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.”

Wikileaks reveals true scale of Colombian slaughter - 250,000

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Wikileaks Cables Reveal Killing Hits Record Levels -

by DANIEL KOVALIK

For years, it has been believed that Guatemala led the Hemisphere in mass slaughter in the modern era, with 200,000 victims in the 1980s – about 94% of them at the hands of the U.S.-backed state and its death squad allies. Very sadly, it appears that Colombia has shattered that record, and, as Wikileaks reveals, the U.S. is quite aware of this.

Thus, in a November 19, 2009 U.S. Embassy Cable, entitled, “2009-2010 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report,” the U.S. Embassy in Bogota acknowledges, as a mere aside, the horrific truth: 257,089 registered victims of the right-wing paramilitaries.  And, as Human Rights Watch just reported in its 2012 annual report on Colombia, these paramilitaries continue to work hand-in-glove with the U.S.-supported Colombian military.
Even for those of us deeply involved in Colombia, this figure is staggering.  The only time I saw such a figure before was in a book (Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror) which I recently reviewed on this site, and which cites one independent journalist for the claim that around 250,000 victims have been killed by the Colombian para-state.  This book further claims that this number has been artificially lowered through mass graves and Nazi-style crematoria.

It appears now that the U.S. has been quite aware of this death toll for over two years, though this knowledge has done nothing to change U.S. policy toward Colombia — which is slated to receive over $500 million in military and police aid from the U.S. in the next two years — and certainly did nothing to prevent the Obama Administration from seeking and gaining passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement last year.

And, much like Guatemala in the 1980’s, the violence in Colombia falls disproportionately on the indigenous population – another fact acknowledged by the U.S. Embassy in cables released by Wikileaks.   Moreover, this anti-indigenous violence is escalating.  Indeed, as the U.S. Embassy acknowledges in a February 26, 2010 Embassy Cable entitled, “Violence Against Indigenous Shows Upward Trend,” such violence is pushing 34 indigenous groups to the point of extinction.  This violence, therefore, can only be described as genocidal.

This 2010 cable explains that, “for the second consecutive year killings of indigenous increased,” with a 50% increase (to 106 killings) from 2008 to 2009.  The cable further explains that “[o]ther indicators of violence against indigenous also worsened in 2009.  According to ONIC [The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia], displacement rose by 20% (3,212 to 3,649), forced disappearance by over 100% (7 to 18), and threats by 3000% (10 to 314).  ONIC also reported an increase in forced recruitment of minors by all illegal armed groups, but did not provide an estimated number of cases.”

Moreover, while the Embassy explains that the left-wing FARC, by its own admission, was responsible for some of the violence against indigenous, the Embassy also acknowledges that it is the Colombian state and its paramilitary allies which are chiefly to blame for this violence.

Thus, the Embassy, relying on a study by anthropologist Esther Sanchez – a study itself funded by the U.S. government – notes that the militaries and the paramilitaries target the indigenous because they “often perceive indigenous as FARC collaborators because they co-exist on their territories”; and that it is the Colombian military’s very presence on indigenous land which “’brings the conflict to the backyard of the indigenous,’” thereby putting their lives and very existence at risk.   Still, the Embassy scoffs at the notion that the Colombian military should leave indigenous territory, characterizing this very request by the Awa indigenous tribe as “impractical.”

And, this is “impractical,” the Embassy forthrightly explains, because that territory must be captured for its vast resource wealth.  To wit, the U.S. Embassy explicitly acknowledges that “capital investments in the mining of hydrocarbons sectors” as well as “investments in rubber [and] palm oil” – that is, the very investments which U.S. military policy and the Free Trade Agreement are designed to promote – are leading directly to violence against indigenous persons.  This is so, the Embassy relates, because the indigenous peoples “are unlikely to abandon land which is considered sacred to their cultural identity.”   That is, they will not make way for capital exploitation voluntarily.

All of this reveals that the U.S. and Colombia continue to press forward with both military and economic policies which the U.S. itself recognizes are leading to genocide.  Indeed, as the U.S. Embassy itself recognizes, genocide is truly necessary for these policies to be carried out.

This puts a lie to any claims that the U.S. is interested in human rights.  Indeed, as the U.S. is poised to exclude Cuba from the Summit of the Americas on human rights grounds, it is the country hosting this Summit – Colombia – which, by any objective account, should be singled out for its uniquely bad human rights policies.  In truth, the U.S. itself, which is propping up Colombia’s brutal regime, should also be so singled out.  However, because the U.S. runs the world, this too would seem to be “impractical.”

Daniel Kovalik writing for Counterpunch