Saturday 24 January 2015

Murder in Chavista Venezuela

Here you can see the murders reported in the Central Venezuelan state of Carabobo from January 2006 up to December 2014. The data comes from Notitarde. As this newspaper has just been sold out under governmental pressure, you can expect those numbers to drop or completely disappear. The Chavista government said it wanted an "impartial press".

The murder rate in Carabobo, like in all of Venezuela, rose dramatically from 1999 up to 2008. Since then numbers seem to have stabilize, although there is quite some discussion about what is really going on, as you can see here. I have discussed this issue with Dorothy Kronick in a couple of emails. My impression, based on projections from the Electoral Council data on voters is that if murder has reached its peak it is because of the demographic evolution: the amount of men in the most likely age range to be involved in murders also peaked about that time. Still, it might be too early to tell whether the murder epidemic has reached its maximum.

In any case, Venezuela now is just a shadow of what it was in 1998...and back then it was already in bad shape.

Time for a change?

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