- Title: VENEZUELA: Report says Caracas has world's highest murder rate
- Date: 27th November 2009
- Summary: CARACAS, VENEZUELA (RECENT) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF NEIGHBORHOOD AT NIGHT VARIOUS OF POLICE PATROLLING NEIGHBORHOOD POLICE SEARCHING PEOPLE VARIOUS OF PEOPLE BEING SEARCHED POLICE PATROLLING POLICE ENTERING HOME TO SEARCH PEOPLE IN HOME POLICE SHOWING POSSIBLE DRUGS VARIOUS OF POLICE RUNNING THROUGH NEIGHBORHOOD GENERAL VIEW OF GUN
- Embargoed: 12th December 2009 12:00
- Keywords:
- Topics: Crime / Law Enforcement
- Reuters ID: LVADLRLH3Z4SFYWTK3L7IADVBSSE
- Story Text: Venezuela's capital Caracas has the world's second-highest murder rate, according to a report released by an NGO specializing in compiling data on violent crime.
Daily shootings are well-documented in cities like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Juarez, Mexico where powerful drug gangs battle for territory and to keep the authorities at bay.
But the report, released by the Citizen Council on Public Security (CCSP), a Mexican NGO that compiles crime statistics from media and police reports, highlights Caracas' sky high homicide, putting it second behind Juarez.
The report says Venezuela's capital had 96 homicides per 100,000 habitants in 2008 -- Juarez had 130 -- up from an estimated 45 in 2006.
Many of the killings happen in places like this, the vast Petare slum where police patrol the maze-like streets where tens of thousands live cramped in brick houses clinging precariously to steep hillsides.
Figures provided by CCSP are important because official statistics are hard to come by in Caracas.
A populist who counts on a voting base among Venezuela's poor, President Hugo Chavez doesn't want to highlight the crime problems. Government officials and police chiefs declined to speak with Reuters about the problem.
Crime figures as the top problem for many Venezuelan voters. And while police make their nightly rounds in the streets of Petare, locals complain authorities are weakened by corruption.
Nor are police safe from violence. According to a recent story by Caracas daily El Universal, 56 officers have been killed this year.
Doctors and nurses at the Perez de Leon hospital in Petare scramble to keep up with victims of gunshots, but couldn't save policeman Leber Moreno.
Wladimir Jimenez, an emergency room doctor in Petare, said the situation is dire.
"It's incredible the number of people who are subjected to violence in the poor neighborhoods. What we can see is that there's a tremendously significant tendency toward the elevation of figures in these kinds of problems," he said.
Petare resident Victor Chacin is one of the many accidental victims. He said he received a stray bullet while sitting outside his house.
"I was next to my house with my family drinking a beer. I was going to go to bed when they came shooting," Chacin said while recovering in Perez de Leon.
At Moreno's funeral, the scene was all too familiar. Moreno's colleagues and relatives gathered at a service before heading out to the cemetery to lay yet another to rest.
The victim's brother, Alvaro Otero, said it was another violent chapter in his life.
"Everyday they are leaving us without families, without brothers. I've been suffering from this since 2000. In 2000, they killed my other brother, almost in the same area. There were four of us and now I'm the only one left. In 2000 they killed one, another died in a car accident in 2003 and last night they killed my brother with five gunshots in front of our house, in front of our mother," he said.
The approach to attacking crime via poverty reduction programs has done little to slow killings. And while Chavez still remains popular with the poor for government spending on things like health clinics and public transport, many are fed up with the growing crime rate. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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