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Murder by Numbers: Do Media Reports of Violent Crime, Poverty, and Inequality in Venezuela Add Up?

As mentioned in an earlier post, Reuters reported yesterday on “a campaign from opposition media to highlight the [Venezuelan] government’s failure to tackle violent crime” ahead of next month’s legislative elections. Such media campaigns, close to Venezuelan elections, are hardly surprising – nor is it unusual that the campaign has been picked up by international media, including the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, Voice of America, the Vancouver Sun, public radio, and other outlets. These news reports and opinion pieces repeat the same theme: that violent crime in Venezuela is out of control, which the government of “Hugo Chávez can’t or won’t stop,” as an op-ed in the Miami Herald today puts it. Most of the articles claim that Venezuela’s high murder rate now makes it more dangerous than Iraq – a problematic claim, as some analysts have pointed out, since the Iraq civilian death numbers cited come from an underestimate: Iraq Body Count’s tally, which is mostly derived from media reports of deaths.

A key part of the campaign, Reuters noted, occurred when two opposition papers “printed a gory archive photo of bodies piled up in a morgue.” The government responded by ordering the papers to desist, citing the need to shield children from the violent images as its reason. This prompted immediate cries of censorship. Largely ignored by the international press was the fact that the photos of the bodies – most of which were naked – were printed without the consent of the victims’ families, as a U.S. observer has pointed out in a letter to the New York Times. Further underscoring the Venezuelan government’s rationale for halting publication of the photos, CNN also reportedly stated that it could not show the images because they were “too graphic”.

Few of these reports attempt to offer any explanation as to why the murder rate has increased, but the New York Times’ Simon Romero takes a shot in the dark, proposing that it could be the economy: “While many Latin American economies are growing fast, Venezuela’s has continued to shrink. The gap between rich and poor remains wide, despite spending on anti-poverty programs, fueling resentment.” The Vancouver Sun’s Jonathan Manthorpe likewise takes a stab: “the [Venezuelan] economy, which unlike other South American countries has withered … since Chavez came to power.” The Globe and Mail in Toronto this week also ran an editorial focusing on the supposed rise in inequality in Venezuela – which is so significant, according to the paper, that

[Chavez’s] Bolivarian socialist model has not alleviated the long-term problem of income inequality, and the attendant social ills it perpetuates. Ironically, this runs counter to the overall trend in the region. Latin America used to be known for its acute and persistent income inequalities. But 12 of the largest economies in the Americas – including Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Mexico – actually saw a reversal of this pattern in the past decade.

But upon closer examination, the Globe and Mail relies on a study by Luis Lopez-Calva and Nora Lustig that uses data from 2000 – 2006 to draw its conclusions. Their finding that Venezuela is an inequality outlier in the region is outdated by data from the UN Economic Commission on Latin America. Using data from 2002 – 2008, the Commission found that Venezuela led Latin America in decreased inequality, and currently has the most equitable distribution of income in the region. A correction request to the Globe and Mail was answered with the reply: “This is a matter of a different interpretation of different data.” A query as to whether the Globe and Mail would likewise cite data from 2006 – at the height of the U.S. housing bubble – to describe the current state of the U.S. or Canadian economies, was unanswered.

As for Romero and Manthorpe’s claims that Venezuela’s economy has shrunk while others’ in the region have grown, in fact, according to data that is accepted and cited by institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the United Nations, from the first quarter of 2003 to the beginning of 2009, Venezuela’s GDP nearly doubled, growing by 94.7 percent in 5.25 years, or 13.5 percent annually. This is despite a severe recession that resulted from an opposition oil strike in 2002-2003 and other disruptive events, including a military coup, that took place during the first four years of Chavez’s time in office. The poverty rate has been cut by more than half, from 54 percent of households in the first half of 2003 to 26 percent at the end of 2008. Extreme poverty has fallen even more, by 72 percent.

Certainly ongoing poverty, and inequality, is linked to violence, but since both poverty and inequality are on the decline in Venezuela, what explains the rise in murders? One part of the answer could be that some of the violence is being exported, from neighboring Colombia. This current crop of news reports on Venezuela’s generally ignores the documented presence of paramilitaries and Colombian drug gangs inside Venezuela. Le Monde Diplomatique reports:

In 2008 Últimas Noticias reported that the former head of the directorate of intelligence and prevention services (Disip), Eliézer Otaiza, had claimed around 20,000 Colombian paramilitaries were based in Venezuela and were involved in kidnappings, contract killings and drug trafficking. The Venezuelan press has said nothing on the issue, but on 31 January 2009 El Espectador, published in Bogotá, had the headline “The Black Eagles have flown to Venezuela”.

As Le Monde Diplomatique describes, the paramilitaries’ presence and activities are seen by some chavistas and Venezuelan government officials as a destabilization campaign:

“We sometimes get quite abnormal peaks in insecurity. It looks like a policy of destabilisation,” said Guadalupe Rodríguez of the Simón Bolivar Coordination in the 23 de Enero district of Caracas, a Chavist stronghold. Pérez has studied the question in detail: “Caracas today is like Medellín in the 1980s. It’s the same MO – hidden forces are fostering insecurity with the aim of creating a para-state.”

Other causes considered by Le Monde Diplomatique include the decentralized nature of Venezuela’s police, rampant police corruption, a more violent youth culture, and “the usual causes: broken families, gender-based violence, violence in the home, imitative aggression or overcrowded conditions.”

If foreign actors and paramilitaries are indeed partially responsible for the rise in murders, then media and opposition blaming of the government would be adding insult to injury and further contribute to undermining the government.

One is hard-pressed also to find any voices – outside of the Venezuelan government’s – in these many news reports that challenge the opposition campaign or attempt to put the statistics in context. Le Monde Diplomatique offers this, too:

Miguel Angel Pérez, the executive vice president of the Institut d’Etudes Avancées, complained: “They would like us to believe that insecurity is a product of Chavism. They’re forgetting how terrible it was in the late 80s and early 90s: you couldn’t go out in the street.”

In December 1996, two years before Chávez came to power, the French military/police specialist periodical Raids said: “With an average of 80 people shot dead each weekend, violence on public transport a daily occurrence, poverty growing exponentially and an economic crisis that has been gnawing away at the country for over 15 years – inflation is at more than 1,000% – Caracas has become one of the most dangerous cities in the world, perhaps the most dangerous.” Few people seem to remember this.

“This is an election year,” explained Pérez. “In election years, what we call the insecurity curve soars. Insecurity is the warhorse of the opposition and the media fan the flames.” Every Monday, an army of reporters gathers at the morgue in Bello Monte. Microphones at the ready, they rush to meet the families of the weekend’s victims – especially old women in tears – and shout: “Señora! How do you feel?”