Laya’s apartment was a single room, crammed with the essentials of life—like a sailor’s cabin or a prison cell, perhaps. There was a big bed and a flat-screen TV, an armoire, a chair, and a clothesline strung across one corner with laundry on it. Laya said he was content. He was lucky to have a job, and was grateful to Daza for finding him a place in the Tower. Every day, he walked by the health club on the way to work, and he thought about how different his life was.

Daza told his own story in similarly redemptive terms. One day, he showed me his church, a large former storeroom, painted green, with plastic chairs stacked up and a preacher’s lectern. Gold cutout paper letters on the wall spelled out Casa de Dios (House of God) and Puerta del Cielo (Heaven’s Gate). Daza arranged two chairs and invited me to sit down.

He came from Catia, he said, one of Caracas’s most notorious slums. His family was very poor. He was the youngest of several boys; his brothers were much older. He had stayed out of trouble until he was eight, when some older boys stole his bike and gave him a humiliating beating. He described them as malandros—thugs—who had terrorized his neighborhood. “I remember watching them as they chased my older brothers,” Daza said. “They had guns, and my brothers would run when they chased them, and they shot at them.”

“I didn’t care if they killed my brothers,” he went on. “I resented the way they came home and behaved in front of my mother. They mistreated her, they smoked drugs and spoke badly in front of her. I used to tell them they were cowards, because all they did was bring their enemies to the barrio and then run away when they came.”

Daza formed his own gang of kids. “We got ahold of some guns, and then, when I was fifteen, as our first thing, we waited for the leader of those same malandros and walked up and”—he made a shooting motion—“we finished him.” After that, he became the boss of the whole barrio.

Daza had done two stints in prison, one for five years and another for two. During his second incarceration, for an illegal-gun charge, a policeman-preacher came to the prison and converted him. He emerged “con el Evangelio” and had been trying to lead a better life ever since.

For Daza, as for many other residents of Caracas, the prospect of a better life is material as well as spiritual. Chávez’s Administration has had mercurial effects on the nation’s economy. While his anti-capitalist rhetoric has induced some companies to leave, others have learned to work with the government and have done quite well. Regulations are astonishingly profuse—the mere act of paying for dinner in a restaurant requires showing I.D.—but, perversely, this has encouraged a surge in black-market entrepreneurship. Many doctors and engineers have fled the country; other professionals have flourished. The one constant is the flow of oil money, which brings some people great wealth, and also supports a burgeoning public sector. The poorest Venezuelans are marginally better off these days. And yet, despite Chávez’s calls to socialist solidarity, his people want security and nice things as much as they want an equitable society.

One evening, Daza insisted on driving me back to my hotel. He and Gina and I waited outside the Tower as a gleaming green Ford Explorer pulled up, and a driver climbed out and handed him the keys. I got in back, and we set off. As we drove, Daza said, “God blessed me with the car last December.” It seemed that a man had owed him money, and when he was unable to pay him back he had given him the car instead. It was a 2005 model, Daza explained, and it was fine, but now he wanted the 2008—ideally, a white one. By coincidence, we passed a white 2005 Explorer in traffic. Daza murmured his appreciation, admiring the shiny chrome grille in his side-view mirror. Later, we went by a Ford dealership, where a 2012 Explorer sat in an illuminated showroom. “Who knows how much that costs—maybe a half million bolivares!” he exclaimed.

On the expressway, Daza asked where the hotel was and seemed uncertain when I told him the district, Palos Grandes. Had he been there? Yes, of course, he said. I had to point out the exit, however, and direct him from there. As we approached the hotel, passing gated apartment buildings and exclusive restaurants, he and Gina gazed out of the window in amazement. “People here are really rich, aren’t they?” he said. In front of my hotel, he stopped the car in the middle of the street and stared, transfixed, as cars honked and swerved around us.

In many parts of the city, though, it is not the rich but the malandros who are ascendant. Caracas is among the world’s easiest places to be kidnapped. Thousands of kidnappings occur every year. In November, 2011, the Chilean consul was taken by gunmen, beaten, and shot before being released. That same month, the Washington Nationals catcher Wilson Ramos was kidnapped from his parents’ home in Venezuela and held for two days before being rescued. In April, a Costa Rican diplomat was abducted. The next day, the police descended on the Tower of David to search for him, but found only a few guns.

At a dinner party in Caracas, I listened as two couples traded stories about calls they had received from criminals claiming to have abducted their children. In both cases, the voices of children who sounded like theirs came over the phone, crying and begging for help. The calls were false, made by fraudsters, but the episodes, along with increasingly bloody news reports, left them worried about the future. One of the more talked-about crimes while I was in Caracas involved the murder of a taxi-driver, who was beaten, slashed in the face, and shot several times. His killers then ran over his body in his own car, just for fun, before escaping.

Daza never seemed to leave the ground floor of the Tower, and didn’t seem to want me to, either. Whenever I suggested going up, he became evasive, and he made excuses when I asked to sit in on a session with the floor delegates. If he demanded an entry fee of each new resident, as had been reported, he wouldn’t admit to it. But it seemed likely that he was making a living for himself from the building, possibly from the bus garage. Somehow, he was able to afford a few luxuries; he lived above his church, but he had an apartment elsewhere in the city; he had children from previous relationships, and they could visit him there safely.

On a couple of occasions, I managed to climb up into the Tower for a look around. At the tenth floor, members of the building’s security squad invariably appeared to demand that I identify myself and tell them where I was going. When I mentioned Daza’s name, the guards let me go on, but they reappeared every few minutes to keep an eye on me. The residents of the Tower were watchful, and said little as they walked by. On the stairways, many had loads to carry, and moved like mountaineers, with the set expressions of people undergoing an endurance test.