From time to time I talk about how crime, specially violent crime, has increased dramatically under Chavismo. The murder rate in Venezuela has tripled since Hugo Chávez is the president of Venezuela and his ministers keep repeating time after time how they are succeeding in the fight against crime. They keep mentioning crime has dropped 40%, 50%, 75% since they are in power, which is just shameless lies (we have had about 9 ministers of Interior and Justice since February 1999, since Chávez started to work as a president). They sometimes pick up a week where crime drops and consider that a proof of a definite drop or they compare chosen isolated weeks from two years (just those where there is an occassional drop within a general increase).
Nobody can ask ministers difficult questions about where they get their statistics, about how those statistics compare to the "big successes" of their other Chavista predecessors. The farce goes on and thousands of Venezuelans get murdered every month.
This is the latest update. In my region, Carabobo, a state with 2 million people, around 1634 people have been murdered from January to October. If the pattern goes on like this, next month there will be over 182 people killed in that state only and in December we will have over 220. There are similar murder rates in many other parts of Venezuela...even those regions that were relatively safe some years ago, like Mérida or Margarita, are incredibly dangerous now.
I am snatching this from Alpha, who has a great Dutch blog about Venezuela. This is an advertisement for special transport between Maiquetías Airport and Caracas, in an armoured vehicle, for businessmen and other people afraid of going through what normal Venezuelans have to go through day after day.
This makes me so sad. I may need to 'snag' that graphic if you do not mind.
ReplyDeleteSure, JM, if you mentioned the blog with a link in the comment you do. :-)
ReplyDeleteI am taking the references about murders from the police reports as published in Notitarde. They usually appear on the 2 of every month (about the previous month). Unfortunately, the articles are now only available on the day (under the macabre sucesos) and their historical search is not working. But those numbers are very real. These people published the names and details of the murdered people (as far as those are identifiable), the reports come from the local CICPC. The national one apparently is not allowed to published national records since 2002, so journalists would need to work in coordination across Venezuela, something they don't do (they hardly do it abroad because of time constraints and other things, they do it much less so in Venezuela because of that and much more).
I do not have the numbers pre 2004 but I know the big jump in criminality happened in Carabobo since end of 1999 as I have lots of friends and relatives in the region.
I will perhaps put some more graphs about the probabilities of getting murdered by municipality.
The ad below comes from Alpha.
ReplyDelete