[LINK] "Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why"

[rfmcdonald]

If accurate--there's at least one Latin Americanist reading this who can confirm--this New York Times article suggests nothing so much as a breakdown of Venezuelan society: a murder rate surpassing the Colombian, the South African, even the Iraqi has to be symptomatic of some wider issue. Certainly the impact of this crime on the relatively deprived people who can't really insulate themselves from its effect has to weigh highly negatively on the nominal beneficiaries of Chavez' regime.

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

[. . .]

Venezuela is struggling with a decade-long surge in homicides, with about 118,541 since President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a group that compiles figures based on police files. (The government has stopped publicly releasing its own detailed homicide statistics, but has not disputed the group’s numbers, and news reports citing unreleased government figures suggest human rights groups may actually be undercounting murders).

There have been 43,792 homicides in Venezuela since 2007, according to the violence observatory, compared with about 28,000 deaths from drug-related violence in Mexico since that country’s assault on cartels began in late 2006.

Caracas itself is almost unrivaled among large cities in the Americas for its homicide rate, which currently stands at around 200 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela who directs the violence observatory.

That compares with recent measures of 22.7 per 100,000 people in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, and 14 per 100,000 in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. As Mr. Chávez’s government often points out, Venezuela’s crime problem did not emerge overnight, and the concern over murders preceded his rise to power.

The politicization of the judiciary, along with the disemployment and/or emigration of many of the legal system's professionals, is cited as one reason for the surge, along with long-standing police ineffectiveness and cus in resources to anti-Chavez states.