The Forces of Disorder.(crime in Venezuela)(Brief Article)

Lately, the gang known as Los Pegadores (the Hitters) had been hijacking as many as three trucks a week on the freeway that winds from Caracas down through the coastal mountain range to the port of La Guaira. But Thursday, Aug. 23, was a bad day for the highwaymen. Around noon their leader, "El Bemba" (the Mouth), and a dozen of his men staged a fake accident inside one of the freeway tunnels, forcing the driver of a Mack truck to pull over. But as they set about unloading their booty, a special undercover squad of detectives from Venezuela's judicial police arrived on the scene. Soon four hijackers lay dead, their bodies riddled with bullets; five more would meet a similar fate hours later after they fled the scene. In what the police insisted was a "shoot-out," not a single cop received as much as a scratch. The news made the front pages the following day. But, except in scale, it was business as usual for the Venezuelan police.

With crime spiraling out of control in Caracas and other cities, police are taking an increasingly hard line toward crooks. In the process, their critics charge, the forces of order are not merely carrying out a "shoot-to-kill" policy. In recent months, detractors say police have increasingly been hunting down and executing men they term "expendable thugs." It's a charge authorities deny. "This is not a criminal state that... promotes an extermination policy," says Deputy Interior Minister Gen. Luis Camacho Kairuz. "You can be sure that when a mistake is made the perpetrator will be punished." But cops say otherwise. "Of course there are villains who have to be taken out of circulation," one former senior policeman told NEWSWEEK, "because they keep on killing. Or because they are rapists; they rape children, they murder children, they murder women."

Certainly, much of Venezuela has begun to resemble a war zone. One reason: the country has been in economic decline for virtually 20 years. Almost all social indicators, in areas like health and education, show a marked deterioration over that period. Another factor, experts agree, was the release of almost 8,500 prisoners in 1998 under a new criminal-justice code. As a result, in the past decade violent crime has tripled, and in the capital, Caracas, the murder rate has quintupled. An average Venezuelan weekend now sees up to 100 murders. More than 8,000 people were killed last year--a rate of around 33 per 100,000, compared with 5.7 murders per ...