economy expanded. Their numbers surged again when the recent oil boom allowed Venezuelans to buy hundreds of thousands of new cars. The 34 percent increase in car sales in 2007 and 2008 has further congealed the glacial traffic here.

Motorizados seized the opportunity to take passengers desperate to avoid delays that could easily make a 3.2-kilometer trip take two and a half hours. With a motorbike, the same trip takes no more than 15 minutes.

“The gains in productivity are incredible,” said Rommel Mendoza, 34, a radio journalist who uses a motorbike for reports on street life here that have a wide following. “Now, I can do four or five stories a day instead of just one.”

Because motorizado work is more lucrative than some blue-collar trades, many motorizados have become targets of criminals. Demand for motorbikes is soaring, setting off a boom in robberies and killings.

Thieves killed at least 66 people this year in attempts to steal their motorbikes. Killings of motorizados have grown so common that their funerals have turned into a rite witnessed with a mix of dread and fascination in the cemeteries of Caracas. Often, the associates of the fallen motorizado precede the hearse in a caravan, revving their engines. Liquor flows by the time they reach the burial site. Some empty their handguns into the sky.

Then the motorizados balance the coffin on a pair of motorbikes for one last, slow spin.

“The motorizados come face to face with death every day,” said Ramon Velasquez, a groundskeeper at the Southern General Cemetery who has seen dozens of such burials. “More than most of us in this city, they know what it is like to be alive.”

 

The New York Times

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