Venezuela crime soars amid declining poverty
Analysts
say President Chavez must re-examine idea that decreasing inequality will lead
to less violence.
Chris
Arsenault
"Several
men came onto the bus with guns," said the expert, a professor at a major
Caracas university, who did not want his name used for fear of violent
reprisal. "They took everyone's money. It wasn't rich people riding on the
bus - it was poor people trying to get home from work," he told Al
Jazeera.
With
an average of 53 murders per day in 2011, according to the Venezuelan
Observatory on Violence, a watch-dog group, the country has a murder rate of
about 67 per 100,000 inhabitants. Neighbouring Colombia, in contrast, has a
murder rate of 38 per 100,000 while Mexico - where some regions are gripped by
deadly drug violence - has a rate of about 15 per 100,000.
Long
a scourge of urban Latin America, it is unclear why violent crime has become so
bad in Venezuela. In the Americas, only El Salvador and Honduras have higher
murder rates, according to data released by the United Nations in late 2011.
In
central America, criminal gangs known as Las Maras have thousands of members,
said Luis Cedeno, founder of the Investigative Institute of Citizen Security,
while "in Colombia, the problem is drug trafficking". Mexico's border
regions have drug wars, the security expert and sociologist told Al Jazeera,
but in Venezuela "there is no cause; it is a multifactorial model ".
Poverty drops
Winning
presidential elections for a third term on October 7, populist president Hugo
Chavez has said he wants to see "preventative, scientific and
community-based police… to fight against the crime that causes so much damage
to society". But the problem has gotten exponentially worse since Chavez
first took office and his government has been slammed by critics for its
security record.
"Crime
is supported by the government," Augustin Reyes, a 63-year-old carpenter
living in a "barrio" or slum in Caracas told Al Jazeera, in an
allegation frequently made by Chavez opponents. If the situation keeps getting
worse, the government must be behind it, they believe.
Abductions
increased 20-fold between 1999 and 2011 to 1,105, according to official figures
cited by InsightCrime, a security website.
Sources
close to Chavez and his socialist party told Al Jazeera that senior government
planners generally assumed - like leftists the world over - that crime is
caused primarily by poverty and inequality. Address the root causes, they
reasoned, and crime will decrease. But the data hasn't borne out those
conclusions, leaving many scratching their heads.
Poverty
dropped from 50.4 per cent in 1998 when Chavez was first elected to 28.5 per
cent in 2009, according to the World Bank, an impressive decrease by any
standard. Government supporters credit the redistribution of oil wealth -
Venezuela has the world's largest petroleum reserves - for reducing poverty.
Venezuela's
Gini coefficient - an index that measures inequality by placing countries on a
scale from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality) - moved from 0.498 in
1999 to 0.412 in 2008, "a drop unparalleled in Latin America",
according to the Brookings Institute.
'Surprising' results
"The
Venezuelan numbers are surprising," Andromachi Tseloni, professor of
criminology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, told Al Jazeera.
"Inequality is [normally] highly correlated to murder rates. I haven't
seen another country where inequality has dropped sharply and homicides have
risen sharply."
Venezuela
is now described as "upper middle income" by the World Bank, but it
has a far worse murder rate than Haiti -the poorest country in the western
hemisphere.
So,
if people are more equal and generally better off economically, why are murders
rising at an alarming rate?
"Political
polarisation [between supporters and opponents of the Chavez government],
institutional impunity among the police, justice system and inside prisons, a
massive circulation of weapons, poor illumination in public areas, alcohol
consumption, drug trafficking and organised crime," are all responsible,
Cedeno, the sociologist, told Al Jazeera.
Between
1999 and 2011, the Bolivarian Republic experienced more than 144,294 murders,
according to Paz Activa, a security organisation, and the murder rate has
increased more than three-fold since Chavez took office.
"Security
is the most important thing for me," Juan Ramirez, a student carrying a
skateboard in Caracas told Al Jazeera. "I have been robbed and the police
didn't do anything."
Police
incompetence and corruption is nothing new in Venezuela, or other parts of
Latin America. Government critics, however, believe the notion of "class
war" espoused by the far-left has taken impunity to new levels.
In
poor areas, street gangs are sometimes allied to the socialist party, acting as
pro-government thugs while the police turn a blind eye to their criminal
exploits, the political opposition says. One street gang leader in Barrio 23 de
Enero, an area notorious for gang violence, expressed interest in doing an
interview, but later declined, apparently because he "had a meeting at the
ministry of defence".
'Transition' period
"Everything
in our judicial system [can be bought] for the right price," Adriana
Vigilanza, a politically connected lawyer and government critic, told Al
Jazeera. "Socialism is only present in Chavez's speeches, but the cruelest
capitalism is present in our jails."
Many
of the country's penitentiaries are essentially controlled by inmates, who can
run their criminal operations from jail.
Government
supporters acknowledge crime is a problem and say they are working to combat it
while improving the lives of average citizens by redistributing the country's
oil wealth and reducing poverty.
"The
private media [which is anti-Chavez] highlights crime to an enormous
degree," Greg Wilpert, author of Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The
History and Policies of the Chavez Presidency, told Al Jazeera. "It is an
area the government has neglected" he said as it was "generally
assumed that decreasing poverty would decrease crime".
"That
didn't work… and the government started developing a new national police
force."
The
new police force is part of Venezuela's massive political transition, as the
country consolidates "21st century socialism" by expropriating some
businesses, opening universities and forging new international relations with
countries such as Iran.
Opponents
of the government deplore these developments, but they lost October's election
by a significant margin, meaning the majority of the population seems to back
the moves. For criminal justice, however, this transition could be problematic.
"In
a stable democracy, or a stable dictatorship, citizens and [government]
agencies know the rules," Tseloni said. "When things are changing,
there are more opportunities to do things you wouldn't normally do."
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