VENEZUELA-CRIME: Running Shoes, Horoscopes and Prison Massacres

By Estrella Gutiérrez Reprint | | Print |

Estrella Gutierrez

CARACAS, Oct 28 1996 (IPS) - In oil-rich Venezuela, where 80 percent of the population is dirt-poor, violent crime claimed the lives of 24 people, most of them young, over the weekend. Three were shot to death for their brand-name running shoes.

“I don’t understand what is happening to us. It is as if Caracas were under fire from some war without mercy,” the head of the city morgue, Jack Castro, said Monday.

Unofficial estimates put the number of illegal firearms among the country’s 22 million inhabitants at one million. Organised crime, drug trafficking and consumption are on the rise, experts say, leading to shoot-outs between gangs and drug dealers.

Analysts also point to a shortage of police, who are underpaid, while more than 20 people have been lynched by crowds in poor neighbourhoods over the past two years.

The Caracas bar association warned Monday that if things do not change, in five years there will be over 153,000 criminals and space for only 22,000 in the country’s prisons.

The sub-human conditions in Venezuela’s notoriously overcrowded prisons — where an average of one inmate a day is killed — claimed further victims last week, when 25 prisoners in a Caracas penitentiary were burnt to death by their guards after failing to file out of their cell fast enough.

But while the world was shocked by images of the burnt corpses, the president of Venezuela’s association of astrologists, Jose Bernardo Gomez, was being taken into custody for having predicted that 80-year-old President Rafael Caldera would not outlast 1997.

The order to arrest Gomez was issued by Interior Minister Jose Andueza, who thus helped an obscure prediction spread like wildfire. “Thanks minister” was one of the astrologist’s first phrases after his release 48 hours later.

Gomez himself called it shameful that his country made headline news around the world on the same day for “the La Planta massacre and the detention of an astrologist because the government didn’t like one of his predictions.”

Eleven members of the military and one civilian have been arrested in connection with the massacre. The supreme court must decide what kind of court will process them, which threatens to lead to a freezing of the investigation.

The London-based rights organisation Amnesty International said the La Planta massacre “revealed the terrible prison conditions and systemmatic violations of the human rights of prisoners” in Venezuela.

The group concurred with a “march for life and against violence” by local humanitarian organisations and dozens of individuals on Saturday in urging that the crime not meet with impunity, frequently mentioned as a chronic ailment of the legal system here.

Gomez, meanwhile, has become a shooting star, like those he consults to predict the future.

And the government, which found it hard to stomach predictions made before a small local group of entrepreneurs and politicians and reported by only one local newspaper, now has to put up with Gomez’ bearded face peering out from all sorts of local and international publications while he elaborates on his dark forecasts.

“I will give up astrology if Caldera is still in power by Jun. 8,” said Gomez, who in his weekly astrological predictions has sucessfully forecast the triumph of the president and many other public figures.

While the government wrings its hands over Gomez’ predictions, family members of some of the 1,700 inmates of La Planta — designed to house 700 — complain that their sons and brothers figure neither among the living nor the dead, although officially only one corpse has yet to be identified.