Mission: Identity

President Hugo Chavez, a former paratrooper, has started a whole lot of programs called Missions to bring Venezuela up to speed, apparently. Some of them are to bring education and medicine to the poorest parts of Venezuela. In others, they hire people without jobs to clean the streets and other activities, including the processing of new ID cards.

In Venezuela, everyone gets a Cédula, which is an ID similar to the American Social Security Number. However, you carry your card around with you and present it at various places, similar to showing your Driver's License. Everyone gets their first Cédula when they're approximately ten years old. Because I'm twenty-three and I was in the United States when I turned twenty, it means that my ID card was expired for about three years. It's not like it matters because they still accept it, but I needed to get a new one "just in case".

Last Saturday, my mother receieves a call from her neighbor about a"operative" for Cédulas in Puerto La Cruz under an overpass, so we drive there to get my new card. It is raining, and when we get there there's a lot of water leaking from the top. The process seems to work under the Oriente clerk rules, where you're supposed to know how everything works already. The first thing I had to do was to register to vote. Next, it was to enter my information like 3 of 4 times to each person in the line. Finally, I get my picture taken, put my fingerprints all over the place and they print the cards and laminate them. They look quite cheap as they're just printed on paper and laminated.

It still took an hour, though. Once you get all your information filled out and your picture taken, you have to wait until a lot of people get their information in as well because they print the cards in batches. Because all of it is so chaotic, when I had to sign the papers with my information I noticed than anything but my name and ID number was completely incorrect. There is no room for corrections, though, so I just signed away because frankly I didn't care. It was still much much faster than going to the actual government building where you're supposed to get them, because you have to get there at around 6:00 AM and wait until noon. Then you have to wait like 1-6 months for you to get your card. I call the new way an inefficient efficiency.

As for my old ID card, they took it away! They just stapled it to the back of one of the papers I had to sign. I asked the man if I could run make a copy for him and keep my old card as a memento, but he said that I couldn't. I told him that a bunch of people had copies, but he said that it was because they allegedly lost their old ID cards.

Bullshit; that's what my sister said when she got her card so that they wouldn't take her old one away. How the hell was I supposed to know that I had to make a copy and make that excuse?