Perrera
[5] According to Gustavo Chourio, an urban planning expert at the University of Zulia, about 30 percent of Venezuelans used to own their own vehicle, the highest average in Latin America, a proportion that has dropped drastically by 2018 because few people had sufficient resources to buy spare parts such as tires or batteries.[5] Far from banning them because of their unsafe conditions, the Venezuelan government has presented the vehicles as an innovation in transportation and has justified their emergence, several pro-government governors and mayors have activated their own free fleet of perreras.[6] In April, during Expo Potencia 2018, an event in Caracas promoted by Nicolás Maduro to show the "production capacity" of companies linked to the government, the National Road Maintenance Company, attached to the Ministry of Transportation and which sells supplies for such as tires and oils, exhibited a model of a perrera built from a cargo truck that had no seats but walls made of brass and metal bars that supported the roof of the truck and from which users had to hold on.Erika Farías, mayor of the Libertador municipality, where the historic center of Caracas is concentrated, said that "these contingency trucks were placed at the disposal of our people so that during rush hours they can help to lighten the waiting time".According to Luis Alberto Salazar, president of the Committee of Public Transportation Users, for the first half of 2018 there were 25 deaths of passengers due to the use of perreras: sixteen in Mérida, two in Valencia, four in Tocuyito (Carabobo), two in Güiria (Sucre) and one in Puerto Ayacucho.