Chavez's Skewed Security Priorities

Frequent travelers to Caracas know the drill. When landing at Maiquetia International Airport after dark, grab a taxi and wait -- wait for another passenger car or cab and travel to the Venezuelan capital together.

That is the safe and prudent thing to do. Otherwise you become easy prey for kidnappers that prowl the 14-mile stretch to the city and hold their captives for ransom in roadside huts.

This road alone is not the sole security problem in the South American nation. Venezuela now has one the highest kidnapping rates per capita in the world, increasing in 2009 anywhere from 40-60 percent from the year before, according to the U.S. State Department. Most are so-called “express” kidnappings that last some 24 hours but prove quite lucrative to criminals.

What’s more, in 2009 there were 16,047 homicides, nearly a four-fold increase in a decade, according to Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, which claims to use only the most conservative official numbers. Sadly, impunity grew as much in the past decade. Only 1491 detentions were made last year in connection with homicides as opposed to 5017 made in 1998.
Clearly the country’s crime situation needs significant attention, investment and analysis.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has spent more than a decade improving the lot of the poor. His socialist revolution, with all its setbacks, has made Venezuelan income disparity the lowest in Latin America, for instance. But in securing public welfare, Chavez has ignored public safety.

Instead Chavez has pursued a quixotic defense policy meant to secure the homeland rather than improve citizen security. Chavez's government has invested billions in new military weapons and equipment as well as in training and arming thousands of new peasant militias to, among others, help the armed forces resist foreign aggression.

Weeks ago, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced a new five-billion dollar weapons deal with Chavez. Since 2005, Chavez has spent more than $10 billion in such purchases, making Venezuela the top weapons purchaser in Latin America by far.

The skewed security priorities and waste of valuable resources is only half the problem. Venezuela has not been decommissioning old arms. With inadequate stockpile security procedures in place, these weapons can easily turn up on the black market and eventually find their way into the hands of miscreants.

According to Matt Schroeder, manager of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, these weapons can “fuel criminal elements in Venezuela and seep out to the region,” a serious concern particularly for neighboring Colombia that is still fighting several illegal armed groups.

Increased levels of impunity, plus the growing number of leftover arms and an already well armed citizenry -- Venezuelans posses somewhere between 9 and 15 million firearms -- is a recipe for more violent crime.

To confront the situation Chavez’s government launched the Bicentennial Mechanism for Citizen Security last month. With the new strategy Chavez is seeking to improve security in the 36 most affected municipalities. Last December, Chavez also created a new federal police unit to counter endemic police corruption.

Still, some experts say Chavez's efforts are not enough. In a recent interview with the local daily El Nacional, security expert Fermin Marmol Garcia, said there have been “12 security plans in 10 years of revolution” but no political will to stop the scourge. Forty years before Chavez came to power there were a total of 304 kidnappings, he said, since 1999 there have been 2655. “Something happened in our society.”

Chavez typically shifts blame to others, such as Colombia. And it is true that illegal groups based in Colombia have a history of kidnappings in Venezuela. Also some of Colombia’s security successes have meant the relocation of criminal elements and drug traffickers to countries such as Venezuela.

But the fact of the matter is that Venezuela’s crime wave is largely the result of internal weakening of its own institutions. The Venezuelan government, according to Roberto Briceno Leon, a sociologist and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, has disarmed some local police forces for political reasons. Moreover, he said in an interview that the government has set a poor example as “the first violator of norms”, thus undermining the rule of law in the country.

Meanwhile, on the security front, Chavez’s priority “is a political priority -- to stockpile arms against the enemies he believes he has,” Briceno said. In that regard, he added, it is not a policy of protecting the population, but merely of protecting his followers.