By Jeremy Morgan
Latin American Herald Tribune staff

CARACAS – Unofficial estimates suggest that an already worryingly high crime rate in this capital lurched upwards last weekend, with the bodies of 60 or more murder victims turning up at the city morgue. The norm, for want of a better word, in more recent times has been about 40.

The unofficial body count is by no means a definitive means of measuring the kill rate in what is reckoned in per capital terms to be one of the most murderous cities on the planet. The government stopped issuing regular statistics several years ago – when, if anything, things were even worse – and Interior and Justice Minister Tarek El Assaimi is proving no less reticent than many of his predecessors.

Morgue officials are officially under instruction not to talk to the media, but the details keep on trickling out anyway. The gag order does little or nothing to stop the media going on about wrongdoing, as is their wont right around the world. And, in any case, there’s not exactly any shortage of fuel for the feeding frenzy here.

In what was an atypically public remark about violent crime from an official from President Hugo Chávez’s government, Public Defender Gabriela Ramírez on Monday described the problem as “disproportionate” – although whether or not that was a reference to conduct of the media wasn’t entirely clear.

Ramírez attributed the problem to a lack of “vigilance” about social rights in the country. She was speaking at an international forum on crime, and her line was that this wasn’t a specifically Venezuelan problem but one that afflicted all Latin America.

This may have suited theoreticians attending the forum, but anecdotal evidence suggests it isn’t what a lot of people down in the street actually wish to be told. What they want to hear about are solid sound steps to rein in the bad guys.

Crime consistently continues to top the league of causes of major concern for the public at large. If the opposite poles of Venezuelan society tend to agree on anything it would seem to be the need to do something about the propensity of too many individuals – and a lot of them seem to be young males – to take the law into their hands. And those hands are all too often loaded with guns.

But while the poor and the rich might equally fear this threat, they react in distinctly different ways.

In upper income districts of the city, the wealthy huddle behind high walls, closed circuit television and expensive alarm systems. And they usually have a gunman of their own at the gate, a security guard who’s there not only to make villains think twice but also to keep down the insurance premium.

In notoriously rough areas such as Propatria up at the end of the Metro subway line on the far reaches of north-west Caracas, the dirt poor tend to rush off home and get indoors as soon as they can.

Unsurprisingly, it’s the poor and those who work with or for them who get it most in the neck. Luis Manuel Vásquez, 35, a buhonero or stallholder who also worked as a casual handyman in Prado de María in west Caracas, was just two blocks away from home when he was jumped by bad guys last Thursday evening.

Having despatched Vásquez from this life, the killers then stole his earnings, his watch and his sports trainers. Just why anyone would want to be in a dead man’s shoes is one of the myriad mysteries about the criminal mind in this city.

People were watching but didn’t intervene; they were probably too frightened, too inured to the all too customary rein of violence. And it’s suggested they knew all too well who the killers were.

Only hours before, and not far away in Gramoven, yet another young man was killed when he tried to stop somebody stealing his motorbike. Rainefer Arteaga, 22, tried to get away with the keys of his bike but got shot in the back.

Neighbors complained that a nearby unit of the National Guard – which was sent out on to the streets to reinforce the police some years back – were “indifferent” to the plight of people living in the district.

Kervin Sequera, 22, had a different sort of problem with inadequate public services. He was shot in the chest in El Valle in south Caracas last Friday afternoon, and died after being taken to one health center after another, none of them able to attend him.

By the time Sequera ended up at the hospital at the Fuerte Tiuna military barracks, it was too late. The only thing the doctors there could do was to pronounce him dead.

There was an ominous incident in middle class Colinas de Santa Mónica, although it remains unclear whether this was just one more instance of outright lawlessness or perhaps had political overtones.

Dissident National Assembly Deputy Wilmer Azuaje, who hasn’t endeared himself to the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) by raising questions about members of the Chávez clan in the president’s home state of Barinas, claimed that four men kidnapped his ex-wife last Thursday night.

Azuaje says he had gone to collect their six-year-old, when the gunmen turned up in two vehicles. According to Azuaje’s statements to reporters, when she turned up she was ambushed and seized, and he was forced to get out of his car.

He says the thugs threatened to kill her and that they’d been following him for some time. The woman was released, apparently unharmed, some hours later, and Azuaje claims this was the 14th attack on his life.

If you’re out and about in Petare in east Caracas, think twice about hanging around in El Carpintero. The zone is rife with gang rivalries and the gunslingers aren’t particular if people who have nothing to do with their quarrels get in the way.

Estimates suggest the local kill rate is running at 1.4 a day, 8.5 a week and 34 a month for a total of 172 during the first five months of this year alone. It’s said even the cops and guardsmen aren’t immune from attack in this area.

Across town in Caricuao, it appears that a man posthumously named as Ángel David Pacheco, 25, should have thought twice about stealing a cellular telephone that was being used by a man waiting for this wife outside a pharmacy.

Two men rode up on a motorbike and snatched the phone, but as they made their escape, the man pulled out a gun and shot Pacheco, the passenger, in the head. His friend in front was wounded and ended up in hospital. Their intended victim is said to have been a plain clothes officer from the state security service, DISIP, name, rank and number undisclosed so far.