VENEZUELA: Smile, This Is Not a Hold-up

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jul 6 2004 (IPS) - Taxi and bus drivers serving poor outlying districts of the Venezuelan capital have started filming their passengers and searching them with metal detectors, in a desperate attempt at fighting the wave of robberies on public transport vehicles. “Smile Ma’am, cooperate, it's for the security of all,” says Antonio Montoya, who works on buses that serve dormitory cities on the southeast side of Caracas.

Montoya, who is working as a cameraman, pretends to be filming someone else while actually pointing his lense at two young men sitting in the back, who he considers suspicious.

“Since we started filming, the number of assaults has diminished,” Montoya told IPS as he put away his handicam. “Several times groups of guys have returned from where they came or decided not to take the bus, to avoid being filmed. I believe those were robberies or deaths that were prevented.”

Dilia, a passenger sitting nearby, tells of one such case. As she was riding from Caracas to the nearby Caribbean coast, two individuals refused to submit to a metal detector wand search or to be filmed. They fled, and were chased down and caught by the police, who found they were carrying firearms.

The microbuses that serve Caracas and the larger buses that travel to outlying cities are frequently targeted by thieves. ”Among the 2,500 buses serving the southwestern part of the capital, we have up to 50 robberies a day,” said one of the heads of the bus driver union, David Bonalde.

Whenever a driver is killed, hundreds of buses block traffic and practically bring the city to a standstill in protests. “More than 20 drivers have died this year at the hands of thieves,” complained Bonalde.

Not to mention the risk to passengers. “The most dangerous route is Libertador avenue. I was mugged three times last year. I don't ride those microbuses anymore,” said Amanda Delgado, a manicurist who commutes from the westside of Caracas to the east.

Buses on Libertador avenue have to pass through a tunnel, where they are hidden from view. In that stretch, it is common to hear “Everybody freeze. This is a hold-up!”

The robbers steal the passengers’ money, cell-phones, watches and even items of clothing. They also take identity cards and other documents that the victims will have to swim through a sea of red tape to replace. The armed robberies are characterised by aggression and cursing, and women are sometimes sexually assaulted.

According to police reports, 894 homicides, 2,300 corporal injuries, 6,900 violent thefts, 5,000 robberies, and 39 kidnappings were committed in the first six months of the year in Caracas, a city of nearly five million.

Although a majority of the murders involved firearms, the police only arrested 95 people in the first half of the year for illegal carrying of weapons.

The projections point to more than 2,000 homicides in Caracas for all of 2004, similar to last year's total. But the phenomenon is not limited to the capital, Marcos Tarre, an expert on security questions, pointed out to IPS. “Last year 11,330 people were murdered” in this country of 25 million, he said.

That figure “represented an 18 percent increase on 2002 levels, when the homicide rate had already risen 20 percent with respect to 2001. That amounts to 31 homicides a day, while there are five robberies an hour.”

Venezuela is in sixth place in Latin America and the Caribbean with 33 homicides per 100,000 population, according to Inter-American Development Bank statistics. It is surpassed by El Salvador, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala and Jamaica. But Caracas ranks third on the list of cities, with 133 murders per 100,000 population, only exceeded by Medellín, Colombia and Recife, Brazil.

According to Tarre, “filming the passengers raises questions of illegality, but it is a sign of the desperation of drivers and passengers in the face of the overwhelming crime. It is the equivalent of local residents in middle-class neighbourhoods who illegally block streets and access roads with barriers and control posts.”

“Some passengers are bothered by” the filming and metal detectors, “but most cooperate, because they understand that they are receiving a better-quality service,” said Edgar Centeno, a taxi driver who picks up clients at a shopping centre and who told IPS that he was ”assaulted five times by passengers with innocent-looking faces and couples pretending they were lovebirds.”

On the Aeroexpresos Ejecutivos line of luxury buses, which serve the country's interior, the head of security, Roberto Sánchez, said the passengers and their carry-on bags are searched, and there is a closed-circuit TV system that films the boarding of each unit.

Sometimes robbers try to hold up the wrong bus. In late June, a young man – Jesús Ramírez, 18 – who was holding the driver of a microbus on Libertador avenue at gunpoint while his three accomplices ordered the passengers to hand over their belongings, was shot and killed by a plain-clothed police officer riding the bus.

The three other delinquents fled, and were chased down by passengers, who caught one of them, a 16-year-old who they tied up using his own shoelaces and turned over to the police.