"Aqui no hay barrios" (There are no barrios here) was what real estate agents told me when they showed me apartments in one of the middle-class zones of eastern Caracas, to assure me that the slum districts that house roughly half of the city's population, called barrios in Venezuela, were safely distant. Shortly after I arrived in the country, a security official at the U.S. Embassy warned me never to travel into the slums. "The people there are so desperately poor," he insisted earnestly, "that they'll rob your shoes, your shirt, your eyeglasses, your belt -- and that's if you get out alive." The 

barrios are often identified in everyday conversations like these as a kind of cancer on the city, pouring bodies into and draining resources out of the valley of Caracas. Caracas's slums have been steadily growing since the 1950s, but in the 1990s, their population surged alongside the marginal quarters of Bogotá, Lima, and the other outsized metropolises of Latin America. But in Venezuela this constituency has succeeded in leveraging its local energies into a national political movement. In a country where over 85 percent of the population lives in cities, the radical social-democratic government of Hugo Chávez has counted largely on barrio residents for its 

base of support. The politics of media and journalism, moreover, have played a uniquely prominent role in the class conflict that has occupied Venezuelan society for the last six years. On both the right and left, the airwaves have become a critical theater in the political and social conflict of a divided nation.