Chavez Support Strong on the Ground in Poor Caracas Neighborhood

CARACAS, Venezuela, March 15, 2007 — -- While the presidents of the United States and Venezuela were courting support and trading barbs during their separate forays through Latin America this week, the people of Santa Cruz del Este in Caracas quietly celebrated the fruits of their lives under Hugo Chavez: running water, functioning schools and paved streets.

This barrio, where residents once carted pails of water to their homes over rutted pathways, has been transformed by Chavez initiatives. Its children are scrubbed and schooled, its adults better fed and more employed. Community leaders and ordinary residents discussed their lives this week with a team from ABC News led by Barbara Walters.

We picked this particular barrio to visit -- it was not suggested by the government -- but the people here seemed much more positive about Chavez's leadership than those we met in more affluent sections of the city.

Santa Cruz del Este is not a typical neighborhood by any yardstick: the community is well organized, well led and very well connected politically. It is also relatively safe; the crime rate, for instance, is lower than many areas in this beleaguered city.

Violent crime in Caracas -- homicides, assaults, even kidnappings -- are so rampant that embarrassed law enforcement agencies stopped issuing crime statistics in 2003.

The community is cohesive and, in a sense, self-policing: "Neighbors watch out for one another," as one resident put it.

Walters, who came to the barrio in preparation for an interview with Chavez, visited with 45-year-old Gladys Garcia in the cramped but immaculate apartment she shares with her mother and her brother. "Before Chavez, we did not have water," Garcia told Walters, "now we can do our laundry."

"Did you have toilets?" Walters asked.

"Yes," Garcia said, "but we had to carry the water up the stairs. I have seen a lot of changes with President Chavez: fixing houses, roads, trains, improving the dignity of our community."