Hugo Chavez finally spoke about crime and insecurity from Havana, just because of the latest recommendations of the U.S. State Departament for those travelling to Venezuela. His response: We’re ain’t that bad, compared to the U.S.A.
But wait, the crime rate in America is the lowest in 20 years. Good for Americans, bad for Chávez.
He probably got the wrong data… once again.
Time for number crunching: In its latest report about crime, the FBI indicated that there were 14,748 murders in the United States in 2010 (The full 2011 report will come out later this year). In Venezuela, the estimated number for 2010 was 17.600. This number comes from the NGO Venezuelan Observatory of Violence and it is only a projection, because the CICPC stopped the release of official numbers in 2005.
In February 2011, the government admitted in front of the National Assembly that at least 14.000 murders occurred in Venezuela during 2010. The official murder numbers for 2011 weren’t in the annual report of the Interior Minister at all, but the OVV puts them in 19.336, making 2011 the most violent year in Venezuelan history.
So yes, Hugo Chávez’s claim that violence in the US is higher than in Venezuela is correct only if you substitute “US” for “Venezuela” and vice versa.
Finally, here’s a great article from The Guardian about why crime in the USA is going down.
Nothing like the very Minister of Interior and Justice Tarek El Aissami admitting his miserably failure when it comes to homicides: “No hemos podido romper ese piso duro de 48 muertes por cada cien mil habitantes, una tasa muy muy alta” ( http://www.globovision.com/news.php?nid=214790 ). While in Venezuela we have 48 homicides per 100,000, in the USA the number is 5.5 ( http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm ).
Of course, after Chavez’s gaffe, Mr. El Aissami wastes no time and tells us that it’s all Capriles’ fault: ( http://www.eluniversal.com/sucesos/120328/banda-que-asesino-a-libero-iaizzo-esta-plenamente-identificada ).
A thing we should not forget is that the number of homicides has quadrupled when compared to 1999. FOUR frigging TIMES more homicides than in 1999. I don’t have the sources right now, but I remember reading about that a while ago.
What amazes me is that there are still some chavistas out there who think that it’s all made-up, or that say that it’s been always like that. Although it might be true for the barrios, that was hardly the case in other places. Armed robbery inside the Metro trains was unimaginable. An assault at midday inside a bus or at a traffic light was unthinkable. Before Chavez, it was just the barrios that were marginalized, now it’s the city as a whole.
The murder rate in 1998 was 19 x 1000 000.
Source: UNODC’s seventh report. After that, then minister Jesse Chacón decided UNODC were not good to the revolution.
The murder rate in 1920 was higher than that, according to an interesting book.
http://archive.org/details/venezuelaeinfh00bruoft
Guaros and Falconeanos were particularly violent, which corresponds very much with my grandmother’s stories about them.
Raul A.’s hypothesis is that Polar (c) brought some control to the violence produced by cocuy (with a much higher alcoholic content). The murder rate was around 8-10 up to the nineties, then there was a hike, the number kept stable for a couple of years until Chávez got elected and then it went through the roof.
Go to page 486. Murder rate.
http://www.unodc.org/pdf/crime/seventh_survey/7sc.pdf
The amazing thing is how one discusses with Chavistas and they come up with “but there is crime in Europe as well”. Chávez said in 2005 on a BBC interview that “even in Italian a politician was recently murdered” and he added crime had dramatically improved in his tenure, contradicting what the journalist said (but the journalist back then did a horrible job and didn’t have any sources to back his claims, he also asked stupid questions to Chávez).
Only very recently (since 2011, as far as I know) have Venezuelan newspapers started to talk about “murder rate”.
I have written at least 2 times a year since 2000 to El Universal and Notitarde showing them my murder charts. Notitarde published once one chart they did comparing two periods only. Venezuelans live in the hic et nunc. More than two periods is something unfathomable by most, apparently…or so the journos think.
There was León from Observatorio, talking on CNN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J7FY_MSqu8 . At 1:05, while Joker Izarra is laughing, León needs to mention that the “tasa de homicidio es como en la ciencia uno mide o compare países y ciudades”. This is really not rocket science but in Venezuela you really have to explain it over and over again. The calculations are simple cross-multiplication as one learns at age 9-10 (I did, in Venezuela, in a public school in a poor region).
But then you go over to many Venezuelans – including journalists – and you get to hear area X is worse than Y because there were 20% more murders (never mind location Y is 10 times smaller)…or stuff like that.
Of course, now even most Chavistas will have a suspicion crime in the US or in Europe cannot be as bad as in Venezuela and crime in Venezuela “may have gone from bad to worse.” Still, the level of urgency is not there.
It has to do with how some elementary rules of logic are not learnt in Venezuela…it is about very basic, family education, no intelligence or the like.
I was recently talking to “G”, a Caraqueno who is teaching at a university – análisis de sistemas, I think. This “G” is a nini. He said that indeed crime has increased but he sent me a link to a blog of a Venezuelan in Norway talking about how there is also a lot of crime in Norway. In Norway, for Goodness sake! Of course, the guy reads every article from tabloid papers in his new home and he thinks things in Venezuela are not that bad. “G” admits crime is much worse in Venezuela but then he explains it is because of the “exceso de liquidez”. He also says he has never been assaulted in Venezuela in over a decade and yet he recently travelled to Spain and after some days he discovered he had been stolen several hundred euros. I don’t know if he really got that money stolen or he just didn’t know how to spend it, but it was incredible to hear that level of reasoning.
This is the way millions “reason” in Venezuela. Recently a Spaniard working at the EU on technology told me he has had to deal with lots of Cubans and they had “an issue with some logical reasoning”. The guys he had to deal with were really drawing conclusions from premises from which you simply can’t draw conclusions. He said he hadn’t seen this glitch in logic processing in other people, be it Mali, Colombia, Sweden or elsewhere. Perhaps there is something about it and that is what some Cubans and Venezuelans have in common. I don’t know…but when I hear more and more Venezuelans I start to think there is something that went wrong.
Of course this has nothing to do with genetics. It doesn’t even have to do with formal education. There is just something weird that happened with very basic education.
Thanks for the link, Kepler.
That was more or less what I remembered: the number of homicides went from 4550 in 1998 to something like14000-17000 in 2010. If we talk about homicides per 100.000, we went from 19 to 48… And all that after 18 governmental “plans” to fight crime. These guys are geniuses… when it comes to propaganda, because that’s the only thing the chavismo passes with flying colors…
I have more specific data for Carabobo
Look at Juan José Mora, where Morón is. There are 70 thousand people living there.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ba1p_FUzSE8/T0_MhO04a2I/AAAAAAAAB_s/AutIrlSLlm8/s1600/ajuanjosemora.png
(absolute numbers)
In Libertador and Southern Valencia the murder rate is higher, way over 100 x100 000.
In Carabobo at large numbers seem to have reached a plateau in the last two years, but then we know this is not a simple evolution.
I will try to do a forecast of murder per municipio for March tomorrow and see how results come out on Monday in Notitarde.
In Argentina a few years ago, I saw a tv debate in which a politician claimed that crime there was lower than in the US or Canada. The statistic he cited was the number of insurance claims, per capita, for loss of property due to housebreaking. He did not mention the fact that a far larger percentage of people in the North actually have insurance they can make a claim to.
And the fact that over there people makes the proper denounce to the authorities, because the chance the RCMP or the FBI has the same level of corruption as the CICPC is pretty low.
The RCMP will always have the horse show.
Your friend’s flaws in logical processing reminds me of a lot of relatives I have here in Honduras. Whenever I point out that it creeps me out how close we live to what is essentially the second most violent city in the world (San Pedro Sula) they tell me, “Oh, but when we were in Spain there were places we couldn’t go into at night!” Yes, because one dangerous tenement in Madrid is the same as an entire country. I’m also one of the lucky ones in the sense that I’ve never been attacked or robbed during the entire time I’ve lived in Honduras (my entire life up to this point). However, to make the assertion that it is somehow a safe country because of this is just stupid. I wonder if this faulty logic is some sort of defense mechanism people use in order to not go crazy while living in a madhouse.
Also, WTF does ‘exceso de liquidez’ have to do with rising crime? That sounds like the typical ‘falta de valores’ argument that people here trot out when trying to explain rising crime rates.
The US has alien attacks and zombie uprisings. Evidently, crime and mayhem are much higher over there.
Our sage leader can’t be fooled by your mumbo-numbo-jumbo.
LOL. Hollywood is just bringing the Americana slice of life to the world.
Something worth investigating would be the convictions for murder, or the “solved” rate for murders. I have no idea what the respective rates for “solving” murders are in the US compared to Venezuela, but common sense would tell us that the “solving rate” is much higher in the US than in Venezuela -fewer murders and a more functional criminal justice system in the US.
From the “solving rate” for murders, one can then move to actual murder convictions per population. While the murder rate in Venezuela compared to the US is > 10:1, when you are talking about murder convictions per population, the Venezuela: US ration will be much less. It may well be that there are more murder convictions per population in the US compared to Venezuela: not likely, but possible.
I don’t know about the current rate of solved murders, but I’ve heard on the media (sorry, no hard data) that in Venezuela 80-90% of crimes go unsolved. There’s some hard data in the link that Kepler gently provided us (http://www.unodc.org/pdf/crime/seventh_survey/7sc.pdf), but only for 1998-2000. At the time, there were around 1000 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, of them 33 homicides. The number of convicted felons went from 55 (crimes) and 18 (homicides) per 100,000 to 17 and 6 in that period. But even if we choose to ignore the drastic fall and stick to the pre-2000 numbers, the success rate is awful: around 5% for crimes and 50% for homicides.
I don’t have data about USA, but I remember reading that in Germany the success rate for crimes was around 50%. At first I thought that it was pretty poor, but it’s enough to deter any person of turning to a life of crime. The odds are against them. Using some probabilistic “numbo-jumbo”: In Germany, the first time somebody commits a crime the odds of getting caught are 50%; the second time 75%; the third time 82,5% and so on.
In Venezuela, assuming an optimistical 20% success rate for the police, the odds of the criminal getting caught are: 1st time 20%; 2nd time 36%, 3rd time 49%. Only after his third felony the chances favor the police, and not by much.
We don’t need to stop all crime. That’s impossible, but we should stop potential life time criminals as soon as we can, not till the guys have done so much harm.
People will believe whatever they want to believe and politicians will be there to egg them on.This has nothing to do with formal education or even intelligence-It has to do with the willingness or unwillingness to allow one’s emotions and desires to alter the ability to see objectivity or even value objectivity.
People can embrace lies that they don’t believe for political and economic purposes, too.
Don’t worry. Once everybody is equally poor, there’ll be nothing left to steal or kill for.
Well, the highest amount of crime in Venezuela today is on the poorest sectors of society. Once everybody is equally poor, it’s also probable that most, if not all, will be dead, if the crime rate keeps rising at the current pace.
Its also very important to consider the proportion of the crimes vs the population because not only do they have less murderers but their population is 10 times bigger than ours
@luisferpardo
The truth of a proposition has little to do with its believability, and vice verse. The notion that “truth will prevail” is merely a pious wish. History does not show it.
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Winston Churchill said.
This story has legs: Mexican President Felipe Calderon has his own view on this.
http://www.lapatilla.com/site/2012/03/29/calderon-dice-que-venezuela-es-mas-violenta-que-mexico/
Not every head of state is a mendacious so-and-so.
Its interesting that Chavez felt the need to comment. A few years ago he barely commented at all on insecurity. These days it is a much more common occurrence. That tells its own story.
But I do wonder whether this is yet another reflection of the in-fighting in the PSUV. Last year El Aissaimi’s announcements seemed to directly undermine what Chavez was saying. Is Chavez now just drawing a line in the sand for his ministers?
The problem I have with the OVV Gustavo is that they’re always coming out with conflicting, even dubious information. They said there were “17,600″ killings in the first 11 months of 2010. But their report on “2010″ which came out in early December (sounds as though you haven’t seen it) states “13,080″ murders for the whole year, a monstrous “3,492″ criminals killed in clashes with police and “4,508″ violent deaths under investigation. There were also “2,767″ disappeared persons, some of which no doubt are intentional homicides but you can’t really say how many.
Now, if we tack the officially justified killings by police on top of murders and call it “intentional homicide”, that’s still “16,572″ fatalities for 2010. The deaths under investigation I believe include a very small number of suicides and accidents and this is the number I think the OVV are adding on to murders/defense kills by cops, rounding off the 17,600 for the first 11 months.
In a nutshell, it would assumedly (as I just said) include a very small number of suicides and accidents (though these would be dwarfed by the intentional homicides) so I don’t know if people would use that figure? Folks normally go on exact numbers for murder/intentional homicide statistics and some may object to their inclusion.
Here’s the link:
http://www.derechos.org.ve/pw/wp-content/uploads/21SeguridadCiudadana.pdf
Best wishes.