THE chance of being shot in Caracas may be higher than just about anywhere else in the world, outside war zones. Cheuk Woon Yee Sinne, a baseball player from Hong Kong, found that out on August 13th. As she took the field for a match in the Women’s Baseball World Cup, at an army stadium in Venezuela’s capital, a stray bullet hit her in the leg. Her team promptly pulled out of the tournament.
That was an embarrassment for the government of Hugo Chávez, which faces a legislative election on September 26th. It said the shooting was an isolated incident and moved the tournament to a venue outside the capital. But it also has another solution to Venezuela’s crime problem: suppress negative crime statistics and prevent the media from publishing gory images.
The government stopped publishing data on murders several years ago. Nevertheless, Roberto Briceño-León of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, an NGO, says that a government report he has obtained puts the national murder rate at 75 per 100,000 people, up from 49 just four years ago and almost twice the rate in neighbouring Colombia where guerrillas continue to wage war.
The report estimates the murder rate in Caracas at an astonishing 220 per 100,000 people. That is higher even than in Mexico’s drug-ridden Ciudad Juárez. “I don’t have the slightest doubt that Caracas is the most violent city in the world,” says Mr Briceño-León.
- The Economist: Gobierno culpa a los medios de la delincuencia, El Universal, 20/08/2010 06:52 PM
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