Venezuelan slum where gangs turn to social work

By Daniel Salgar

CARACAS, Venezuela (AA) - Petare rises as a giant at the eastern end of Caracas, a maze of narrow alleyways between makeshift houses with more than a million residents, making it the largest neighborhood in Latin America and one of the most violent.

In the Venezuelan capital, the highest murder rates are concentrated in the poorest areas: Sucre, where Petare is located, and Libertador, in the center west.

Most of the victims are young men and the deaths are usually caused by readily available guns.

Nelly Larco works at Sucre Town Hall and is a communal leader in the El Dorado sector in Petare.

In an interview with Anadolu Agency, she said the country’s economic crisis helped explain the recruitment of young people into gangs and other armed groups.

“More than insecurity, the main problem is the difficulty to get food,” she said.

“That is not just a problem in Petare, but all over the country. Their incomes are not high enough to buy imported food -- the only kind that you can find.”

According to the opposition-led Congress last month, inflation currently stands at just under 250 percent for the first seven months of the year.

“Why would a young man go to work if he knows that the money he will earn is not enough for anything?” she asked. “What hope can a recent graduate in a country like this one have?”

Easy money, fashion, drugs, status and power results in many of the youth in this neighborhood emerging either as victims or perpetrators of violent crime.

- Poverty reigns

In the absence of formal channels for labor inclusion and income, the most expeditious means of obtaining resources are in the illicit economy.

“When they commit crimes or sell drugs they earn more, they can buy good clothes and have the best women,” Larco said. “Sadly, that is very valuable in Petare, where poverty reigns and moral values have been lost.”

Larco spoke to Anadolu Agency while sitting on the steps of a football pitch on the seventh floor of a huge gym in the middle of El Dorado.

It is one of the few initiatives the government has carried out to encourage youngsters to spend their time doing something other than illegal activities and violence.

Vilma Vaamonde is a member of the communal council of El Dorado and one of the founders of the gym.

She remembers a time when the area where the gym now stands was a wasteland full of garbage that provided a cradle for delinquency and indigence.

The community spent years showcasing proposals to the local government to renovate the space and build the complex that hosts classes in dance therapy, yoga, tai chi, boxing and football.

Vaamonde said the complex had helped residents improve their lives.

In El Dorado, violence has dropped in recent years but in the rest of Petare, armed groups and delinquency still exists.

In the area known as Primero de Noviembre, Andres Paez stands in front of a huge graffiti mural of popular former President Hugo Chavez.

Paez is a representative of Petare Norte in Sucre municipality and a member of the Primero Justicia opposition party.

- Thousands of gangs

As a snapshot of the scale of the problem, he said that each of the municipal area’s 23 neighborhoods had “at least” two criminal gangs.

“It’s not just Petare Norte, but all of Petare, where there are 2,000 neighborhoods,” he told Anadolu Agency. “You do the math.”

Truces between gangs have brought relative calm in recent months. “The rogues don’t have any problems with their own people, they have problems with gangs from other neighborhoods and commit crimes in other sectors of Petare and Caracas,” Paez explained.

On their home turf, gangs are now drawn to social projects, such as providing mattresses and activities for children or raising money for street lighting to “improve safety”.

A situation has evolved in which gangs take care of people -- a daily occurrence for Alexandra Evaristo, a communal leader in the Bolivar neighborhood on top of a hill known as La Bombilla.

During her dawn treks to get water -- supplies in the area were cut off more than two months ago -- or food, the price of which can be three times as much in some parts of the neighborhood, it is the gangs not the police that provide protection.

“To tell you the truth, here we are more afraid of the police than of the gangs,” she said. “The authorities do us more harm. It's nonsense, but that´s the way it is.”

The gangs are just one of many armed groups in Petare.

Sociologist Veronica Zubiliaga, who teaches at Simon Bolivar University, has been investigating urban violence and is part of the Network for Activism and Research for Coexistence.

She said along with young street gangs, there are more sophisticated organizations dedicated to kidnapping and organized crime, as well as the so-called collectives that are known as community working groups.

- Chavez

“Now, there are the armed collectives,” Zubiliaga said. “Among these the most traditional are the ones from the 23 de Enero neighborhood, heavily ideologically aligned with the government.

“There is also an emergence of other armed groups identified as collectives, but when we study them they seem more like masked policemen acting on their own.

“And there are others who do not have masks and who carry out social actions, for example, distributing food.”

Paez said armed collectives are like gangs, but with a political aim, and are a consequence of the groups Chavez left to protect his people.

Chavez, who ruled as president from 1999 to his death in 2013, talked about a “peaceful revolution but armed” -- an argument that was used to import weapons into Venezuela that were delivered to civilians.

Those weapons had a decisive role in politics.

“Instead of protecting the revolution, the collectives use the power of weapons to steal money with the aggravation of being protected by the state,” Paez said.

“Here we have seen confrontations between collectives that try to steal and delinquency bands that resist it and in that clash many civilians die. Sometimes, the same community has confronted these collectives.”

Among this patchwork of armed groups, it becomes clear that one of the main factors fuelling violence in Petare, and across Venezuela, is the flood of weapons in circulation.

While the government has delivered weapons to civilians, weapons also circulate without control on the black market, sometimes supplied through state national authorities.

- Death by guns

According to Zubiliaga, who was part of the defunct Presidential Commission for Arms Control and Disarmament, approximately 90 percent of deaths in Venezuela are caused by firearms.

That makes it the second-highest gun homicide rate in Latin American, behind only the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.

There are many recent examples of how weapons still have a relevant role in politics.

President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s successor, said in June that if the Bolivarian revolution was destroyed “what cannot be achieved with votes, will be achieved with weapons”.

Two months earlier, he had boasted that the government had raised the number of armed militiamen to 500,000 across the country.

In January, while sporting a rifle in his hand, Maduro said the government would hand out 10,000 or 20,000 rifles in popular areas to protect national sovereignty.

In neighborhoods such as Petare, that means more deaths.

Traditionally, the government has carried out military operations to deal with crime and violence.

In 2010, the Security Centennial Device operation was launched. The murder rate at the time was 45 per 100,000.

Two years later, the Patria Segura Operative saw the expansion of militarized checkpoints and massive incarceration of young men. The murder rate jumped to 53 homicides per 100,000 that year.

Since 2015, the government has been conducting the Organization for the Liberation of the People (OLP).

- Homicide rate

Paez said the operation brought hooded men into neighborhoods, hunting for suspected criminals to beat up.

“In these operations, at least in Petare, friends who went in the morning to work have fallen,” he said. “They have cleaned the neighborhoods of gangs a little, but that is not the way, because they have committed crimes, violations against human rights and have killed innocent people.”

The government stopped announcing the official number of homicides in 2008. In March this year, Luisa Ortega, who served as prosecutor general for 10 years and was once a Maduro loyalist, announced that there were 21,752 homicides in 2016,

She said more than half of the victims aged 15-30 and claimed state forces were responsible for 4,667, or 21 percent, of the total deaths.

The OLP operation led to 241 deaths last year.

In the absence of reliable government information, independent projects such as Caracas Mi Convive collect information about homicide rates.

According to their data, Petare is where the most people are killed in the capital.

“Between May and July of this year, there have been more than 450 homicides, about 35 percent of those were committed by state officials, while 18 percent were associated with criminal gangs,” Juan Francisco Mejia, the director of Caracas Mi Convive, said.

The homicide rate spiked in 2016 at 70 per 100,000, according to the Public Ministry, and projections by independent organizations not put the rate in Caracas at 90 per 100,000.

Based on those figures, after El Salvador, Venezuela is the most violent countries in the Americas and Caracas is one of the most violent capital cities in the world.