Hugo Chavez's Legacy: Venezuelans Are Terrified of the Dark

[Bacchus4.0]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hugo-chavezs-legacy-one-worst-103009436.html
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With shootings and kidnappings an almost daily occurrence in this city once known for animated nightlife, crowds at restaurants and clubs thin out at dark. Businesses are cutting back hours and accommodating earlier crowds.

Venezuela was never crime-free. But long-standing problems in law enforcement have been exacerbated by erratic policies of the late Hugo Chavez, who favored military force over traditional policing. Since soldiers have little training in delinquency control, crime has exploded as the economy has imploded and political tensions have surfaced.

“What the state has deployed is the perfect recipe for a situation of chaos,” said Veronica Zubillaga, a sociologist at the Simon Bolivar University in Caracas. A reliance on the armed forces, she said, has undermined the police and has led hardened lawbreakers to be herded into packed prisons, which serve as schools of criminality.


Patrols of heavily-armed national guardsmen are a common sight throughout Caracas. While the government, now run by Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, has not published comprehensive crime statistics in over a decade, murders are thought to have climbed fourfold in the last 16 years, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a non-profit.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Another epic article from the bowels of the right-wing propaganda machine.

Wooooo, woooooo, wooooo.

[Marksman_91]

2. Just wondering, have you actually been in Venezuela yourself?

I've lived there my self, and still visit it every year. And this article says nothing but the truth. Maybe you should take a week someday to visit the Bolivarian "paradise" you so admire. Hopefully that gives you a Reality-Check experience while you're there to see if the crime rate is made up or not as you seem to believe