Group: Near 14,000 murders in Venezuela last year

[Bacchus39]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101210/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_venezuela_crime


CARACAS, Venezuela – Close to 14,000 people were murdered in Venezuela last year and the figure could be significantly higher, a prominent human rights group said Thursday, alluding to the rampant crime that has become a central concern of Venezuelans.

Venezuela has one of Latin America's highest murder rates and the government has stopped releasing complete annual figures, making arriving at an exact figure difficult.

In its annual report, the Provea human rights group said a total of 13,985 people were slain last year, but thousands more in this country of 28 million inhabitants were likely killed. The group accused government officials of using statistical loopholes to "hide the true dimension of the phenomenon."

The report said official homicide figures fail to included the number of "unresolved deaths," a term that means authorities have not yet determined the cause of death. Those deaths topped 4,200 in 2009.

[mudplanet]

1. Shocking. But what is the murder rate in Colombia if those murdered

by the military and the paramilitaries are figured in? And in Honduras?

[Bacchus39]

2. I am not certain, but I would actually estimate somewhat substantially less than in Ven

I believe Ven and Honduras have been at the top for a few years with Colombia right up there too. help yourself looking at the actual statistics

[mudplanet]

3. And you'd be wrong. Murder rates in Venezuela and Colombia are

comparable (leaving out the thousands who are murdered by government forces), Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, those virtually purely capitalistic countries, head the list.

Do the research yourself, it'll take you all of ten minutes, by google with "murder rates by country". For every site/organization that lists Venezuela's murder rate as higher than Colombia's you'll find ten that list Colombia's not just higher but substantially higher. If you really want to go in depth, research what human rights organizations have been reporting about the widespread murder by the Colombian government over the last ten years and you'll come to the same conclusion I have: the murder rate in Colombia is three or four hundred percent higher than that in Venezuela.

People murdered via "extra-judicial" execution (i.e., the thousands in Colombia who are murdered each year by the government and it's paramilitaries) are often referred to as "false positives" and are not even counted in most stats. Think about it: a "false positive" by the government's own nomenclature, is a person who they murdered who they now think was incorrectly suspected of being a FARC supporter. It escapes them that it's not ok to murder people who sympathize with FARC's goals. They get away with all this murder largely because people such as the OP spread pernicious half-truths about what's happening in Latin America.

Why was this story even posted by the OP? It's simply anti-Chavez propaganda.

I'm sure there is a real problem with violent crime in Venezuela, but the Chavez government isn't conducting a campaign of "extra judicial" murder of its opponents, while in Colombia, the government is doing just that: conducting a systematic, decades-long campaign of murdering people for the crimes of being union activists, living on arable land that corporations and the wealthy class want to take for free, or simply being unable to shoot back. And they're doing it with my tax dollars.

[Bacchus39]

5. you asked the question, you do the research n/t

s

[mudplanet]

8. I did do it, in the ten minutes before I responded to your post

instead of 1)just saying it was so or 2) lying or telling a pernicious half-truth

Some people ain't gonna let the facts change what they know to be true. But that isn't gonna stop most of us from calling them out on their bullshit.

[ChangoLoa]

10. Can you show your sources then?

Please?

[ChangoLoa]

6. Violence in Venezuela is not political

you're right about that point.

But if your source is Nationmaster, their site shows numbers from 1998-2000. In those days, the murder rate in Venezuela was around half the Colombian murder rate.

*SOURCE: Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering the period 1998 - 2000 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention)
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita

If that's not your source, please share the one you were using with he rest of us.


In 2009-2010, the online sources I find say Venezuela is around 45% higher than Colombia (49 vs. 36) and smaller than Central American countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homicide_rate

Do you have some other primary source?
Wiki sources are incomplete since they exclude extra-judicial and unresolved murders.


There's also a report made by the INE (Venezuelan State Statistics Institute) which talks about 21,000 murders in 2009 (extra-judicial killings by the police, unresolved violent deaths and recognized murders). With that number, the murder rate in Venezuela would be around 71 per 100,000. Unfortunately, the report was taken out of their site when it started making noise two months ago. I downloaded it before.

[ChangoLoa]

9. Typo.. I meant 35% higher than Colombia, not 45%. nt

[mudplanet]

11. OK

"Wiki sources are incomplete since they exclude extra-judicial and unresolved murders." Those people haven't been murdered, they've just "disappeared." They're actually vacationing somewhere on the beach and they'll turn up any day now, tanned and happy. Now, let's have a big cry fest for the injustice done to Bettencourt. FARC holding two dozen people hostage proves that they are a criminal, terrorist organization. The Colombian government directly or through its proxies kidnapping and murdering 50,000 people is an aberration (not a systematic campaign), it was only the bad apples, they deserve our continued support.

Let us compare respect for human rights and political freedom in Venezuela and Colombia. In Venezuela a person can own and operate a national television station or leading newspaper whose stated goal is the overthrow of the legally and popularly elected president and the government (through violent means), and can do so for a decade without once being shot at or having a family member "disappeared." In Colombia a person can't even become the leader of a small union without being tortured and murdered with impunity by the government or it's allies in the corporations. There isn't any point in calling the police: the men that show up to take your report are the same ones that killed your husband, and what they are really doing isn't taking information about the murder but writing down your name as a potential future target if you keep making trouble.

Again, a google search on "murder rates by country" results in multiple sites listing varying numbers and most of those sites include the proviso that murder rate stats are notoriously difficult to gather reliably. Citing one source with 2010 stats is meaningless outside of trying to impugn Venezuela's social and political progress under Chavez.

Sources I find show Colombia's murder rate five to ten years ago was nearly double that of Venezuela's at the time. Oh, but that was yesterday. They've cleaned up their act now and have seen the light!

Imagine having a "dictatorial" state like Venezuela even bothering to collect and report on "extra-judicial killings." While in Colombia that task is left to non-governmental organizations because if you pose the question to the government the response is that it was the FARC that did it, but they were dressed in Colombian military uniforms and in Colombian military vehicles to try to direct the blame away from FARC. If that doesn't remind you of the scum that ran El Salvador in the 1980's then you've got a really short memory. In fact, the whole political situation in Colombia so closely mirrors El Salvador in the 1980's that you have to think that the State Department has resorted to its "El Salvador" solution that it considered for Iraq. "We know the government is murdering thousands of unarmed people every day, but we didn't kill anyone. We just gave them a million dollars a day to do it. But it's not our fault."

I repeat, I imagine there is a problem with violent crime and murder in Venezuela just as there is in most of the countries in the region, but Venezuela isn't conducting a well planned and generously funded program of systematic murder and displacement of poor people: Colombia is and has been doing so for decades. It's government receives billions of $ a year from the US for guns and other fascinating high tech weapons of death, is involved and has been involved closely in the drug business and uses that US funded military to aid corporations and the wealthy to murder, with impunity, thousands of Colombians every year.

And then there are the paramilitaries (apparently it's A OK to have an armed force of murderers, torturers and sadists in Colombia as long as they work for corporations and don't have political freedom as a goal): "These successor groups, whose members number in the thousands, operate in vast areas of Colombia and are responsible for massacres, killings, forced displacement, rape, and extortion, as well as drug trafficking. Their targets have included human rights defenders, trade unionists, and ordinary citizens who speak out and resist involvement in criminal activity." http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/03/24/colombia. But they don't kidnap wealth heiresses so they are OTAY!

If my bad Spanish offends you, here it is in English. Victory to the revolution and to FARC. Death to fascist murders everywhere.

[Judi Lynn]

13. You are light years beyond, ethically! Thank you for your post.

Every now and then they find a mass grave of formerly "disappeared" people, but by the time those bodies have deteriorated to the point they are poisoning the local water supply, it's impossible to count them in any year's stats for "murders," isn't it?

Not to mention those who've been, as testified in court by former paras, CREMATED in one of their various locations created to handle the dead guy overflow. It's also hard to work THEIR numbers into murder rates for any given year!

Your comments are deeply appreciated.

On edit, speaking of Colombia, of course!

[ChangoLoa]

14. No worries, you haven't spoken any Spanish yet.... nor given any link

Should we hope for a link?

[mudplanet]

15. Give it up, pal. If I thought you were really interested in the truth about

what was going on and has been going on in Latin America I might bother. But you do now the truth, you just can't tell the difference between right and wrong.

[ChangoLoa]

16. So you actually have no source (!?)

I'm quite interested in Latin America.

What's wrong with you? You can't share your source with the rest of us?

Tell us more about the difference between right and wrong. Is there a rabbit in your hat?

[mudplanet]

17. I wouldn't be proud of it. The CIA is also quite interested in Latin America

Here's your source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Murder rates are comparable, especially given that "The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.<1> The legal definition of "intentional homicide" differs among countries. Intentional homicide may or may not include assault leading to death, infanticide and assisted suicide or euthanasia." and that "extra judicial killing," "disappearances" "false - positives" and the general trend of many rural murders by government forces and forces supported by the government often go unreported because the people that take the report are the murderers.

Short lesson on right and wrong:
Using my tax dollars to machine gun little boys from a tank, using my tax dollars to conduct a systematic campaign of torture and murder of defenseless people whose primary offense was to work within the legal system for their rights or who were poor and defenseless and were in the way, or just because the people that receive the tax dollars like to torture and murder people (because it gives them an erection?) WRONG

Saying that I object to those activities and, even better, doing something to end them, RIGHT

[ChangoLoa]

18. Unbelievable! SHOW US YOUR SOURCES, please.

And stop deflecting.

That's not my source, by the way. Read again.

On edit:
You wrote: "the same conclusion I have: the murder rate in Colombia is three or four hundred percent higher than that in Venezuela."

[mudplanet]

19. Jebus. Are you unable to google "Colombia human rights paramilitaries extrajudicial murder"

I'm not having a debate with you about it.

If you're not convinced by what you read, frankly, I think that there is a rat's ass around here I care about more.

[spanza]

21. You're making up stuff

"the murder rate in Colombia is three or four hundred percent higher than that in Venezuela"

If you are telling the truth, share your sources. It's very easy to paste a link.

[mudplanet]

22. OK. I posted this earlier but it's worth posting agian

"Wiki sources are incomplete since they exclude extra-judicial and unresolved murders." Those people haven't been murdered, they've just "disappeared." They're actually vacationing somewhere on the beach and they'll turn up any day now, tanned and happy. Now, let's have a big cry fest for the injustice done to Bettencourt. FARC holding two dozen people hostage proves that they are a criminal, terrorist organization. The Colombian government directly or through its proxies kidnapping and murdering 50,000 people is an aberration (not a systematic campaign), it was only the bad apples, they deserve our continued support.

Let us compare respect for human rights and political freedom in Venezuela and Colombia. In Venezuela a person can own and operate a national television station or leading newspaper whose stated goal is the overthrow of the legally and popularly elected president and the government (through violent means), and can do so for a decade without once being shot at or having a family member "disappeared." In Colombia a person can't even become the leader of a small union without being tortured and murdered with impunity by the government or it's allies in the corporations. There isn't any point in calling the police: the men that show up to take your report are the same ones that killed your husband, and what they are really doing isn't taking information about the murder but writing down your name as a potential future target if you keep making trouble.

Again, a google search on "murder rates by country" results in multiple sites listing varying numbers and most of those sites include the proviso that murder rate stats are notoriously difficult to gather reliably. Citing one source with 2010 stats is meaningless outside of trying to impugn Venezuela's social and political progress under Chavez.

Sources I find show Colombia's murder rate five to ten years ago was nearly double that of Venezuela's at the time. Oh, but that was yesterday. They've cleaned up their act now and have seen the light!

Imagine having a "dictatorial" state like Venezuela even bothering to collect and report on "extra-judicial killings." While in Colombia that task is left to non-governmental organizations because if you pose the question to the government the response is that it was the FARC that did it, but they were dressed in Colombian military uniforms and in Colombian military vehicles to try to direct the blame away from FARC. If that doesn't remind you of the scum that ran El Salvador in the 1980's then you've got a really short memory. In fact, the whole political situation in Colombia so closely mirrors El Salvador in the 1980's that you have to think that the State Department has resorted to its "El Salvador" solution that it considered for Iraq. "We know the government is murdering thousands of unarmed people every day, but we didn't kill anyone. We just gave them a million dollars a day to do it. But it's not our fault."

I repeat, I imagine there is a problem with violent crime and murder in Venezuela just as there is in most of the countries in the region, but Venezuela isn't conducting a well planned and generously funded program of systematic murder and displacement of poor people: Colombia is and has been doing so for decades. Its government receives billions of $ a year from the US for guns and other fascinating high tech weapons of death, is involved and has been involved closely in the drug business and uses that US funded military to aid corporations and the wealthy to murder, with impunity, thousands of Colombians every year.

And then there are the paramilitaries (apparently it's A OK to have an armed force of murderers, torturers and sadists in Colombia as long as they work for corporations and don't have political freedom as a goal): "These successor groups, whose members number in the thousands, operate in vast areas of Colombia and are responsible for massacres, killings, forced displacement, rape, and extortion, as well as drug trafficking. Their targets have included human rights defenders, trade unionists, and ordinary citizens who speak out and resist involvement in criminal activity." http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/03/24/colombia . But they don't kidnap wealth heiresses so they are OTAY!

[social_critic]

23. why not start a new thread about Colombia?

I thought this was a discussion about crime rates in Venezuela, and the possible causes.

[mudplanet]

25. This isn't a thread about the crime rate in Venezuela, it's part of a continuing

attack on Chavez and socialist reforms in Venezuela. I doubt the OP or most of the participants really care about violent crime in Venezuela. Unless, prior to 2000, they were also preoccupied with the high rate of poverty, lack of social justice and the poor's access to health care in Venezuela their concern is crocodile tears, the worst sort of hypocrisy.

I'm sure they'd like to see the US intervene in Venezuela to insure the same kind of progress the US has engineered in Haiti since forcing Aristide into exile.

[social_critic]

27. This IS a thread about the crime rate in Venezuela

if you look at the first post, it IS about the crime rate in Venezuela. The intent of the person who debates or writes commentary isn't really relevant, the subject by itself is important.

What if the comment is an attack on Chavez and socialist reforms in Venezuela? Individual contributors should be free to point out the flaws in the system Chavez is leading. And no, they don't have to be interested in crime rates prior to 2000. They could have developed the interest last week, or when they realized that, taken as a whole, the government is not worth supporting. It is their choice to criticize, and they do have the right to advocate change - and change it would be, because the current government has been in power for more than 10 years.

Maybe what we have here is a failure, by some so called "progressives" or "socialists", to understand the drivers for the behavior and ideas of those who don't agree with them. Your commment, that you are sure they would like for the US to intervene is completely unsupported, nor is it relevant to the subject at hand. Based on what I have seen, many of them would like for international agencies to put pressure on the Venezuelan government to change its behavior, but I don't see comments involving an invitation for US intervention.

I do see a nearly religious dogmatism, bordering on religious mania, on the part of regime supporters who seem to believe all disagreement with their ideas, or criticism of the powers that be, has to be, by definition, wrong, or evil, or inviting US intervention.

And this is one reason why those who behave this way fail, eventually the regimes you install evolve into autocracies or oligarchies, because all crticism is silenced, and human nature loves to gather and concentrate power unto small groups. This is what happened in the Soviet Union, in China, in Viet Nam, North Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere where the regimes evolved into a mature state.

I've already made the comment, quoting from Fidel Castro's speech in 2006, in which he said (I'm paraphrasing) - "how come I'm the only one who complains about the way things are around here?". Fidel, you see, was aware that internal lack of criticism was like a cancer eating at his government.

What he could not accept was that criticism could go as far as suggesting that he be replaced. He completely missed the point, that he could not draw a line, and that he had to allow the people to believe they could replace the communist regime - precisely because this would then lead communist party leaders to hone their governing skills and work so hard, nobody would really want to replace them. And when he missed this critical point, that he had to allow society to serve as a Darwinian test ground for ideas, he allowed the communist party to become the breeding ground for fat cats, corrupt parasites, oligarchs, and others whose main interest was to line their pockets.

You see, I have observed this process already, and I have seen it fail. And I can see clearly ahead, the government in Venezuela WILL fail precisely because it has people like you defending the crime rate with absurd excuses. The way to strengthen the process is to point out the problem exists, and to propose possible solutions (I have already done so, and you can feel free to read them above). The way to weaken it is to ignore it or to try to silence the critics. And by ignoring it, all you do is contribute to social injustice and misery, because crime usually impacts the poor more than the rich.

I have seen people behave the way you do so often, I'm not surprised, nor do I think you are evil, or have bad intentions. You are just being human, and as such you are making the same mistakes many have made. It happens, over and over and over. And this is the reason why things today are the same as they ever were.

[southmost]

4. how about Mexico?

There have been an estimated 30,000 deaths due to drug-related violence in Mexico in the past four years.

Source: Faux News

news like this should definately be put in perspective (most of the larger countries to our south have high violence rates)

[social_critic]

7. Proper comparison is on a per capita basis - Mexico has lower crime

If we use murder victims per capita, then Mexico is lower down, because their population is smaller. Crime in Venezuela is very high. It is also increasing gradually over time - and it has increased significantly since Chavez took over.

There are many reasons for higher crime, but one of them may be the sheer number of young males able to get guns, who live in very poor areas, have little education, and come from broken homes (the divorce rate in Venezuela, as well as women who have children out of wedlock, is very high). The lack of arrests and convictions is also a factor, as police are overwhelmed by criminal elements. Another problem is the terrible conditions in jails, which serve as training ground for younger criminals.

I have looked at the overall numbers, and I conclude Venezuela has been managed in such a poor way in this area, it is almost as if they had decided to build a criminal manufacturing society. And this isn't necessarily a fault of left or right. The trend started with the pre-Chavez governments, but the Chavez government has not been able to put pressure on these key reasons to change the crime trends. They also seem to be unaware of the basic social underpinnings of crime, and tackle it at a very superficial level, without understanding there are deeper reasons within society which fuel the crime wave.

One of the most basic problems is the moral breakdown, which leads to so many children born out of wedlock, and the lack of responsibility on the fathers' part. There's also lack of tracking of fathers who divorce and abandon their children, refusing to pay for their upkeep. Thus mothers find themselves with several children, living in the most terrible conditions, and can not go to the courts to force the father to pay some child support. The divorce laws are also toothless, and women are divorced without having the ability to get proper alimony and child support. The situation is worsened because so many men work in the informal economy, as peddlers or day laborers, so their wages can't be tapped by the courts. It's a real mess.

[mudplanet]

12. Stats on crime by country are misleading

and not indicative of how dangerous it is to live in each country or how "lawless" the social situation is in a country.

The crime rates in New Zealand and Denmark are among the world's highest, but they are also among the safest places in the world to live.

If you can cite a greater driver of crime than poverty, I'd like to know what it is. And poverty rates in Venezuela have been dropping continuously for the last decade.

[social_critic]

20. Yet crime rates have been increasing continuously as well

I can't cite a greater driver than poverty. But let's say poverty has indeed gone down, but other drivers are markedly up. I have speculated it may be caused by a confluence of factors, namely, the arrival into the population of a huge cohort of young males born to teenage mothers, divorced mothers left in poverty, more guns, less police, lower conviction rate, worse jails, and so on.

Let's look at this more fine-grained - say poverty has been going up overall, but the poverty rate for unwed and divorced mothers with male children went up over the last 20 years - this would put the population segment more likely to become criminals right in the poverty zone.

We do know the crime rate is up in Venezuela - this is a given. So the question becomes, since poverty has gone down, then what can be done to drive the crime rate down? Evidently the focus has to be on young males between 0 and 16. I realize this age group by definition does not include real criminals, but society should intervene early, to have the needed influence BEFORE they do get in trouble.

I would focus on the teenage mother issue - it's easier to teach them contraception and educate them, than to pay later to put young teenagers in jail. And by education I mean not only how to take the pill, I mean education to get a better job, which seems to work. I hope you think this is something reasonable, it doesn't involve any violence at all (unless you happen to be the Pope), and it has been shown that educated women with less children raise them better, and lead better lives. Until then, I would also look at jail conditions, which I've read are awful, and also at the judiciary - I bet the judicial system isn't able to handle the case load.

[naaman fletcher]

24. The crime rates in New Zealand and Denmark are among the world's highest,?

Yes they are. So yes, crime rates can be misleading as Denmark is very safe yet has lots of small-ish crime (and probably a higher reporting rate, also).

Now, what is misleading about Venezuela's murder rate? Are you saying that somehow it paints a picture of Venezuela as being horribly unsafe, when in fact that is not the case?

[social_critic]

26. It is a reflex action - they don't accept constructive criticism

The issue is fairly simple, they can't accept constructive criticism at all. The usual technique, rather than discuss the issue, is to argue the source of the information, or bring up some other country where there are problems. It can be funny, one can say "wow, traffic in Caracas is getting really bad" and they would answer "but traffic in Burundi is a lot worse".