HT No Pasaran!Warfare: Quick, which nation shows average civilian deaths at 33 a day in the last third of 2007? Now name the one where civilian deaths average 19 a day? If you guessed Iraq and Venezuela, you'd have it backward.
Quagmire!
Shocking? Of course. But true. With even Venezuelan officials admitting their country clocked 12,249 murders in 2007, Hugo Chavez's socialist "sea of happiness" resembles a war zone. In December alone, Venezuela had 670 murders while Iraq had 476 — and that number is falling fast.
This is Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, the place wildly praised by Hollywood eminentos like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn, and its crime is so bad it tops that seen in actual warfare.
Quagmire!
People like Stone and Penn frequently criticize the Iraq war effort and its progress toward peace. But not once have we seen any of them express outrage at the slaughter brought to the streets of Venezuela courtesy of Hugo Chavez, a supposed champion of the poor.
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Some champion. On Jan. 1, around the same time Hollywood film director Oliver Stone was loudly praising Chavez's revolution in Caracas, 63 murders started off Venezuela's New Year; 35 died the same day in Iraq.
Stone probably knows this, because anyone who's ever been to Caracas knows all about the severity of the crime. Venezuela is the kind of place where families around the dinner table discuss kidnapping and make pacts to not pay ransom for fear of bankrupting the family.
Quagmire!
Meanwhile, night travel is strongly discouraged and no one wears jewelry openly. Security guards pack big firepower to guard tiny businesses like bakeries, and bulletproof cars are common.
Quagmire!
Lonely Planet's Venezuela guide warns its hardy-backpacking readers who can put up with anything to never set foot in the dangerous Chavista slums encircling the capital. You risk life and limb to do so.
Quagmire!
Meanwhile, it's Venezuela's poor who can't defend themselves who are hit the hardest.
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Cuban doctors sent for propaganda purposes to help the poor often flee for their safety, leaving boarded up "free" health care kiosks in Caracas slums like Petare and Catia.
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Even low-level Chavista political operatives in red T-shirts fear the rampant violence and crime of the slums.
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A perfect movie describing the terror was 2005's "Secuestro Express," which might have been entered for Academy Award consideration if the Venezuelan government, perhaps with Hollywood complicity, hadn't prevented it.
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It's not just that there are a lot of crimes. There's also a lot of getting away with it. The government, starting to feel heat from the locals over crime, particularly after El Mundo reported the figures, is on the defensive, saying it's busy solving the crimes.
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But most violent crimes go unsolved because the Chavez government is more interested in pursuing "political" crimes — like persecuting dissident TV stations and opposition politicians — than hunting down the thugs who make Venezuela less safe than Iraq.
Quagmire!
The root of the problem isn't just in a government unwilling to catch crooks, but also in Venezuela's growing geographical role as the drug transshipment point to Europe.
Eighty percent of the cocaine reaching Europe via the Spanish and Italian coasts comes from Venezuela. Yet Venezuela cut off all cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2005, leaving it open to pressure from drug gangs escaping the heat in Colombia.
Worse yet, Jane's Defense reports that Venezuelan military officers, who don't get to share directly in Chavez's theft from the government, are frequently allowed to take cuts of drug traffickers' profits, to keep them loyal.
The result: Traffickers operate freely and multiply — inside and outside Venezuela.
Quagmire!
Meanwhile, over in Iraq, we are winning the war. The civilian casualty figures are down dramatically, and it's safer to walk around in Baghdad now than it is in Caracas.
The willingness to fight and to win is the difference between the brave Iraqi and American war effort and the festering mess in Chavez's chaotic Venezuela.
It just goes to show that waging war is about winning peace. And not waging it is the way to become another Venezuela. But there are none so morally blind as those, like Hollywood's many friends of Chavez, who refuse to see.