The heavy hand on Venezuela's streets
Faced with soaring levels of crime and violence, Venezuela's government continues to militarize the police. The public disproves of the crime, but not the response.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has deployed well over 40,000 police and military troops in response to rising public dissent over high violence levels. Soon this number will surpass 80,000, with soldiers present in every state. The operation, known as Plan Patria Segura (Secure Homeland), began in May with the deployment of 3,000 soldiers to the streets of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and has escalated since. The plan was originally designed to target high-crime areas and last just six months, but as the crime rate continues to climb the government has extended the plan and there now appears no end in sight.
Crime and violence in Venezuela has skyrocketed over the past 15 years due to dysfunctional penal and judicial systems, a flailing economy, an influx of drug trafficking and rampant corruption within the government, military and police. Despite the use of militarized tactics, security conditions have only continued to deteriorate. In 1995, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes reported 20 homicides for every 100,000 residents in Venezuela. By 2010, that number officially quadrupled to 50 homicides per 100,000.
And that is a conservative figure. Research by the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (Observatorio Venezuelano de Violencia), a respected non-governmental security organization, recorded over 19,000 homicides in 2011, or 67 murders per 100,000 people. According to the NGO, this increased to 73 homicides per 100,000 people in 2012, compared to the government’s count of 56 homicides per 100,000 that year. Using either official or independent rates, murder levels doubled or tripled in the two decades after Hugo Chávez took power. Various reports place impunity levels anywhere between 93 percent and 97 percent, and the country has become a major departure point for drugs heading to the United States and Europe.
Given endemic police corruption and Venezuela’s strong military tradition, it was little surprise that Maduro recently turned to the armed forces to serve as a defacto police force, as a short term – but increasingly permanent - solution to widespread insecurity...
