In Caracas, there are very few green spaces, other than the Avila mountain range, which ruffles the northern side of the vast Venezuelan capital city. The rest is pure urban concrete. Of those few green spaces, even fewer are safe enough to go to without needing a bodyguard or a bullet-proof automobile.

But there is one important exception – it’s in the municipality of Chacao, and it’s called the Country Club. I was there – and it’s not quite as elite as you might think. The Country Club is a private recreation club where any resident in the area can buy a membership and where even without a membership, everyone visits and socializes. It’s safe there, nobody gets mugged, and it’s like a privately financed neighborhood community center. It has an inexpensive restaurant, some tennis courts, and a little golf course. It’s not a real big establishment, and it’s no more luxurious than a nice San Diego mall in some place like Encinitas. Feathers has some interesting corollary thoughts about this here.

The gateway to the golf course looks like this:

The restaurant and club house looks like this:

The 9000 people around Chacao who have memberships go there to play golf, providing employment to about 2,000 poorer people who have jobs there, in hospitality industry work like waiters or caddies. When I was in Caracas, the caddies said that business was down, due to all the people who were emigrating.

But given the degree of class hatred instilled by the Chavista political establishment, this community center, the only one the middle class people could go to, is now the target for expropriation. The crazed mayor of Caracas, Juan Barreto, a lunatic who once chased a man around at an airport with a broken booze bottle he smashed for the purpose at the duty free, has vowed to expropriate the little community center and turn it into low-income shantytown housing, like this:

Miguel says that confiscating this lovely green part of Caracas will take a ton of legal work and probably be very difficult to do. He’s usually right about these things, but when I was in Caracas, people at the golf course were genuinely worried. This government, after all, is capable of anything, and taking away the one safe meeting spot left in Caracas, a place they look upon with envy and expect harsh words about them being said, is too much. They’ll show those escualidos who’s in charge, is their logic. More importantly, they will take away their freedom of association, including the freedom to exchange ideas. Much better to have a constant blare of Chavez posters and soundbox speakers of Chavez’s 6-hour political speeches, the idea of calmly talking over things on a beautiful golf green is anathema to these vicious leftists who seek to control every aspect of Venezuelan life.

Their main aim, though, is probably political. When I was in Caracas, people on the green told me that the Chavistas would like to change the voter composition of of the municipality of Chacao, which is one of order and low crime and no trash, into one that makes it look just like the rest of Caracas, a dangerous mess. They want to bring in angry Chavistas dependent on handouts, achieving the same effect as would happen if Projects were put in a pleasant part of Connecticut.

Not only that, Daniel has an intriguing post describing how other mayors of Caracas are distancing themselves from this naked grab for power – he thinks it is a sign of a power struggle among the chavistas and has a great post here.

Knowing how beloved the golf course is, and knowing how it’s the one and only real refuge away from Chavez around the city of Caracas, I get the feeling that the Chavistas have stepped over the line, gone too far. My blood was boiling when I read about this proposed expropriation. I am glad Miguel made some pretty good arguments for the difficulty of doing it, but in the meantime, the place will likely go underinvested, as all properties under seige do, and further lower the quality of life to something like intolerable in a perfect reflection of Chavez’s “revolutionary” visage.

Let’s hope it does not happen.