Venezuela crime out of control, imperiling Chavez re-election

USA Today
September 20, 2012
By Peter Wilson

Courtesy of: AP / Fernando Llano

EL JUNQUITO, Venezuela — Margarita Hernandez has been waiting more than a year for someone to pay for the murder of her 18-year-old son, killed by thugs a few blocks from his home.

“He was visiting friends when three men approached and shot him without warning,” said Hernandez, who works in a drug store. “The police know who the killers are as my son’s friends identified them — but one of the killers has an uncle in the police, so no arrests have been made,” she says.

Venezuela under President Hugo Chávez has the fourth-highest murder rate in the world and an abysmal crime-solving rate. Police in Venezuela make arrests for only eight of every 100 murders committed in the country of 28 million.

Crime is an issue that has enabled challenger Henrique Capriles Radonski to pull closer to upsetting Chávez in his attempt to win a third term Oct. 7. Some experts blame Chávez for allowing the country to become a transit point for the South American drug trade.

“Venezuela has become a criminalized state,” said Vanessa Neumann, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “You have drug traffickers and Colombian guerrillas operating in the country, and government officials have become involved with them. That makes it difficult to combat crime.”

Crime is common in Latin America. The Mexico-based Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, a non-government entity that compiles homicide statistics, found that 40 of the world’s 50 most dangerous cities last year were in Latin America.

Venezuela stands apart in two important areas, said Roberto Briceño León, who heads the Observatorio Venezolano de Violencia, a non-government group that monitors crime in the country.

“First, crime here is increasing unlike most Latin countries that are experiencing a decline,” he said. “And secondly, the government isn’t making it a priority or taking the right steps to combat it.”

Instead, Chávez has made it worse by arming groups who support his presidency and taking over state and city police forces, León said.

Murders and kidnappings have soared since Chávez took office in 1999. Last year, the Observatorio, estimates 18,850 people were murdered, up from 4,550 in 1998. There were almost 16,000 kidnappings, up from a few hundred in 1998.

Venezuela now has more murders annually than the U.S. and European Union combined, and that is despite 18 government anti-crime initiatives that Chávez has introduced.

More than 9,500 murders were committed in the first six months of this year, compared with 8,830 a year agoin the year-ago period, the Observatorio reported. Most of the victims are poor, male and between the ages of 18 and 30. More than 60% are shot five times or more.

Venezuelan newspapers are full of gruesome crimes that go unsolved. Criminals have committed armed robberies in hospital operating rooms and held hostage an entire movie theater audience.

Even high-ranking government officials have been targeted with relative impunity. The father of the pro-Chávez governor of the eastern state of Delta Amacuro was kidnapped earlier this month, while the governor of the eastern state of Monagas was assaulted in January.

Several diplomats assigned to Caracas, including the Mexican Ambassador, have been kidnapped or robbed. Caracas’ once thriving nightlife has gone quiet because many people are afraid to leave their homes after dusk.

Chávez has blamed the upsurge in crime on capitalism, poverty, the breakdown of families and American culture, which he says glorifies violence. His Interior and Justice minister, Tareck El Aissami, said earlier this month that the government has spent more than $500 million in the past few years on crime-fighting measures. A newly created police force, for example, has had marked success in zones where it has been deployed, he claimed.

Briceño disagrees, saying Chávez’s own revolutionary and socialist rhetoric has made things worse.

“The government is confused as to how to respond to the upswing in crime,” he said. “They view using the police as a bourgeois and repressive measure that was used by their predecessors. They want to use new solutions, but they just aren’t working.”

Capriles has capitalized on the crime issue, which surveys show is the voters’ most pressing issue this election.

Besides promising to fire corrupt police officials and deploy more than 20,000 more officers throughout the country, Capriles said he would launch an immediate campaign to disarm the country.

“Whoever has an illegal weapon will have to turn it in, or we will come for it,” he told cheering supporters at a recent rally. He also promised to clean up the country’s prisons, from which criminals direct kidnappings and robberies.

Hernandez voted for Chávez in each of his presidential campaigns. She said she will vote for Capriles this time.

“We deserve better than to live like this,” Hernandez said. “We deserve to live in peace. My son deserved better.”

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