"Las Mayas"

A boy plays with a cat while her father works on their shack at the slum of Las Mayas in Caracas. The hillside slum of "Las Mayas" provides both great vistas of Caracas and an ideal view of a housing crisis shaping into a major battleground for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's re-election bid. Along one side of the once-forested slopes, shacks of corrugated iron, wood and mud cling precariously to land that erodes a little bit further whenever it rains, and at the bottom of the valley lies a possible solution: rows of neat red-brick apartments that are part of Chavez's vision of new "Socialist Cities", designed to end the South American nation's housing shortage while promoting communal living. REUTERS