Battling Murder in Venezuela's Participatory Republic

[If participatory democracy is to offer an alternative it must rise to the direst of challenges. In Venezuela, where the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution explicitly aims to create a "democratic, participatory and self-reliant" society, yet over 100,000 people were killed in a decade, this challenge is insecurity.]

Battling Murder in Venezuela's Participatory Republic

May 28th 2009, by George Gabriel - OpenDemocracy.net

Increasingly, the Left's response to representative institutional frameworks - "participatory democracy" - demands a further empowerment of the people, the antidote to an at times suffocating conglomeration of modern elites. This suffocation gave birth to the Venezuelan Caracazo in 1989, where in response to popular protest against the imposition of neo-liberal reforms the security forces massacred Caracas slum dwellers in their homes. If participatory democracy is to offer an alternative it must rise to the direst of challenges. In Venezuela, where the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution explicitly aims to create a "democratic, participatory and self-reliant" society, yet over 100,000 people were killed in a decade, this challenge is insecurity.

Professor Ross Hastings of Ottawa University identifies three determinants of a person's engagement in criminal activity: personal disposition, personal situation, and lack of fear of the justice system. In Venezuela, with poverty halved since 2003, the stand out cause of homicides must be considered the impunity with which they are carried out. Barely 3% of murders result in a sentence. Yonny Campos, Commissioner of the Caracas-wide Metropolitan Police explains, "they commit homicides, 2,3,15,20, and no one denounces them, no one chases them, no one takes action."

(click here to view entire article)

Human Rights and Police Reform in Venezuela: A Venezuelan Perspective

[Seeking an experienced, nuanced, and Venezuelan perspective on human rights and insecurity in Venezuela, Venezuelanalysis.com spoke with the Venezuelan human rights organization Red de Apoyo por la Justicia y la Paz (Support Network for Peace and Justice).]

Human Rights and Police Reform in Venezuela: A Venezuelan Perspective

April 3rd 2009, by Pablo Fernández Blanco, Maryluz Guillén, and James Suggett – Venezuelanalysis.com

Recent reports by Human Rights Watch and the U.S. State Department have put the issue of human rights in Venezuela under much international scrutiny. Seeking an experienced, nuanced, and Venezuelan perspective, Venezuelanalysis.com spoke with the Venezuelan human rights organization Red de Apoyo por la Justicia y la Paz (Support Network for Peace and Justice). The Red de Apoyo was founded in 1985 to denounce abuses of power by the police and military and to support its victims. Since then, the non-governmental organization has expanded to include work on a variety of economic, social, cultural, and civil rights. General Coordinator Pablo Fernández Blanco and Coordinator Maryluz Guillén speak about the ways in which the Chávez government has progressed, the areas where there is still much work to be done, the government's attitude toward human rights activists, the situation before Chávez was elected, and the potential impact on human rights of the February 15th referendum, in which voters approved an amendment to abolish term limits on elected offices.

(click here to view interview)

More Than 100 Latin America Experts Question Human Rights Watch's Venezuela Report

[ In an open letter to the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, over 100 experts on Latin America criticized the organization's recent report on Venezuela, A Decade Under Chávez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela, saying that it "does not meet even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility." The signers include leading academic specialists from universities in the United States, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and a number of state universities, and academic institutions in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, México, the U.K., Venezuela and other countries.]

More Than 100 Latin America Experts Question Human Rights Watch’s Venezuela Report

December 17th 2008, by Various Authors - Venezuelanalysis

December 16, 2008

Human Rights Watch
350 Fifth Avenue, 34th floor
New York, NY 10118-3299 USA

To the Board of Directors,

We write to call your attention to a report published by Human Rights Watch that does not meet even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility. The document, A Decade Under Chávez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela, appears to be a politically motivated essay rather than a human rights report. Indeed, the lead author of the report, Jose Miguel Vivanco, stated as much when he told the press just a few days after its publication, "We did the report because we wanted to demonstrate to the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone..."[2]

Clearly Mr. Vivanco is entitled to his views about Venezuela, but such statements run counter to the mission of Human Rights Watch and indeed any organization dedicated to the defense of human rights. By publishing such a grossly flawed report, and acknowledging a political motivation in doing so, Mr. Vivanco has undermined the credibility of an important human rights organization.

We do not make these charges lightly and we hope you will understand the seriousness of such grave errors in judgment. As scholars who specialize in Latin America, we rely on what are supposed to be independent, non-partisan organizations such as Human Rights Watch for factual information about human right abuses committed by governments and sometimes non-governmental actors. So do many other constituencies, including the press, government officials, and the public. It is a great loss to civil society when we can no longer trust a source such as Human Rights Watch to conduct an impartial investigation and draw conclusions based on verifiable facts.

(click here to view entire letter; click here to view letter in Spanish)