Venezuela’s unending tale of murder and sorrow
By: Oakland Ross 
The Star
 March 22, 2014

LEO RAMIREZ / AFP/GETTY IMAGES Police have long served as instruments of intimidation, not crime prevention

Beleaguered by some of the worst stats for violent crime in the world, this oil-rich South American nation faces both fear and political conflict

CARACAS, VENEZUELA—For a few fleeting moments, you might almost have convinced yourself that Venezuela was not a deeply splintered land.

Granted, the source for that brief impression of unity was a horrible and unnerving crime — the cold-blooded murder of a TV actress and former beauty queen, along with her husband, both shot to death in their car. Their 5-year-old daughter, Maya, suffered a bullet wound to the leg but survived.

The woman’s name was Monica Spear and her death this past January — along with that of her spouse, British-born Thomas Berry — seemed to blanket the entire country in a shroud of sorrow and mourning that made no distinctions among economic classes or political ideologies.

Instead, almost all Venezuelans seemed shocked by the double murder, a crime at once senseless and yet painfully emblematic of their country’s ongoing troubles with shiftless young men packing illegal guns.

Spear’s killing was the result of a botched robbery, and its grisly conclusion highlighted for the umpteenth time the almost gratuitous nature of violence in South America’s most crime-ridden country, a territory where pistol-toting thugs are as likely to pull a trigger as they are to heave a shrug, and with about the same degree of moral compunction in either case.

For a raft of reasons, not all of them well understood, Venezuela is burdened by a scorching homicide rate. Think of Mexico, a country notorious for its drug-fuelled carnage — 80,000 dead in just seven years — then multiply the Mexican murder rate by four.

That’s Venezuela.

Compared to Venezuela, Mexico is practically an oasis of peace, as Monica Spear sadly discovered on a dark night in January.

Crowned Miss Venezuela in 2004, Spear had more recently won considerable success as an actress in Venezuelan telenovelas.

In the immediate aftermath of her death, almost all of her compatriots shared the same sense of outrage and seemed to speak with a single, unified voice, a rare occurrence in a country split smack down the middle between those who fervently support the socialist revolution launched by late Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chavez and those who are dead set against it.

“The fight against violence has to involve all the authorities, so the criminals know they’ll face the full rigour of the law, because we’ve had enough already,” stormed Nicolas Maduro, who took over as the country’s president following Chavez’s premature death from cancer last March.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Henrique Capriles also spoke out against the climate of violence that at times threatens to overwhelm his country.

Addressing Maduro in a post on Twitter, Capriles proposed that the two sides “put aside our profound differences and unite ourselves against insecurity, a single bloc.”

This seeming show of solidarity provided a bracing tonic for Venezuela’s 30 million polarized souls, at least while it lasted, and that was not long.

Ignited by fury over the attempted rape of a university student in the western city of San Cristobal, a spreading fire of at times violent protests raged across Venezuela’s major cities in mid-February and has continued to inflame many parts of the country.

There is little talk of Venezuelan solidarity now, as mainly student protesters erect makeshift barricades in the streets and attempt to defend them against police.

At least 25 people have lost their lives in the demonstrations so far and hundreds more have been injured. The dead include Antonio Cermeno, 44, a former championship boxer, who was kidnapped and murdered on Feb. 25 — another crime with no apparent purpose other than an appetite for bloodshed and bedlam.

The protesters cite a diversity of grievances, including stubborn shortages of consumer goods, skyrocketing inflation and government repression, as well as their country’s pervasive climate of insecurity and fear.

Albeit imperfectly, the troubles tend to reflect an ideological fault line that has divided Venezuelans more or less in half ever since Chavez stormed to power 15 years ago, setting the oil-rich country on a divisive course toward “Bolivarian revolution,” a reference to Simon Bolivar, the 19th-century South American nationalist.

Then and now, the anti-government protesters mostly represent Venezuela’s middle or privileged classes, while the poor — the principal beneficiaries of the revolution’s largesse in housing, health care and education — have mainly sat the protests out.

Still, if there is a uniting factor, it has to do with Venezuela’s searing rate of violent crime, including kidnappings, armed robberies and homicides, a deadly phenomenon that predated Chavez’s ascent to the presidency in 1999 but that worsened dramatically during his 14 years in power and does not seem to be diminishing.

“In theory, crime is not a partisan issue,” says Eric Olson, associate director of the Latin America program at the Wilson Center in Washington. “It’s an issue of discontent across the board in Venezuela.”

If anything, it is supporters of the government who have the most to fear from pistol-wielding thugs roaring through the streets at night on motorcycles, the transport of choice for Venezuelan criminals. After all, most of the killings — 24,763 last year alone, by one count — take place in poor neighbourhoods and involve criminals murdering each other.

“The deaths are very heavily skewed toward young men in barrios,” says George Ciccariello-Maher, a Venezuela expert at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

But innocent people are often caught in the crossfire, while wealthier Venezuelans are particularly susceptible to street robberies and to a common Latin American criminal manoeuvre known as secuestro expres — or express kidnapping — in which prosperous individuals in possession of bank cards are marched from one ATM to another in a series of coerced cash withdrawals that continues until their credit limits max out.

But theft is one thing, and murder is another — and it is Venezuela’s homicide rate that terrifies people most, whatever their income or class background.

Consider the numbers.

According to Roberto Briceno-Leon, head of a monitoring agency called the Venezuela Violence Observatory, the country’s national murder rate stands at 79 homicides for every 100,000 population, a figure that places Venezuela among the five most murderous states on Earth. The corresponding statistic for Canada is 1.6. The global average rate is 6.9. The murder rate in neighbouring Colombia, a country long infamous for violent crime, is 31.

“This is a reality that has been increasing in the last 15 years,” Briceno-Leon told TV news channel NTN24 in January, shortly after Monica Spears was shot dead. “We’re talking about a situation that is very grave and lamentable for the country.”

Some dispute his figures.

“Be careful about the actual data,” says Ciccariello-Maher, who tends to sympathize with the Maduro government. “The numbers thrown around these days are political.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not an incredibly dangerous country, which it is,” he says.

Disagreement about numbers may largely be blamed on the government, which has stopped compiling figures for public consumption. It has also barred Venezuelan media from reproducing images that depict violence and aggressively restricts the ability of news outlets to report on crime and protest.

“A better response would be to publish more accurate rates,” says Ciccariello-Maher.

Venezuela does not have an especially violent history — or not by South American standards. There is no Venezuelan equivalent of La Violencia, the 18-year orgy of killing that tormented Colombia from 1948 onward.

What Venezuela does have is an array of weak or broken-down institutions, including its penitentiary system, its police and its judiciary.

“More than 60 per cent of those in prison are waiting to be sentenced,” says Rafael Uzcategui, a researcher at Provea, a Caracas-based human-rights monitor. “In many cases of sentencing, the time waiting to be sentenced is greater than the sentence itself.”

That’s unjust, of course, but it’s also deeply counterproductive in a country where imprisonment, far from reducing crime, merely breeds more and better criminals.

“The jails in this country are like universities for crime,” says Uzcategui.

Meanwhile, he says, Venezuela’s judges tend to be political toadies, selected not for their technical competence but for their willingness to toe a partisan line, a tradition that did not begin with Chavez but that continued and maybe worsened under his rule.

“The process of politicization (of the judiciary) really became more pronounced under Chavez in the 1990s and 2000s,” says Olson. “Their jobs depended on their not crossing the executive.”

As for the police, they have long served as instruments for political intimidation rather than crime prevention, a tradition that is only now changing, and only very slowly, with the establishment of a national police organization — the Bolivarian National Police — that has at least some claim to professional competence.

Even so, approximately 90 per cent of Venezuelan homicides go unsolved, according to Briceno-Leon.

The shock waves of Colombia’s troubles have long been felt in Venezuela. Paramilitary bands on the right and guerrilla armies on the left have routinely crossed the border, bringing havoc with them.

“Especially in western Venezuela, the spillover is significant,” says Ciccariello-Maher.

The socialist revolution launched under Chavez has spawned armed groups of its own, bands of men known as colectivos. Initially formed to drive drug dealers out of impoverished neighbourhoods, they are now reviled by opposition supporters, who see them as thuggish, pro-government enforcers. They have been blamed for at least some of the bloodshed that has mottled the protests.

Venezuela is not the only Latin American nation grappling with explosive rates of violent crime. El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras all face similar challenges, as does Jamaica. In those countries, however, the lofty murder statistics are produced in large measure by a combination of illegal drugs and organized criminal gangs.

In Venezuela, the causes of the violence seem both more disparate and also less clear. Still, drugs and local mafias do increasingly play a part.

“Venezuela does have drug issues,” says Olson. “It’s a transshipment point. A lot of (drug-laden) planes take off from western Venezuela, headed for Central America or Mexico.”

According to Uzcategui, Venezuela’s emerging outlaw gangs are mostly run out of the country’s jails by seasoned criminals known as pranes (pronounced “PRAH-nays”) who typically have the run of the facilities, enjoy access to cellphones and the Internet, and hold enough power to strike illicit deals or order hits far beyond the prison walls.

“The gangs respond to the leadership in prison,” says Uzcategui. “The control of criminal organizations comes from the prisons.”

To some, it seems surprising that Chavez’s socialist revolution has yet to yield any reduction in criminal violence. In fact, the turmoil has only grown worse, contradicting the standard liberal theory that better living standards ought to produce a safer, more law-abiding society.

In Venezuela, it hasn’t worked out that way.

“People don’t stop murdering just because the stats say they are not starving anymore,” says Ciccariello-Maher.

In the wake of Monica Spear’s murder, the Maduro government has embarked on a national disarmament campaign and promoted tougher police action against criminals, but many Venezuelans are skeptical.

For one thing, the revolution led by Chavez was fuelled in part by fierce resentment of the country’s traditionally heavy-handed police forces.

“The Bolivarian revolution cannot have a repressive police because that is what it was formed to stand against,” says Ciccariello-Maher.

Besides, ham-fisted police behaviour will merely pack more people into overcrowded prisons.

As for disarmament, it certainly sounds like a good idea, but it is likely to be a very hard sell in a country as riddled with illegal weaponry as Venezuela.

True, the country’s bars, restaurants and liquor stores now feature large signs declaring each of these premises to be a “zona libre de armas” — an arms-free zone — but so what?

After all, hardened criminals are notorious for doing anything and everything except what they are told.

“The mafias are going to have weapons regardless,” says Ciccariello-Maher. “They will have access to weapons.”

In any case, when Maduro lectures Venezuelans on the evils of owning firearms, he is adopting a perilously hypocritical position, for his government evidently condones the gun-brandishing colectivos that patrol the country’s urban barrios and serve at times as ad hoc shock troops.

“For us, it’s a contradiction,” says Uzcategui.

In the sorrowful case of Monica Spear, Venezuelan police say they have so far arrested five suspects, including one or more minors.

It’s a start — or it could be — but there is a long way to go before crime rates improve in Venezuela, especially given the country’s deep-seated partisan divide, not to mention the protests that continue to rage through its cities.

“Crime affects Maduro supporters and Capriles supporters equally,” says Olson at the Wilson Center in Washington. “It could be common ground for working together.”

It could. But it probably won’t.

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