Chávez can't keep lid on murder capital

Published on Thursday 26 August 2010 19:06

SOME here joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. Sadly, the numbers bear them out.

• President Chavez. Pic Getty/AFP

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000. Even Mexico's infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives.

Venezuelans have absorbed such grim statistics for years. Those with means have hidden their homes behind walls and hired foreign security experts to advise them on how to avoid kidnappings and killings. And rich and poor alike seemed to have resigned themselves to living with a murder rate that the opposition says remains low on the list of the government's priorities.

Then a front-page photograph in a leading independent newspaper - and the government's reaction - shocked the nation, and rekindled public debate over violent crime.

The photo in El Nacional is unquestionably gory. It shows a dozen homicide victims strewn about the city's largest morgue. But it merely testifies to an unusually anarchic two days in this already perilous place.

But a court ordered the paper to stop publishing images of violence, as if that would quiet growing questions about why the government - despite proclaiming a socialist revolution - has been unable to close the dangerous gap between rich and poor and make the country's streets safer.

"Forget the hundreds of children who die from stray bullets, or the kids who go through the horror of seeing their parents or older siblings killed before their eyes," said Teodoro Petkoff, the editor of another newspaper, mocking the court's decision in a front-page editorial. "Their problem is the photograph."

Venezuela is struggling with a decade-long surge in murders, with about 118,541 since President Hugo Chvez took office in 1999, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a group that compiles figures based on police files. That included 43,792 homicides in Venezuela since 2007, compared with about 28,000 deaths from drug-related violence in Mexico since that country's assault on cartels began in late 2006.

Caracas itself is almost unrivalled among large cities in the Americas for its murder rate, which currently stands at around 200 per 100,000 inhabitants.

That compares with recent measures of 22.7 per 100,000 people in Bogot, Colombia's capital, and 14 per 100,000 in So Paulo, Brazil's largest city. Chvez's government often points out that the concern over murders preceded his rise to power. But the number of homicides last year was still more than three times higher than when Chvez was elected in 1998.

Reasons for the surge are complex and varied. While many Latin American economies are growing fast, Venezuela's has continued to shrink. The gap between rich and poor remains wide, despite spending on anti-poverty programmes, fuelling resentment. Adding to that, the nation is awash with millions of illegal firearms.

Police salaries remain low, sapping motivation. And in a country with the highest inflation rate in the hemisphere, more than 30 per cent a year, some officers have turned to supplementing their incomes with crimes like kidnappings.

But some crime specialists blame Chvez's government itself. The judicial system has grown increasingly politicized, losing independent judges and aligning itself more closely with Chvez's political movement. Many experienced state employees have had to leave public service, or even the country.

More than 90 per cent of murders go unsolved, without a single arrest.

Henrique Capriles, the governor of Miranda, a state encompassing parts of Caracas, said Chvez had worsened the homicide problem by cutting money for state and city governments led by political opponents and then removing thousands of guns from their police forces after losing regional elections.

But the government says it is trying to address the problem. It recently created a security force, the Bolivarian National Police, and a new Experimental Security University where police recruits get training from advisers from Cuba and Nicaragua, both with low murder rates.

The national police's overriding priority, said Vctor Daz, a senior official on the force and an administrator at the new university, is "unrestricted respect for human rights". "I'm not saying we'll be weak," he said, "but the idea is to use dialogue and dissuasion as methods of verbal control when approaching problems."

Meanwhile, the debate over the morgue photograph published by El Nacional is intensifying The government says the photograph was meant to undermine it, not to inform the public. The authorities are also threatening an inquiry into Rotten Town, a video by a Venezuelan reggae singer that shows an innocent child struck down by a stray bullet. For all the government's protests, the video has spread rapidly across the internet since its release here this month.

Given the government's stance in these cases, many here worry it is focusing on the messenger, not the underlying message. Hector Olivares, 47, waited outside the morgue early one morning this month to recover the body of his son, also named Hector, 21. He said his son was at a party in the slum of El Cercado, on the outskirts of Caracas, when a gunman opened fire.

Olivares said Hector was the second son he had lost in a senseless murder, after another son was killed four years ago at the age of 22.He said he did not blame Chvez for the killings, but he pleaded with the president to make combating crime a higher priority.

"We elected him to crack down on the problems we face," he said. "But there's no control of criminals on the street, no control of anything."