Behind Venezuela's crime wave - police and Colombian narcos

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Eight million Venezuelans have voted to give Chavez another term to continue the Bolivarian revolution. Six million voted against, in a record turnout election that defied misleading reports in western media of a tight race. The number one concern of Venezuelans in recent years has been violent crime. Le Monde Diplomatique correspondent Maurice Lemoine wrote perceptively about this two years ago and identified three central problems. Police corruption and disorganisation - police are responsible for a significant part of the crimewave; Colombian narcos moving their business to Venezuela and bringing violence with it - is it a coincidence that as Colombia's crime rate falls, Venezuela's rises; and, paradoxically, rising living standards.

A new national police service is being created in Venezuela to replace the badly trained and semi-criminal old police forces. But prisons are still a violent nightmare (reforms are also underway), and murder and insecurity are worryingly prevalent. Some see a conspiracy at work to bring crime to the country, others a government failing to recognise that poverty reduction alone does not reduce crime in a culture of license and impunity. Criminals and narcos do it because the repressive hand of the pre-Chavez police force has to some extent been lifted. Torture and executions was the traditional way of dealing with criminals. In some parts of the country that may still be the case. When I lived in Venezuela in the mid-90s violence and guns were everywhere. Dealing with this problem is going to be one of the biggest challenges of the next presidential term.

Lemoine writes:

The poverty rate has fallen from around 60% to 23% over the last decade, and extreme poverty from 25% to 5%, but crime has soared. The government may have fallen into the trap of blaming violence on poverty alone: it has channelled all its energies into accelerated social programmes focusing on health, education and food (with some success) but has neglected insecurity, which was supposed to go away as conditions improved.
As in almost every Latin American country, the police are part of the problem, rather than the solution. “The difficulty,” said Soraya El Aschkar of the General Police Council, “is that we have not one police force but 135.” In federal, decentralised Venezuela, every governor and mayor has his own security force. There are no common rules, even on training, which is often entrusted to former members of the armed forces who create institutions that are more military than professional.

Then there are the narcos:

...thanks to the collusion of some elements of the police and the national guard, the Colombian drug trade is not only using Venezuela as a staging post on the way to the US or Africa but has also strengthened its hold on Caracas.
The scale of operations is huge. Marginalised youths are recruited with the offer of low price or even free (at first) cocaine. “We have seen a significant rise in consumption,” said a member of parliament, “and the indicators suggest a worrying number of teenagers are involved.” Once hooked, they burgle, rob, assault and kill to fund their drug habit. They become dealers but end up getting shot when they can’t pay their suppliers on time. They form gangs and fight for control of entire districts. “The turf wars between these imported networks,” I was told, “produce a lot of bodies, which is something the newspapers love.”
Could this simply be a natural result of the growth of international crime, which also affects Brazil and Central America, especially Mexico? Possibly.
The opposition and the media rejoice every time the US and Colombia claim (based on the testimony of supposed former guerrillas, whose identities are carefully concealed) that the leaders of the Colombian narcoguerrillas are in Venezuela. Yet they keep quiet about the revelations of Rafael García, former head of information technology at Colombia’s administrative security department (DAS, the intelligence arm of the president’s office). He does not hide his identity. Now in prison, García has revealed links between the DAS and extreme rightwing paramilitary organisations (the principals in the drug trade). He also claims that the former director of the DAS, Jorge Noguera, met paramilitaries and Venezuelan opposition leaders to plan the destabilisation of the Venezuelan government, and the assassination of Chávez.

It has long been known that paramilitary groups were present in the Venezuelan border states of Táchira, Apure and Zulia. In 2008 Últimas Noticias reported that the former head of the directorate of intelligence and prevention services (Disip), Eliézer Otaiza, had claimed around 20,000 Colombian paramilitaries were based in Venezuela and were involved in kidnappings, contract killings and drug trafficking. The Venezuelan press has said nothing on the issue, but on 31 January 2009 El Espectador, published in Bogotá, had the headline “The Black Eagles have flown to Venezuela” . The journalist Enrique Vivas reported that such groups controlled almost everything in Táchira, and even offered life insurance (except to members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, several of whom were assassinated this February and March).
With the collusion of the Zulia state police (controlled by opposition governors) the paramilitaries have, through violence or money lending, taken control of parts of Maracaibo and of local trade and small business in Las Playitas. I was told: “The authorities in Zulia organise a lot of‘peasant rallies’. Loads of them come over from Colombia – and don’t go back.”
In the state of Barinas, further into the Venezuelan interior, a resident told me: “We have never had so many Colombians. They buy up property and rent it out. When people have problems, they offer financial help. They behave like the narcos in Brazil. Violent crime has shot up to the kind of levels they have in Caracas.” I asked if the criminals might be Venezuelan, and how was it possible to distinguish between criminals and paramilitaries? “In the past, the Colombians never came here. They used to go to Caracas to find work. We never saw contract killings, massacres or kidnappings on this scale.”