Dictatorships are commonly thought of as authoritarian affairs, where crime is low and the trains run on time.
Hugo Chavez’s dictatorship is exactly the opposite. A modern dictator, he has no need for archaic devices like secret police to come knocking on doors of dissidents to terrify them, as happened in the Stalinistic and Castroite days of old. It may come later, but right now, he’s got a more efficient means of controlling the population through terror by allowing for runaway crime across the country. Due to virtually absent law enforcement (except for “political” crimes), people area all terrified of walking the streets in Venezuela.
Citizens are now protesting ‘la inseguridad‘ in a desperate appeal to the Chavistas to make the streets safe.
The Chavistas will never give in to their demands, for it is their own politicized police who are actually committing many of the crimes, if they aren’t just looking the other way and letting criminals run wild.
You can see this dynamic very well in the superb 2005 Venezuelan movie called Secuestro Express, a movie about express kidnaps that took place in the very neighborhoods these murders did. It was a film Chavez tried to censor and kept out of the running for the Academy Awards.
Today in Caracas, crowds of people marched on the offices of the interior ministry in a desperate appeal to end crime that is engulfing every neighborhood and affecting every family. The march follows the murder of three young brothers who were kidnapped with their driver by Venezuelan thugs wearing police uniforms last Feb. 23. When the family could not come up with the $4 million ransom, all three were shot dead by the police-clad animals who abducted them. Were they police? A lot of people think so.
But I know from my own experience on the streets of Caracas that you can buy a police uniform and police regalia and police guns and police ID — I kid you not — from many buhoneros, or, street merchants. It was absolutely astounding to see that. But freakish as this was, Venezuelans themselves were very scared of the army and the police. There had to have been a reason for it. I consider myself very lucky to have gotten out without incident. For three young Canadian-Venezuelan boys, there was no such luck.
Jorge Arena at Devil’s Excrement has an account of the events leading up to this march in this post here.
Veneconomy has an excellent essay here. Excerpt:
In Venezuela values and priorities have been turned upside down. Crimes of political dissidence and opinion are punished and huge sums of money are used to arm the country for a possible war with the United States -a possibility that exists only in the minds of the President and his entourage-, while the true criminals walk free or associate with government personalities and groups of the civil population who support the government are armed. Sadly, these political decisions are the coup de grace for the security of the man in the street.
BREAKING UPDATE: A burly thug in police uniform has shot into the crowd protesting these murders, probably proved that the cops are indeed the criminals in Caracas. The photographer who was shot took one last photo of his killer before he died in this photo here. Unbelievable. EFE has the story here.