In the chaotic Venezuelan capital, even a policeman and his family are obliged to live illegally in the infamous Tower of David

The walls of the Tower of David can talk. Fifty-two storeys high and crowned with a heliport, this unfinished highrise, originally conceived as a bank, was meant to stand tall among its neighbours in downtown Caracas as an emblem of Venezuela's booming economy and the city's uber-modernism of the 1990s.

Instead, with the country struggling with one of the world's highest inflation rates, chronic food shortages and a currency black market where the dollar trades at 10 times the official rate, La Torre de David (named after its principal investor David Brillembourg, whose untimely death in 1993 coincided with the collapse of the Venezuelan economy), is a metaphor for the state's failure to provide its citizens with housing, public transport and even safety.

Illegally occupied eight years ago by more than 300 families and featured last year as a hideout in the American TV series Homeland, this industrial-scale squat counts a policeman among its residents. Not that 27-year-old Jorge Luis Cadena is exactly proud to call it home to his wife and three children.