Monthly Archives: August 2010

Aug
25
2010
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Venezuelans Despair Over Rampant, Deadly Violence

This article was originally posted by VOA News

Venezuela has stopped publishing official crime rates, but murders, kidnappings, assaults, and robberies have skyrocketed during the past decade.

Funerals of murder victims are a daily sight in Venezuela, where hospitals treat an unending stream of assault victims. Far from containing the violence, police increasingly find themselves targeted by criminals. Every day, mourners crowd Caracas’ morgue, including this sister of a slain officer.

“What security can there be if armed officers are killed? Where does that leave the rest of us?” she asked.

The relative, who declined to be identified, notes that rarely are criminals apprehended, much less convicted.

“Tens of thousands of crimes, and where is the justice?” said the relative.

A non-governmental monitoring group, the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, reports the country suffered more than 16,000 homicides last year, more than triple the total in 1998 when President Hugo Chavez was first elected. The group says 2009 saw more violent deaths in Venezuela than in war-torn Iraq and civil war-weary Colombia combined.

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Aug
24
2010
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Chavez’s socialist populism perpetuates inequality

Getty Images/PRESIDENCIAThis article was originally posted by The Globe and Mail

Venezuela’s escalating crime rate reflects the failure of President Hugo Chavez to address the glaring disparities between the rich and the poor.

When “el Comandante” came to power in 1998, he promised to use the country’s oil wealth to benefit the poor. But his Bolivarian socialist model has not alleviated the long-term problem of income inequality, and the attendant social ills it perpetuates.

Ironically, this runs counter to the overall trend in the region. Latin America used to be known for its acute and persistent income inequalities. But 12 of the largest economies in the Americas – including Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Mexico – actually saw a reversal of this pattern in the past decade. A new study shows that the average decline in the Gini coefficient – a measure of income inequality – was 1.1 per cent a year from 2000 to 2007. Venezuela improved the least of the 12 countries, conclude the authors, the economists Luis Lopez-Calva, of the United Nations Development Program, and Nora Lustig, of Tulane University.

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Aug
24
2010
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VenEconomy: And They Fell Short…

Credits: Latin American HeraldThis article was originally posted by Latin American Herald

For some weeks now, President Chávez and his government officials have disclaimed the denouncements of the high levels of violence and the tremendous lack of security in Venezuela. Examples of this eagerness to deny the obvious are the statement by the President on Thursday, August 19, when he said that there was more, but much more, violence during the Fourth Republic, the already notorious “guffaws” of Telesur’s director, Andrés Izarra, during a CNN program, and, worst of all, the precautionary measure issued by a court that imposes de facto prior censorship on disseminating information on and graphics depicting violence, a measure that was later “toned down” owing to the widespread negative reaction it provoked.

The point is that the weekly figures mentioned by the experts on violence in the CNN program fell short compared to those revealed by a study mentioned this Friday, August 20, in El Nacional, entitled “National Survey of Victimization and Perception of Citizen Security 2009.” This study, which was conducted by the National Statistics Institute (INE) at the request of the Vice-presidency of the Republic, reveals that 19,113 people lost their lives at the hands of criminals in 2009, that is 3,076 more than those calculated by the NGO Observatorio Venezolano de la Violencia and cited by the sociologist Roberto Briceño León on CNN, when he said that Caracas has a higher homicide rate than Bogotá and Ciudad Juárez, the same figures that caused Izarra so much hilarity.

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