Violent Crime in Venezuela

(Caracas, Venezuela) The authorities in President Hugo Chavez's socialist utopia appear reluctant to acknowledge that violent crime, as indicated by the number of murders, is a significant problem in the country.

No official figures on homicides have been released since 2006, however, unofficial data put the number of murders in Venezuela in 2009 at between 13,780 and 16,047. A police survey leaked to the press in 2008 put the average at 10,000 violent deaths each year.

However, the government's official disengagement from the violent crime problem ended last week when the opposition-aligned newspaper El Nacional published a front-page photo of bodies in a Caracas morgue.




Text with the photo explained that it was taken in December 2009 at the Bello Monte Morgue, the only morgue in Caracas. It also stated that the morgue "has received in the six first months of this year 2,177 bodies whose cause of death was homicide.”

Release of the information to the public prompted an immediate response from Chief Wilmer Flores of the CICPC (Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y Criminálisticas) Police Force.

“We are contacting the Attorney General’s Office in writing to take action against that newspaper,” Flores said on state television channel VTV from the Bello Monte Morgue in southeastern Caracas.

The police chief said that the picture, which shows naked and half-naked bodies, bloody and piled on tables and on the floor of the facility, was taken in “2006 and not at present.”

The photo also violates local laws for the protection of children and adolescents, since its publication can spread “fear” and anxiety among them, Flores said in a statement on state television.

From the clean, brightly lit chambers of the morgue, Flores said that the newspaper’s front page “goes against all ethics,” and far from being “true freedom of speech and information, it descends into morbidity.”

The paper is “playing with other people’s suffering” in publishing the picture and ignores “the effort” being made by state security forces in fighting crime, which is diminishing “progressively” in Venezuela, Flores said.

The Ombud’s Office presented Friday before the courts for the protection of boys, girls and adolescents a “protective suit against the daily El Nacional.”

That office requested the newspaper “to abstain from releasing pictures that violate the rights” of minors “and particularly against their progressive and comprehensive development,” state-run Radio Nacional de Venezuela said.

So, the government is going after the newspaper to "protect the children." Heh.

Countering the government allegations, El Nacional editor Miguel Henrique Otero said, "All you have to do is stand at the morgue entrance to see what’s going on there, the overcrowding, because criminals are out of control.”