Tag Archives: Caracas

Aug
26
2010
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Venezuela’s crime rate a liability for Chávez

This article was originally posted by Sun Sentinel

 It all started last week when El Nacional, one of Venezuela’s few remaining independent news organizations, published an unquestionably gory front-page picture of the morgue in Caracas.

The picture, almost the size of the full front page of the newspaper and showing dead bodies partially covered by sheets, was meant to illustrate the violence that plagues Venezuela, and has plagued the South American country for years.

Venezuela and Iraq have almost the same population. Yet in Iraq, a country at war with violent and indiscriminate acts of terrorism, the number of civilians killed in 2009 was 4,644. In Venezuela, a country at peace, the number of people killed by violence that same year was more than 16,000; a number almost four times higher than the number in Iraq.

In Venezuela, this is both a social and a political issue.

It is social, because despite of all of its petro-dollars and the money the Hugo Chávez government has spent on social programs within the country, much of it has been stolen and the gap between rich and poor is still enormous.

But it also is political because the Chávez government, which slowly but surely has moved to control all aspects of life in Venezuela by expropriating private property and censoring or persecuting those who dare to criticize the president, has been unable to control the rampant violence that plagues the country.

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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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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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