Venezuelan joggers find safety in numbers on the streets of Caracas

[Bacchus4.0]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/25/caracas-venezuela-joggers-crime-runners

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Then came the "express kidnapping" plague – ordinary people snatched off the street, sometimes in broad daylight. Homicides skyrocketed, with Caracas recording nearly 4,000 slayings last year, more than any other city in the world. Stories of robberies – and worse, robberies gone horribly, fatally wrong – became standard workplace chatter.

Pereira still jogs at night. But she goes with friends, plenty of friends – as many as 300 of them, a huffing, heaving mass of people who chug in unison along darkened streets three nights a week. Their club, Runners Venezuela, underscores a central reality: despite the mayhem, the people of Caracas are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to have as normal a life as possible.

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There are many other violent metropolises in Latin America: Rio de Janeiro, with its heavily armed drug gangs, and Cali in Colombia, where the heirs to the old cocaine cartels battle it out. But Caracas is worse, with homicides rising nearly threefold from 1998 to 3,973 homicides last year, for a murder rate of 122 per 100,000, said Active Peace, a group that studies crime trends here. That is 32 times the homicide rate in New York, a far larger city.

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Crime experts say the tactics will have little lasting impact. And nationwide, most Venezuelans fear for their lives. A Gallup poll released in May showed that residents are the least likely to feel safe among the inhabitants of 134 nations. Forty per cent said there was drug trafficking in their neighbourhoods, and 10% told Gallup that a relative or close friend had been slain in the previous 12 months.