Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

VENEZUELA: Murderous Weekends

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Mar 17 2003 (IPS) - Two-year-old Nairobi Sabino, who was shot in the chest and killed in a shoot-out between police and suspected delinquents on a recent Saturday night in a Caracas slum, was just one of 883 victims this year of ”weekend bullets.”

Those who can avoid going about at night respect a sort of informal curfew in Caracas and other large Venezuelan cities on the weekends, when the numer of murders surges. Death tolls of more than 100 in just 48 hours have been reported on four weekends so far this year.

The homicide rate in this South American country is 33 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Central University Centre for Peace and Human Rights.

Venezuela has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, after El Salvador (139 per 100,000 population), civil war-torn Colombia (80 per 100,000), Honduras (60 per 100,000), South Africa (56 per 100,000), and Russia (20 per 100,000).

According to Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) statistics, the average homicide rate is 2.6 per 100,000 in Canada, 10 per 100,000 in the United States, and 5 per 100,000 in Chile and Uruguay, while the global average is five per 100,000.

A total of 9,240 homicides were reported last year in this country of 23.2 million, up from 7,960 in 2001 and 8,022 in 2000. Between 1992 and 2002, the population grew 15 percent, while the number of murders nearly tripled.

A total of more than 230,000 crimes of all kinds are registered by the police every year, one for every 100 inhabitants. In 1990, one of every 100 crimes was a homicide, a proportion that has climbed to more than 3.5 for every 100 since 2000.

In Caracas, a city of four million, some 2,000 murders were reported last year, 900 of which occurred in the 12 most dangerous of a total of nearly 1,000 slums.

The murder rate in Caracas – three times the national rate of 33 per 100,000, according to the Central University Centre for Peace and Human Rights – outstrips even that of Washington, D.C., which is known as the ”murder capital” of the United States due to an average homicide rate of 50 per 100,000 population.

”It is not just a question of a growth tendency rooted in social and economic problems. The key element is the overall political situation in the country,” physician Roberto Briceño-León, at the Central University’s Social Sciences Laboratory, told IPS.

Part of the surge in crime ”has arisen from the impoverishment of the country,” where real wages have declined steadily since 1978, and Gross Domestic Product shrank 8.9 percent last year, ”as well as from problems like overcrowding,” said Briceño-León.

But, he added, ”the decisive cause is the state’s difficulties in exercising its authority.”

Since December 2001, the government of President Hugo Chávez has been caught up in a fierce political battle with a broad opposition coalition that has held a two-month general strike and massive protest demonstrations demanding that his term be cut short. In addition, Chávez was removed from office for two days in an April 2002 coup d’etat.

”The adequate doses of law enforcement cannot be applied with audited, dismantled or poorly-equipped police forces, as is the case in parts of Caracas and the interior, and amidst a tolerance of impunity, or while the violent political climate encourages permissiveness,” said Briceño-León.

”We are not looking at a circumstantial increase in crime and homicides, but at a phenomenon in which the state has a greater, more obvious responsibility, due as much to action as to failure to act,” said Carlos Correa with the Venezuelan Programme of Education-Action in Human Rights (PROVEA), an influential rights group.

PROVEA says the government has shown serious shortcomings in the legal terrain, with new laws that have not yet been codified or implemented, plans and programmes that are interrupted and modified due to frequent reshuffling of the cabinet, and crisis in the police system, where police forces are audited, go on strike, or work with no coordination among themselves whatsoever.

A total of 95 police forces – 71 municipal and 24 state – are registered with the Ministry of the Interior and Justice, and Venezuela has no national police, because a bill creating such a body has been put on hold.

However, the judicial and secret police are active throughout Venezuelan territory.

The situation has fuelled the increase in ”new categories” of homicide, such as murders of innocent bystanders like Nairobi, who are killed by stray bullets in shoot-outs between police and suspects, or between criminal gangs.

The victims of gang warfare figure in the weekly police reports as victims of ”score-settling” – a classification that effectively forestalls any investigation in the great majority of cases.

Another recent phenomenon are death squads or ”extermination groups”, presumably made up of off-duty police officers, which gained visibility after one such group killed at least 68 people in the northwestern state of Portuguesa, 350 kms southwest of Caracas.

That case was investigated by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and ”has metastasized,” said Correa, who pointed out that PROVEA documented death squad activity in the northwestern state of Zulia and the north-central state of Aragua last year.

In January, the press reported that the deaths of seven suspected criminals in a sting operation by police on the northeastern island of Margarita showed signs that the suspects were the victims of extrajudicial executions, rather than a shoot-out as reported.

PROVEA documented 175 extrajudicial executions or deaths as a result of police brutality in the October 2001-September 2002 period.

More recently, political violence has been added to that panorama. A number of people, including police officers, have been killed in street demonstrations – including both anti-government protests and pro-Chávez rallies.

Three soldiers with ties to a group of anti-Chávez military officers who for months have occupied a Caracas square in protest against the government, as well as a young woman accompanying them, were killed in mid-February.

The group of dissident officers, most of whom are retired, claim the murders were politically motivated, but the judicial police are working on the hypothesis of a crime of passion.