a chaos without control for thousands of Venezuelans

The Caracas metro is free, but it is not an indicator of development or quality of service. The reason is that the bills are finished and the public company has not been able to import them.

A report in the Spanish newspaper El País explains that a trip costs four bolivars, a tiny number, because it is subsidized, but the shortage of cash in the country is such as it is impossible to pay.

"The company has not yet bought the tickets because it has no resources for that," said Alberto Vivas, of the Asociación Civil Familia. Metro, which brings together the former employees of the system.

But there is no staff to collect the tickets. The migration has so affected that two years ago, the company has suspended the treatment of resignations of its staff to try to stop the mbad exodus of its employees.

And although a small station needs at least eight workers spread to attend the box office and supervise accesses, docks and trains, sometimes only two or three.

Inside the subway, pbadengers huddle inside the dirty and hot cars, after waiting thirty minutes on the platform

1 of the metro trains two million people by day. To operate effectively requires 38 trains, but usually has a little over 20

According to Edinson Alvarado, president of the company's union, the availability of a new fleet is affected by 30%. In other lines, the situation is worse: the lack of trains reaches 50%.

After a millionaire repair that was left unfinished, the service did not improve.

Familia Metro explained that 13 new trains have been acquired. stopped by breakdowns. They are the ones supplying spare parts to another fleet of 48 convoys purchased from a Spanish company through a contract signed in 2008, which included upgrading the system for $ 1,850 million.

This operation is the subject of an investigation

For now, frequent breakage force the evacuation of pbadengers in the middle of roads and tunnels. Because even if the 48 trains arrived in the country, their adaptation to the system was not completed.

"The only thing they did was to change the speed limit up to 80 kilometers per hour, but under the full responsibility of the driver. Ricardo Sansone, from Familia Metro.

Other works that were part of the contract, such as electrical substations and the renovation of 42 kilometers of roads, 21 in each direction, were not carried out either.