Andean Group - July 2009 (ISSN 1741-4466)

The Chávez government remains under pressure on crime. Ahead of congressional elections in 2010, the opposition will seek to refocus attention on this issue, and not without reason: crime consistently tops surveys of voter concerns.

Venezuela's Internal Affairs and Justice Minister, Tareck El Aissami, was on the backfoot again in July over the country's crime statistics, denying that the government was in any way hiding or manipulating the figures, and rounding on the conservative rightwing opposition media for deliberately provoking public fears over crime.

However the evidence of rising crime in Venezuela, and in Caracas in particular, is fairly incontrovertible, with studies from a range of independent national and external institutes and NGOS all pointing in the same direction. Several of these organisations have recently called for the government to publish the 'real' figures, suggesting official statistics downplay the true extent of homicides and other violent crimes such as kidnapping.

According to the latest official figures, there were 9,653 homicides in Venezuela in the period January-September 2008. The NGO, Observatorio Venezolano de la Violencia (OVV), estimates that a further 844 people were murdered in the first quarter of 2009, up a sharp 31% on its figures for the same period of 2008.

Nationally, it estimated 4,659 murders, up from 3,562 a year earlier. The total national homicide toll for 2008 was estimated at 14,400, up from 13,156 in 2007.

In attacking the press and the opposition state government of Miranda (which encircles Caracas) for its failure to deal with citizen insecurity El Aissami highlighted the politicisation of the problem. The Chávez government routinely accuses opposition state governors and municipalities of failing to cooperate with the federal authorities on crime initiatives (and vice versa). Chávez used this argument to intervene in state ports in the opposition-controlled state of Zulia earlier this year, alleging that the local government had allowed drug trafficking networks to profilerate on its watch. This only gets the federal government so far however, given that the ruling Partido Unido Socialista de Venezuela controls the vast majority of states and local town halls.  

To date, Chávez 's April 2008 police reform, aimed at bringing the country's 126 regional and municipal forces under one new central command, doesn't appear to have achieved much. The president is vulnerable on this front: polls consistently indicate that voters hold him personally responsible for the breakdown in law and order.

• Not safe
  According to the OVV, Caracas, long known as the most dangerous city in Latin America, now has an annual homicide rate of 130 per 100,000 (inhabitants). The OVV does not compile regional statistics but the UN and the World Bank put the regional annual average for Latin America at about 27 per 100,000. It estimates Venezuela's overall annual average at 65 per 100,000.