Tierra de nadie (UCV)


The Tierra de nadie is the name of one of the green spaces inside the campus of the University City of Caracas, the campus of the Central University of Venezuela. It is a public space. It is officially called Plaza Jorge Rodríguez.

Location and history

It takes its name because it is an area that belongs to none of the faculties that surround it, serving as a shared space for the whole university community; it is one of the most recognized meeting locations within the university. The spaces that border the Tierra de nadie include the Plaza del Rectorado, the Aula Magna, the Central library, the canteen of the university, and diverse faculty buildings. The area designated the Tierra de nadie also extends to a small forest to the north and northeast of the square. An old magazine of UCV's School of Social Communication was also named Tierra de nadie.

Violent crime

Though intended as a peaceful green space and in the center of a university campus, there have been several violent crimes in the Tierra de Nadie, as they have grown across the university as a whole, and more numbers of drug users than students hanging around. In 2015, a young man was killed in the plaza; he wasn't a student of UCV. In August 2017, a journalist was out jogging when he was stabbed in the neck and face, he was found dead in the Tierra de nadie but had left a blood trail from a nearby academic building; it is believed he was trying to get from where he was stabbed to the hospital on the other side of the Central Complex. The murder may have been the result of resisting mugging. Muggings in the Tierra de nadie were quite common, with many reports leading to the arrest of a common thief in 2019.

Artworks

In this area there are many monuments, plants and paths, including murals of the Rectory Plaza by Oswaldo Vigas that face the space, and the statues Maternidad by Baltasar Lobo and Monumento a los caídos de la generación del 28 by Ernest Maragall.
There is also a dedication plaque to honor Jorge Rodríguez Sr., a politician murdered by the government in 1976, which has been vandalised on several occasions, sometimes by the university's management and rector Cecilia García Arocha, as a response to the controversial man, his politics, and his son, Jorge Rodríguez.