Venezuela Crime Soars Amid Declining Poverty
Venezuela Crime Soars Amid Declining Poverty - Features - Al Jazeera English
With some 19,336 murders last year, Caracas has become one of the western hemisphere’s most violent cities and one particular criminology expert had a front row seat the other day, experiencing the overwhelming insecurity first-hand when robbers stuck a gun in his face as he rode home on the bus.
“Several men came onto the bus with guns,” said the expert, a professor at a major Caracas university, who did not want his name used for fear of violent reprisal. “They took everyone’s money. It wasn’t rich people riding on the bus - it was poor people trying to get home from work,” he told Al Jazeera.
With an average of 53 murders per day in 2011, according to the Venezuelan Observatory on Violence, a watch-dog group, the country has a murder rate of about 67 per 100,000 inhabitants. Neighbouring Colombia, in contrast, has a murder rate of 38 per 100,000 while Mexico - where some regions are gripped by deadly drug violence - has a rate of about 15 per 100,000.
Long a scourge of urban Latin America, it is unclear why violent crime has become so bad in Venezuela. In the Americas, only El Salvador and Honduras have higher murder rates, according to data released by the United Nations in late 2011.