Children tussle after dark on a dusty soccer field used just weeks ago as a shooting range by local drug gangs, a sign that a new police force is making a mark on one of Venezuela’s most violent slums.
Under a system influenced by Northern Ireland’s Police Service, policemen now patrol the tangled alleys of the Catia neighborhood night and day, using community-focused policing to gather tips about local criminals who menace residents.
“After 6 p.m., this was basically under curfew,” said 40-year-old local resident Rocio Barrios. “These kids should be in their homes now because it’s late, but they are not in danger. We no longer feel in danger.”
Stacked toward the Caribbean Sea on steep hillsides in western Caracas, Catia and the surrounding area are home to around 400,000 people. It is one of the crime-wracked capital’s most notorious barrios.
Opposition parties have put the soaring national murder rate seen under President Hugo Chavez squarely at the heart of their campaign for September 26 legislative elections in which they expect to slash the socialist’s parliamentary majority.
With one of the world’s highest homicide rates, violent crime is the top concern of Venezuelans, polls show.
The government has not published official murder figures for several years. Nongovernmental organizations, citing leaked police statistics and media reports, say that between 13,000 and 16,000 people were killed last year.
Chavez denied on Thursday that Venezuela was high on the list of most dangerous countries, but did not give statistics.
Two years ago, the opposition won an election for mayor over Chavez’s candidate in Petare, another slum neighborhood traditionally loyal to the president, in which rampant crime played a role. The opposition hopes to repeat that success.
The campaign opened in August with a ghoulish photo of corpses piled up in Caracas’s city morgue, splashed on the front page of opposition newspaper El Nacional. A court later ordered the newspaper not to print more gory pictures.
‘A political banner’
The government says the new National Police project disproves opposition claims that Chavez and his lawmakers have done nothing to combat crime. According to Luis Fernandez, director of the National Police, media attention has created a perception of violence much higher than the reality.
“The theme has been exaggerated. The issue of security has been taken as a political banner during the electoral process,” he told journalists last week during a visit to Catia.
Fernandez said murder rates in the neighborhood had dropped by more than half to 17.6 per 100,000 inhabitants, from 49.6, before the new force hit the streets. Like other officials, however, he said he could not give national crime figures.
“I am glad to say we have achieved these results without firing a single bullet,” Fernandez said. “We want to extend this reduction in crime to the rest of Caracas and Venezuela.”
Although the force appears well designed, it is limited to Catia and the city’s subway system. It will not cover all of Caracas until next year, too late to benefit Chavez in this election but maybe in time for the 2012 presidential race.
“I see the National Police as a bright spot in a generally grim situation,” said David Smilde, a sociologist from the University of Georgia in the United States.
But Smilde said it is too early to say if the political will existed in Venezuela to see it through. “The entire project could be derailed in any number of ways,” he said.
Before the police reached her neighborhood last month, Barrios said some weeks she did not send her teenage daughter to school for fear she would be hit by a stray bullet.
“It was not good. She was shut up at home and would tell me she wanted to move house. I have nowhere to go,” she said.
Now, police are highly visible and residents seem relaxed, chatting on their doorsteps after dark.
So far, most of the police on patrol are former members of Caracas’s Municipal Police (PM), associated in the minds of many with brutality and corruption.
To move to the better paid, equipped and educated National Police, applicants must undergo three months of retraining, in part given by human rights activists at a new security university run by an activist against police brutality.
“It was tough at first,” said one senior officer, who asked not to be identified. “It’s a different way of doing things.”
A fifth of all crimes in Venezuela are committed by the police, according to Interior Minister Tareck Al Aissami, a situation that the new force has been mandated to change.
Totally new recruits will not enter the National Police force until completing a three-year training course aimed at giving them a university-level education.
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