Another thing Hugo Chavez has to answer for is a horrific surge in Venezuela’s murder rate:
ONE of Hugo Chávez’s lesser-known feats since taking over as Venezuela’s leader in 1999 is to have presided over a tripling of the annual homicide rate—and that’s according to the official statistics. Last year more than 13,000 people were killed in a country of 27m, producing a murder rate of 48 per 100,000, the second highest in the world (after El Salvador). In neighbouring Colombia, a country plagued by guerrilla war and drug violence, the rate was 40 per 100,000.
Not surprisingly, violent crime far outweighs the other worries of Venezuelans. Three-quarters of them describe it as the worst problem now facing the country, polls show. “The first thing we need to do”, says José Vicente Rangel, Mr Chávez’s former vice-president, “is confess our failure.”
He claims that the government, opposition, media and criminologists are all equally to blame. But, as critics point out, Mr Chávez controls most of the security forces, as well as the prisons; the courts and the prosecution service are in effect branches of the executive, too. Luis Cedeño, head of Incosec, a public-security think-tank, accuses the government of showing a “total lack of political interest” in tackling crime. . .
Many homicides never get into the official statistics. They include those killed while supposedly “resisting arrest”. Yet in exchanges of fire between police and alleged criminals, 39 suspects are killed for every policeman, suggesting not much “resistance” is taking place. Another large (and growing) group of suspicious deaths excluded from the official data are those that have not yet been categorised—and probably never will be—though most are likely to result from murder. . .
Caracas is currently the second most dangerous city in the Americas (after San Salvador). Even by the official figures, the murder rate is 130 per 100,000; Mr Cedeño says the true figure is a staggering 166. One reason, he argues, is impunity. On average, only three of every 100 murderers are actually sentenced, he points out. Another is a presidential discourse that emphasises class warfare and has sometimes excused crime as a response to social inequality.
For perspective, the murder rate in Detroit, the worst in America, was 47.3 in 2006, so Venezuela as a whole is more dangerous than America’s worst city. Caracas is over three times worse. The annualized rate of death-by-violence in Baghdad for the first nine months of 2006 (near the height of the sectarian violence) was around 300. So Caracas is about half as bad as Baghdad at its worst. In the first half of 2008, Iraq had an annualized death-by-violence rate of 27.6.
(ASIDE: The Iraq 2008 figure is computed from the Brookings Institution report of 18Jul2008. Reliable figures on Baghdad are hard to find. I did my Baghdad 2006 calculation by subtracting the cumulative figures in two Brookings Institution reports, 23Feb2006 and 31May2007. I was unable to find any figures on Baghdad 2008.)
The article also reports that Venezuela’s latest interior minister has “achieved” a 27% drop in homicides in the traditional way, by changing the way the figures are calculated.
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