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Sep
20
2012
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ICYMI: Venezuela crime out of control, imperiling Chavez re-election

Venezuela crime out of control, imperiling Chavez re-election

USA Today
September 20, 2012
By Peter Wilson

violence in venezuela 300x203 ICYMI: Venezuela crime out of control, imperiling Chavez re election

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.”

To read this article on USA Today, please click here.

 
Jul
27
2012
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In Case You Missed It… Articles Roundup Week of 7/27/12

jp venezuela1 articleLarge In Case You Missed It… Articles Roundup Week of 7/27/12

An aircraft burned in a drug raid in Apure State. Afterward, traffickers appeared to have reclaimed the airstrip for drug flights. (Courtesy of: Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)

Hugo Chávez is making good on his threat to remove Venezuela from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights after a recent ruling against his government. The action is just one more in a series – including allegedly plotting a coup in Paraguay and threatening the Spanish oil company Repsol – that have many analysts warning that Chávez is setting a dangerous precedent of radicalization in the region. With the elections just over two months away, Chavez’s government has dramatically increased spending and tightened its control of the media. Venezuelans continue to worry about the country’s high crime rate and investigations show that the drug trade continues unchecked. Meanwhile, Venezuelans remain uncertain about Chávez’s health and alleged recovery.

Hugo Chavez says Venezuela will pull out of regional human rights court, condemns decision, Washington Post

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that his government will pull out of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in protest after a ruling that he called a travesty.

Chávez a threat to the hemisphere, Miami Herald

During a recent interview on A Mano Limpia, hosted by Oscar Haza on WJAN-Channel 41 (Florida), President Obama declared that Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez has not posed “a serious” national security threat to the United States.

Paraguay prosecutor calls Lugo to testify in probe against Venezuelan foreign minister, Associated Press

Paraguay’s former President Fernando Lugo must testify in an investigation over alleged Venezuelan meddling during his impeachment, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Venezuela’s Chavez Threatens Repsol Over YPF Arbitration Case, Bloomberg

Venezuela President Hugo Chavez warned Repsol SA (REP) to “think carefully” about taking action against Argentina after it nationalized its YPF SA (YPFD) unit, indicating the Spanish company may face ramifications in Venezuela.

Facing election, Hugo Chávez ruthlessly consolidates his power, Washington Post

NOT FOR THE first time, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has declared himself cancer-free and ready to resume a full schedule.

Chavez says he won’t stop taking over airwaves, AP

President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that he will not stop seizing control of Venezuela’s airwaves to give his trademark marathon television and radio addresses despite complaints from his challenger that it gives him an unfair advantage during the country’s presidential election campaign.

Venezuela’s productivity problem, Foreign Policy

While much of the developed world is mired in sluggish growth or downright recession, a few days ago Venezuela came out with healthy GDP figures.

Me or your own eyes, The Economist

ÉDGAR TORRES, a toddler in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, was asleep in bed when a gang from up the hill came looking for his mother’s 16-year-old godson.

Cocaine’s Flow Is Unchecked in Venezuela, New York Times

The Venezuelan government has trumpeted one major blow after another against drug traffickers, showing off barrels of liquid cocaine seized, drug planes recovered, cocaine labs raided and airstrips destroyed.

Chávez’s allure, Venezuela’s disaster, Miami Herald

When Churchill was once asked about some aspect of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, he made a memorable statement, tinged with humor: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

 
Apr
27
2012
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ICYMI: Whistle-blown

An impeached judge says the courts are subservient and corrupt
 The Economist
Apr 28th 2012

WHEN Hugo Chávez became Venezuela’s president, in 1999, he promised an overhaul of the country’s notoriously venal judiciary. But according to charges made by a recently dismissed supreme-court justice, the flaws Mr Chávez vowed to rectify are nothing compared with what has transpired under his rule.

On March 20th the legislature removed Eladio Aponte from the court. Previously a colonel and the chief military prosecutor, he joined it in 2004 when Mr Chávez expanded it and appointed 17 loyalists. He was accused of giving government credentials to Walid Makled, an alleged drug baron. The government had long been aware of his actions, and Mr Aponte says that Mr Makled was seen at the time as a legitimate businessman friendly to Mr Chávez. Extradited last year from Colombia, Mr Makled is now on trial in Caracas for drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder. On April 25th he said he had paid Mr Aponte millions of dollars.

Mr Aponte was not criminally charged in connection with Mr Makled’s case. Nonetheless, he still fled the country. Weeks later he showed up in Miami, where he is said to be collaborating with the American authorities.

Now that he is safely abroad, Mr Aponte has minced no words. On April 18th he gave an interview to SOÍTV, a Miami-based television channel, in which he recalled that senior officials “from the president down” would phone him with instructions on sensitive cases. In his account, Elías Jaua, the vice-president, held weekly meetings with leaders of the judiciary–which is constitutionally separate from the executive–and would have those who disobeyed him fired. He also said there is a long-standing order not to release political prisoners, who the opposition says number over a dozen. They include María Lourdes Afiuni, a judge who has spent over two years in pre-trial detention.

Mr Aponte’s most explosive claims involve the government’s links to guerrillas and drug traffickers. Asked about its relationship with Colombia’s FARC, Mr Aponte said he was told to “turn a blind eye to all those gentlemen” (see article). In one case, he said, Henry Rangel Silva, now the defence minister, ordered leniency for a lieutenant-colonel who had been arrested for cocaine-smuggling. He was later freed without trial. Mr Aponte also accused Clíver Alcalá, a general, of being the country’s “drug tsar”. Both men were already on the United States Treasury Department’s blacklist of alleged collaborators with the drug trade.

The government has dismissed Mr Aponte as a discredited turncoat offering no proof. “He sold his soul to the devil,” said Nicolás Maduro, the foreign minister. But if Mr Aponte has evidence to back up his assertions, America could issue indictments of Venezuelan officials.

Politics and biology, however, may move faster than the wheels of justice. Both countries will hold presidential elections this year. And Mr Chávez, who is running for re-election, just spent two weeks in Cuba undergoing radiation therapy after the recurrence of his pelvic cancer. With no heir apparent, tensions within his party are rising. Mr Aponte may not be the last high-level defector in 2012.

To read this article on The Economist, please click here.