Violent crime reflected in one of if not the highest per capita murder rate in the world continues to hog headlines even during the festive season in Venezuela – and despite the government's best efforts to keep a lid on the news as much as the bad guys.
Interior and Justice Minister Tarek El Aissami claimed that crime in Metropolitan Caracas this month so far was 22% down on the same period a year before. But, as has by now become the custom, he didn't issue any figures to back up that claim.
Just why the government subscribes to the absurd notion that reporters will simply take the minister's word at face value remains unclear. If the purpose is to lower the profile on crime reporting, the ban merely adds to the tendency of the more reptilian reporters on the crime beat to dig out the facts in their own way. It's a bit more time consuming, but they've gotten into the habit of going down to the city morgue and counting the corpses. Government attempts to get officials at the morgue to seal their lips have so far been of no avail.
The latest rough count is that around 500 people, most of them young males, have landed up dead by violent means at the morgue this month so far. The number is still climbing and is only taken as a rough indication of what's happening in the darker side of city life.
Some districts of the capital have long been notorious for the murderous tendencies of some of their inhabitants. In Antímano, a poor district of south-east Caracas bedeviled by no-go zones after dark, there were two double homicides last Sunday.
In one case, two young cousins were drinking and chatting with friends in the early hours of the morning.. They should have gone inside: two gunmen turned up on a motorbike and shot one of them stone cold dead without uttering a word. The other cousin tried to run for his life, but the killers gave chase. They shot him first in the leg and then pumped him full of lead as he lay bleeding. The two cousins are said to have had some sort of argument with the killers. Not far away, there'd also been a spat at somebody's birthday party. Two young men left to walk home but were trapped in a narrow stairway and were repeatedly shot. Presumably, the villains were out to make sure.
Outside the capital, an inspector with the state security service, Disip, was no safer when a couple of gunmen on motorbikes went on the armed attack in Carrizal, a town in Miranda state. He and his companion were mown down in a hail of bullets on a street called El Milagro (The Miracle), which didn't seem to work for either of them.
Although the government has refused to provide homicide statistics for 3 years now, murders are running at 130 per 100 000 people in Caracas -- versus 5.7 per 100,000 in the US. The murders are not just confined to Caracas, however. Outside of Caracas, in Carabobo -- a state with 2 million people for example -- around 1634 people had been murdered from January to October. There have been 9 Ministers of Justice in the 10 years that Chavez has been in power.
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