By SIMON ROMERO
CARACAS, Venezuela — 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 for only 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 S.U.V.’s 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 Malavé, 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 Mr. Malavé 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 María Hipólita 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.
Caraqueños, as residents here are known, classify various subsets of motorizados by degrees of industriousness and delinquency.
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 for only 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 S.U.V.’s 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 Malavé, 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 Mr. Malavé 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 María Hipólita 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.
Caraqueños, as residents here are known, classify various subsets of motorizados by degrees of industriousness and delinquency.
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