The military regime and its murders

Brito García was a Venezuelan a small agricultural producer who just died a couple of days ago during a hunger striking, fighting for his rights. You can read more about the whole, very complex story in Miguel's or Daniel's posts. He had been robbed of his land by the big landowner Chávez, the same one who has been supported by many other military men with huge haciendas, as Rodríguez Chacín (I will talk about Rodríguez Chacín in a coming post).

Now the military regime is investigating García's family for "inducing suicide". You can read about that here.

As I have written a zillion times, crime, specially violent crime, has skyrocketed in Venezuela since 1998. The murder rate, in 1998 about 19x100,000 per year and with that a bit below South America's average, has climbed to about 70 murders per 100,000 per year now. The military regime decided to stop sending murder data to United Nations (UN Office on Crime and Drugs) in 2002. Until then you can read there the climbing figures. After that you can only do that if you go to the mortuaries and the regional police offices and do the maths yourself.

And yet the darling figure of such EU politicians as Sara Wagenknecht and Livingston has the gall to say that is not true, that Venezuela's crime has not increased and that it is not worse than in Colombia, in Brazil, in Mexico, in Chile.

Even governments in Mexico and elsewhere have the half-decency to recognize when the number of murders has increased. Chávez does not. He will not recognize anything that doesn't suit him. He keeps following the "principles" of his youth, when he left the head of a dead donkey in front of the door of a girl who did like him. He won't ever accept any story but his.