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In Sight PerspectiveSymbols of a tragic transformation: The abandoned cars of VenezuelaBy Rachelle Krygier December 11 CARACAS, Venezuela — Public services are failing. The power and water come on only intermittently in many cities. Hospitals and schools struggle to provide basic care. Now here’s another sign of Venezuela’s collapse: Thousands of cars lie abandoned in the streets. Caracas is a showroom of museum-worthy relics, models dating from the 1980s to the early 2000s, when manufacturing and imports here began to plummet. Some lack windows and tires. Some are covered in sheets, like corpses.More than 1.5 million cars — 43 percent of Venezuela’s stock — were inactive or abandoned nationwide up to May this year, according to Omar Bautista, president of the Chamber of Venezuelan Automotive Producers. That percentage has doubled in two years.Automobile manufacturing has followed the rest of the economy under the socialist government of President Hugo Chávez and now Nicolás Maduro: Production has fallen 99 percent since 2009, and halved over the past year to just 452 cars in 2019. Two thirds of working cars are at least 15 years old, but the industry is producing only 10 percent of the spare parts it did a decade ago....Read more at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2019/12/11/symbols-tragic-transformation-abandoned-cars-venezuela/
