Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population

VENEZUELA: Violent Death a Young Man’s Burden

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 24 2005 (IPS) - A few days before he passed away, Juancho confessed to IPS that he had chosen to die by the age of 25 if that was the price he had to pay to live among his people in Cartanal, a shantytown on the outskirts of the Venezuelan capital named for the houses made from cardboard (“carton” in Spanish) by its first settlers.

“Death is just a sigh,” he maintained, and his own came at the tragically early age of 24. He lived most of his young life with a gun in his hand, dropping out of school in his early teens to devote himself to petty crimes like mugging, theft and an occasional stint dealing drugs.

To escape the wrath of enemy gangs, who divvied up control of the neighbourhood, Juancho (a pseudonym) would occasionally leave town and spend some time in another part of the country.

But one day he decided he no longer wanted to keep running, and it wasn’t long before a rival local “warlord” put a price on his head: 2,500 dollars.

The “contract” was carried out, and no one was ever charged with the young man’s murder, his family reported.

In Venezuela, a country of 26 million people, there are 10,000 homicides every year, “and the sector of the population that accounts for the largest number of deaths is that of young men between the ages of 15 and 24 in poor and working class urban areas,” Vicmar Morillo of the human rights organisation Provea told IPS.

Police investigations of this relentless carnage – there were 46 murders during the weekend of Nov. 19-20 alone – reveal that many of these deaths represent acts of revenge between competing criminal gangs. Nine out of every 10 homicides are committed with guns.

“A study by the Social Sciences Laboratory at the Central University of Venezuela showed that 83 percent of murder victims are killed near their homes, in their own neighbourhoods,” sociologist Verónica Zubillaga commented to IPS.

While the last decades of the 20th century saw a concerted effort by non-governmental organisations to combat violence against women, resulting in major legal and social advances, “today in Venezuela we are facing a serious problem of intra-gender violence, exercised by males with greater power over those who are more vulnerable,” said Zubillaga.

The situation of male adolescents is particularly dramatic. Of the 9,800 homicides registered by the police in Venezuela in 2004, 1,110 of the victims were under 18 years of age, sociologist Josbelk González of the Central University’s Centre For Peace told IPS.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) joined forces with the non-governmental organisation Voces Nuevas (New Voices) to draw together a group of around 50 young people from Caracas and hear their opinions on the U.N. Millennium Development Goals with regard to issues like sexual and reproductive health, violence and youth participation.

“We discovered that there are many forms of violence and that they are influenced by a range of factors, which is why violence must be addressed with an integrated approach. Civil society organisations and the youth and student movement can have a positive impact, particularly with respect to education,” Oscar Fuentes, one of the participants in the round table discussions, remarked to IPS.

For Zubillaga, “the first step is to get the issue out into the open, to discuss it. Violence takes many forms, and it is very likely that the young people caught up in this whirlwind were once children intimidated by armed teenagers or adults who lived nearby, in a context of unequal power relations,” she noted.

“This is why, when the degree of humiliation becomes unbearable, these kids go out and get guns themselves, and create new gangs to take part in the violence that has long ceased to be a monopoly of the state,” she added.

The extrajudicial executions that have been reported in some regions of Venezuela, alongside the emergence of para-police “extermination teams” or death squads, do not serve as a disincentive to criminal activity, said Zubillaga, noting that the kind of policing that is needed to curb violence is one that is community-based and “skilled in the art of negotiation.”

According to Fuentes, numerous participants in the discussion groups made it clear that “more police officers riding around on motorcycles are not going to fix the problem.”

For her part, Zubillaga stressed that “in the climate of political polarisation that Venezuela has experienced, high levels of intolerance and the rhetoric used by some actors add new elements to an already highly charged situation.”

Yolimar Hernández, a secondary school student who participated in the discussion group, suggested that schools and the UNFPA could “help to develop materials that could be used by youth groups to strengthen families and promote peace.”

Mariana Bigio, a law student who belongs to Voces Nuevas, told IPS that “during the round tables we discussed the fact that in a country like this, ‘thousands’ of laws and regulations are passed, but young people aren’t aware of their rights, and those rights are violated when they are victims of violence right under the nose of the authorities.”

A possible solution, said Bigio, “could be for the government, civil society organisations and agencies like UNFPA to launch more and better educational campaigns, because the more education we have, the greater our chances of overcoming violence, and at the same time, if I live in an extremely violent setting, my chances of getting an education are more limited.”

Jesús Robles, a UNFPA representative in Venezuela, announced that the U.N. agency is planning to develop programmes for 2006 aimed at raising awareness on human rights among the youngest sectors of the population. “This is a global policy,” he added, “because practically half of the world’s population, or around three billion people, are under the age of 25.”