CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called for a new fight against crime yesterday, acknowledging an issue that voters say is their top concern ahead of an election in less than two weeks.
Speaking at a graduation ceremony for more than 8,000 police officers, the socialist leader said the South American country still lacked the specialized forces it needed to solve problems that hit poor neighbourhoods the hardest.
“We need preventative, scientific and community-based police who can help resolve the conflicts in the barrios, between relatives and neighbors, and to fight against the crime that causes so much damage to society,” Chavez said.
Armed robberies and murders are common in Venezuela, where more people have been killed during the last five years than have died in Mexico’s drug war. Many city dwellers are reluctant to venture out after dark, and both candidates ahead of the Oct 7 vote are promising safer streets if they win.
Chavez’s rival, 40-year-old state Governor Henrique Capriles, says he has heard the same story of day-to-day problems – crime, unemployment, inefficient public services – on every campaign stop around the country of 29 million.
At a rally in the eastern city of Maturin yesterday, the opposition leader asked the crowd to raise a hand if they knew a victim of violence. A forest of arms went up.
“How can they (the government) speak about independence when 50 Venezuelans are killed every day here?” Capriles asked.
Local researchers say more than 19,000 people were murdered in Venezuela last year. The government rarely publishes any figures, but says the number was closer to 15,000.
Capriles, who is promising to replace 14 years of Chavez’s self-styled revolution with an administration that would be roughly modeled on Brazil’s government – business-friendly but with strong social welfare programmes.
Chavez says those pledges are a ruse to win over undecided voters, and that “the candidate of the right” is in the pay of a rich elite who held power before he took office in 1999.
Yesterday, the 58-year-old Chavez told the graduation ceremony at a Caracas stadium that capitalist, “bourgeois” governments always sought to criminalize their police force.
“They marginalize them, they mistreat them, they often use them for crime, and – above all – for the repression of the people,” he told the young police officers.
They were all members of a new national “Bolivarian” force, named for South America’s 19th-century independence hero Simon Bolivar. It is gradually being rolled out to replace a patchwork of forces, many of which had a terrible reputation.