By Jeremy Morgan
Latin American Herald Tribune staff

CARACAS -- Venezuela's highly-questioned police corps is in trouble on both sides of the law. Officers keep on getting killed in the line of duty in a country with far too many guns in the wrong sort of hands. Trouble is, a lot of their colleagues are under suspicion of straying seriously on the wrong side of the law themselves.

The National Assembly, which like President Hugo Chávez has a tendency not to say very much about crime -- even if it's widely deemed the country's number one problem -- may be poised to do something, or not as the case may be. A sub-committee headed by Deputy Reinaldo García has called on the government as a "matter or urgency" to "intervene" -- that is, take direct control of -- the police forces in six states as well as the Metropolitan Police (PM) in Caracas.

While the Assembly is dominated by the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and its allies in the self-inflicted absence of the mainstream opposition after it spurned the last parliamentary elections in 2005, the motivating factor in picking out the police forces in question appears to be public concern about crime rather than political.

The states in question are Aragua, Guárico, Lara, Monagas, Táchira and Zulia. Of these, only Zulia is under opposition control. The Metropolitan Police theoretically come under the political control of Opposition Caracas Metropolitan Mayor Antonio Ledezma, but it's long been recognized that these boys in blue are largely a law unto themselves. And signs are they can't stand the sight of him anyway.

"We've observed with much preoccupation the participation of police oficers in criminal acts in these places, such as a high incidence of police abuses and excesses, violations of human rights and presumed renderings of account," García said. That last, by the way, is Venezuela's euphemism for killings motivated by revenge.

García said he and his colleagues had come to the conclusion that out of every 10 crimes committed in the country, "in at least six, police officers either on active service or in retirement are involved." You may read that again if you wish.

It's unlikely García was talking about traffic cops taking a bribe rather than issuing a ticket, however well-deserved that might be in a city full of drivers considered as inept as they're impatient. The most sinister thing about all this is the seemingly all too frequent tendency of cops and other state security officers to go out and commit some of the worst crimes of them all.

Killings and kidnappings are rampant in Venezuela, which in both cases is said to boast one of the highest per capita rates in the world.

A judge in Ocumare del Tuy south of Caracas has imposed the maximum sentence of 30 years' prison on 13 people in a particularly notorious case of kidnappers killing their victims. One man was acquitted because he had nothing to do with what happened. Four of the guilty hailed from the Metropolitan Police, three on active service and one who had been pensioned off at the time of the crime.

In February 2006, three brothers, John Brian, Kevin and Jackson Faddoul, were being driven by the family chauffer, Miguel Rivas, to school in Caracas when they were ambushed and went missing. The family was contacted with a demand for the equivalent today of BsF1 million, the gang later reducing this to BsF700,000. But the family, though wealthy, couldn't raise such vast amounts of cash.

The next development was the discovery of the dead bodies of all four lying face down and side by side, their hands bound and their mouths gagged at the side of an isolated country road. There were indications that they'd been beaten and finished off with bullets to the head.

The brutality of the crime sent shock waves through a society which became accustomed to violent and often seemingly irrational crime quite some time ago. It evoked memories of the earlier so-called Kennedy Case, named after the Avenue where it happened in Caracas.

On this occasion, the targets were six students in a car. Their way was blocked by a barricade manned by a large group of men who appeared to be wearing uniforms. The driver tried to speed away but the men at the barricade opened fire and the car skidded to a halt.

The bandits surrounded the car. The driver was shot in the eye, the other five told to get out. The two surviving male students, one of whom had been hit by a bullet through the back of the car during the initial volley, were told to kneel down. Both were then shot in the back of the neck.

All this came out because the other three students, all female, somehow managed to get away. Their testimony quickly led to the arrest of the men at the barricade. Then Interior and Justice Minister Jesse Chacón had vowed to get the case resolved within hours. It's suggested the men were turned in by their officers and colleagues, such was the shock and scandal generated by the killings.

It turned out that there'd been more than a score of men at the barrier. Twenty of them came from the Military Intelligence Directive (DIM), four from the PM and one from the municipal police in Libertador, west Caracas. But as the case was judged to have been one in which a security operation had gone haywire, only a few of them were sentenced harshly.

In Falcón state last week, three officers from the Mérida state police force and a chief inspector from the scientific and investigative police, CICPC, were ordered to be held in custody pending trial in the case of the so-called Massacre of El Vigía. Eight young males including four legal minors were killed in unclear circumstances in a town of that name in Mérida state last year.

Cops also find themselves on the receiving end. At three o'clock in the morning on Wednesday last week, Danny Humberto Silva Flores, a 24-year-old deputy inspector with the PM, and Jeison Berríos, a colleague in civilian clothes, were in Avenida Andrés Bello in downtown Caracas. They ordered a car to stop and it did, shooting broke out, and Silva Flores was killed.

At first, it was thought he'd been killed by Berríos, who caught a bullet in the ear. But it emerged that the driver of the car was yet another officer from the PM, named in reports as Robert Luis Romero Ramos. A day later, PM chief Carlos Meza announced that the bullet extracted from the dead officer had nothing to do with the standard issue weapon registered to Romero Ramos.

This appeared to clear Romero Ramos, although it did little to establish who murdered Silva Flores and wounded Berríos in what appears to have been a shoot-out in the middle of the night between cops from the same force. Skeptics meanwhile noted that many police have a habit of carrying a gun about which they don't tell the authorities.

A week later, Asdrúbal Villalobos Mariño, 27 an officer with the municipal police in El Hatillo in the south-east of the capital, and a chum, Alexander Ceballos, 21, were drinking a beer at 10 o'clock at night in a bar in Candelaria, a district of the old city center that's notorious for violence at night and not all that safe during the day.

Two men came in, went out, and came back minutes later. This time they were armed. First they shot Villalobos Mariño dead and then did in Cabellos, whose girlfriend was wounded but lived to tell the tale.
A bullet in the head put an end to Jesús Alberto Díaz Urbina, 40, of the Military Police in San Blas, a grim district of generally lawless Petare in the east of the city. He was in a jeep carrying people home which got caught in the middle of a gun battle between rival bands. A fterwards, his sister told reporters: "Today, it was my brother, tomorrow we don't know who it'll be."