Personal Insecurity and National Security in Venezuela
DEVELOPMENTS
When a Venezuelan court banned two newspapers from publishing gruesome pictures of an overflowing morgue in August in Caracas, the South American nation’s capital, an initial read for any observer of Venezuela under President Hugo Chávez may have attributed the ruling to the government’s track-record of shutting down political opponents and media outlets that criticize Mr. Chávez or his policies.
A closer look, however, showed the newspapers sought to draw attention to Venezuela’s sky-rocketing murder rate, numbers which eclipse countries more infamous for their problems with war, drugs, and violence like Iraq or Mexico.
The combination of the country’s murder rate, the successes, failures and controversies of President Chavez’s nationalist agenda, Venezuela’s antagonistic relationship with the United States, ever-increasing inflation, and the recent parliamentary elections – a blow to Mr. Chavez – begs the following question: how far will unchecked personal and economic insecurity go before they become critical matters of national security, if they are not already?
BACKGROUND
Internal violence, struggles for power, and crippling wealth gaps are not new phenomena to Latin America. When Hugo Chávez was elected to power in 1999 – (years after leading a failed coup that landed him in prison from 1992-94) – one of his stated goals was to erase income disparities through new economic and land redistribution policies. Crime was already on the rise in Venezuela.
But according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), under Mr. Chávez’s reign, the murder rate has nearly quadrupled: statistically, two people are murdered every hour, and only El Salvador has a higher murder rate of seventy people per 100,000 (as compared to Venezuela’s fifty-four.) Since 1999, almost 120,000 people have been killed. The Venezuelan government stopped keeping track of the official numbers after 2005.
For further context: since Mexican President Felipe Calderon began a full-on police and military response to the country’s drug and gang wars in 2006, 28,000 people have died. Since 2007 – a smaller time frame – well over 40,000 homicides have occurred in Venezuela, according to the OVV. The juxtapositions are endless – only Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez had a higher murder rate than Caracas (140 in 100,000) in the entire Western Hemisphere.
An almost four-fold increase in death due to murder in Venezuela has occurred during the reign of President Chávez. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, unemployment has fallen over the years, only increasing slightly during the global economic crisis that began in 2008. In fact, the United States and Venezuela had similar official unemployment statistics at the beginning of the crisis, and raw numbers today show that Venezuela is fairing better than the United States, in terms of job creation and retention.
And the President’s nationalist policies, commonly known as Chavismo or the Bolivarian Revolution, include massive spending on welfare and anti-poverty programs, increasing education and job training opportunities, and bringing many industries under the control of the state.
But the wealth gap in Venezuela remains a major problem, an issue not uncommon throughout Latin American history. This fact, and the issues of rampant inflation – the highest in Latin America and one of the highest in the world – the proliferation and availability of illegal firearms, unstable deficits due to an overreliance on oil exports, and the massive underfunding, lack of adequate training, and corruption of the police can all be linked to the country’s murder rate.
On Sunday, September 25, Venezuelans went to the polls for nationwide parliamentary elections, and the nation’s crime rate, for some, was in the forefront of their minds. And the nation’s opposition parties, which boycotted the last election, came together in solidarity to offer an alternative to the President. As a result, Mr. Chávez finds himself with a Congress unable to easily push through his agenda: his party now has less than the 2/3 majority required to pass legislation. This new legislative landscape will certainly affect economic, political and security measures, and have indirect effects on violent crime.
ANALYSIS
Inflation, illegal arms, unprecedented crime, a trade imbalance, and an untrained and controversial police force are all chipping away at Venezuela’s national security, undermining the country’s long-term domestic and foreign agenda.
The violence in Venezuela impacts the nation’s economy and its national security, as they are intimately intertwined. The recent crisis in Ecuador encapsulates the combined issues of security, economic uncertainty, and a lack of institutional capacity to deal with crisis when it arises, and it is not difficult to envision a similar crisis occurring in Venezuela.
Therefore, President Chávez must take further action on some seemingly positive steps to deal with the crisis, including creating the Bolivarian National Police and working with international partners to conduct further police training.
But it would be a mistake for Mr. Chávez to use the few months left of the current rubberstamp Congress to ram through more of his legislation. A lame-duck session to continue more of the same policies that are pulling the nation in different directions is not the will of the Venezuelan people.
There are also many developments happening outside of Venezuela’s borders that will require the President and the new Congress to reframe the nation’s role in regional and international relations, trade, development and influence, no doubt altering it’s economic and national security objectives: Brazil’s history-making presidential campaign; Cuba’s recent announcement that it will layoff as many as 500,000 government workers, the most visible crack in the nation’s half-century experiment with communism; Mr. Chávez’s criticism of Colombia’s – Venezuela’s neighbor and adversary – new President before he was even elected, and their continued disagreement on major developments in the region; and an increasingly global dialogue about moving away from fossil fuels, namely oil.
In 2012 Mr. Chávez will face voters in a much-anticipated re-election bid. Some of the benefits the Venezuelan people have experienced under his tenure will undoubtedly be undermined if public safety does not immediately and tangibly increase. Indeed, an unimproved murder rate will further exacerbate the other issues Venezuela continues to grapple with.
Sean Bartlett is the Americas Regional Editor of Foreign Policy Digest.
