FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE WITH THE VENEZUELAN CRIME WAVE
Bahia de Caráquez, Ecuador, Domingo, 03 de junio de 2007
The following is the text of an email I sent a few weeks ago to the landlady of the house we were caring for in Venezuela over the past six months:
QUOTE
La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, 08May07
Dear ….:
Well, first the bad news. This morning Kathleen and I were taken by surprise by two masked and armed robbers, trussed up naked on the hall floor while they rifled through everything in the house, stealing the computer laptop, the digital camera, I pods and cash.
I was awake from about 0430 and was working in the hallway at my computer. The doors and gates were still locked. About 0615, i.e., after it was already quite light but before the sun was actually shining into the patio, I opened the front wooden doors and then the gate from the house proper to the patio. Dropping the house key on the garden table, I went to the patio shower. I noticed some strange papers and one white sport sock lying there. Before I could check it further or even turn on the water two men, young and athletic, I would estimate about twenty-something, came swiftly from behind the Daewoo Tico car parked in the patio. They had T-shirts wrapped around their faces. Each held a silvery pistol and they were aimed right at my face. They were not noisy but were insistent that I get down on the shower floor on my knees while one held my arms behind me and the other held a gun pressed to the back of my head. From that point I never actually saw them except occasionally for the sneaker of one of them. They were asking me something about “Plata” but I kept saying "No intiendo! No habla Espagnol". It is amazing how my Spanish deserted me as I was looking down the barrel of a gun or having it pressed to the back of my skull.
After a very short time they got me to my feet and pushed me in front of them toward the open back gate to the house and down the hall into the house itself. They pushed me down on the floor opposite the doors to the apricot bedroom, tied my hands behind my back using the rope for the hammock and threw a cloth over my head. Then I could hear them rifling through the desk and the books and the mattresses. They whispered the whole time quietly.
At some point they went in to the apricot bedroom where Kathy was still sleeping and woke her. She looked up to see a pistol touching her forehead. From the hallway I could see nothing but I heard her scream about three or four times till they told her to be quiet. Then she was brought out into the hallway, also naked, told to lie down on her back next to me (I am lying on my face the whole time). She asks them for her "ropa" and they throw a bedsheet over the two of us while they continue to search the house. Eventually they had looked through all the rooms including the kitchen, bedrooms and library and then they left. They took my red backpack - probably to carry the loot-, my laptop and charging cord, our new digital camera, three small I-pods, your cellphone from the house (they might be stupid enough to telephone on it and then the police might be able to trace them by going to the recipient of the call) and our money (US$100 & Bs 350,000) and the Bs 200,000 destined for Paola. They rifled through your armoire but did not find your Bs 168,000. I cannot tell with absolute certainty but I don't think they took anything else of yours either. They did not damage things and were, surprisingly, not brutal to us. They probably figured we couldn't tell them in Spanish anything that would help them. But even when they were tying us up they were not in any way rough. But, having a gun stuck in your face and then being tied up for half hour causes you to live in uncertainty about whether they are actually going to get tough with you. A little unnerving, in case you ever wondered.
We kind of heard them leave. They had closed the front wooden door when they started searching and they left with their booty through the patio. (Clearly, we realise now, they had been waiting there for some time for me to open the patio house-gate. Who knows how long really. But while they were waiting they needed to take a crap or two and did the job(s) in the outside shower using a roll of paper towelling that they found in the patio plus one of our towels to clean themselves). Once we were sure that they were gone (how/where did they get over the wall?), we could shake off the sheet they had thrown over us. We were both bound hand and foot before they left (I had been tied with my hands behind my back the whole time; Kathy was tied with her hands in front. Before leaving they tied our feet as well with t-shirts and underwear. So Kathy could untie my hands and then we could free ourselves. We hoped they were not lowering around the patio. Within a few minutes we were free. I checked the clock: it was 0650 so the whole thing was going on for about 35-45 minutes. The rope marks on my wrist were still visible several hours later.
We left everything as was – they had strewn content of drawers etc all over the floor- and walked over to get Jens to go with us to the police. Trying to speak Spanish in the detail required and in our state was more than we could handle. The local station was however unmanned and we drove to Sanjuan. There were lots of policemen and women around but they took no interest in us. The desk constable told us to wait for the secretary to arrive so we could make statement. She arrived at about 0800, we gave a statement and we were back home by 1030. I used Jens's camera to take some pictures and then we began tidying up.
As you can imagine, we are a little shaken by the hospitality in La Guardia. At the moment Kathy does not want to sleep in the house any more. Paola's sister and family will be staying with us from tomorrow night for a while from Caracas so the house will be fuller (or does that make it more attractive). Fortunately, the “ladrones” did not take our plane tickets for Guayaquil: Kathy wanted to change them to fly tomorrow. We are still trying to deal with all this.
The good news is that we were not hurt, although we were clearly in a very dangerous situation. No weapons or pepper spray or anything else in the house could have prevented this since the bad guys waited in the garden, quietly completing their ablutions as it turns out, until I opened the locked gate. Even if I had been packing a weapon (on my naked body?) I would have had no time to get to it since I was being threatened by two men with guns and would have been disarmed immediately or even plugged, a term that takes on new meaning when you are in the shower and pistols are being held to your forehead. They had the advantages of surprise, superior numbers and weapons. If they had found a gun in the house while I was tied up, who knows how they might have reacted. At best the gun would have been stolen too. But a watchdog like Kira would have been useful and so probably would have been electric wire around the wall.
Jens was a terrific help with the lackadaisical police and offered to put us up at the B&B if we need it. I suspect the bad guys are not coming back since they got everything they wanted anyway and we will now be more on the qui vive.
Thought I would let you know and tell you that we are trying to decide what we should do and what we can cope with. Wondering however if your house insurance covers robberies and break-ins. Taken altogether the new value of the stuff and money we lost was about $2,500 to $3,000.
A little shaken but still alive and kicking
Ronald
UNQUOTE
Our landladies were very supportive in the aftermath of the incident. We had been having smaller security breaches over the half year we were there, and we should doubtless have done something more aggressive like get a dog. But one is always smarter after the event. As it turned out there is a small burglary wave in La Guardia and several other houses have also been burgled or invaded. Also, a local bakery was invaded by two masked men a few weeks earlier and the baker and his apprentice shot dead. Had they resisted? Was there some other issue at stake like a drug related incident? Also, Jens, our German friend, had his motorboat stolen one night with both new outboards. They were found the next morning, the boat on a deserted beach near Juangriego and the motors mounted on a completely different peñero miles away near the Restinga beach. The Guardacosta (Venezuelan Coast Guard) put it down to narco-trafficking and reckoned it the case was unsolvable.
After spending one sleepless night after the burglary in the house, we decided to move over to Jens’s house. He was planning to make a quick trip to Germany anyway and we could stay at his house with Kira, his Rottweiler/Dobermann dog. His house also has rather more passive security so we felt much better. Having the dog also got us out on the beach ach morning to take her for a run.
Crime wave
Venezuela is in the midst of a crime wave that has lasted nearly a decade. The murder rate doubled in ten years, cresting in 2003 with 12,000 murders or a murder rate of 0.316 per 1,000. That ranks Venezuela No. 4 worldwide after Columbia (0.61 per 1,000!), South Africa (0.496) and Jamaica (0.324). By comparison, for example: the USA ranks 24th while Australia, Canada and the UK are 43rd, 44th and 45th respectively.) Other violent crimes are also well up over the mid-90’s.
The Venezuelan opposition and the ex-pat community on Margarita are uno sono the opinion that it is all the fault of left-wing President Hugo Chavez. The crime wave has, of course, happened on his watch. But this finger-pointing seems a little simplistic especially in view of the fact that Columbia’s murder rate is twice that of Venezuela’s and neither Columbia nor Jamaica are governed by Hugo Chavez. If you blame every deteriorated crime statistic solely on the head of state, then you would have to blame Prime Minster Stephen Harper for the fact that Canada has the world’s fifth highest rape statistics.
I have no understanding of why there is a crime wave in countries like Columbia, Jamaica and Venezuela. I now know what it feels like. I remember when every New Yorker had at least one mugged tale to tell and advised newcomers how to behave on the streets. Nearly every visitor to Quito or Caracas has a mugging story too. It is hard to believe that rampant street crime, burglaries and violence does not have at least something to do with widespread poverty and economic class differences. But how they related directly is more difficult to assess reliably. The opposition tried to raise crime as an issue in the presidential election campaign last fall in Venezuela. Chavez never responded to the issue. Some say he is hesitant about cleaning up the police as he might need them to resist violent attempts to remove from office as have already occurred.
I read once that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been thrown into jail overnight. I was pretty angry at first and, since the police had done nothing to prevent the crime and nothing at all to follow up on it, I was hot for vigilante justice for a few days, especially after we heard through the village grapevine that the robbers were local guys and the cell phone had already been sold! (The police had shrugged their shoulders when we reported the crime and said only that there were a lot of riffraff coming over to the island from the mainland and they were undoubtedly responsible.) But I cooled off. We were leaving for Ecuador within a week or so and we had learned to expect nothing of the police.
In cases like these the police always advise reacting totally passively. The robbers are usually armed with firearms or knives and what amount of your property is worth serious injury or death? Researching armed violence against boaters in the Caribbean (there is a lot), we noted that injuries to the boaters occurred when they put up a fight. Kathleen and I had discussed in advance that we would take strong passive measures (locks, shutters, etc.) but that we would react passively of someone attempted to rob us. This stood us in good stead in this case.
The only thing I regret losing really is my work and photos on the laptop and camera and I have even been able to replace many of them. Let this be a lesson to back everything up off the computer. I do so now more avidly on my Hotmail account and have opened a Flickr account for storing photographs. We have also become much more careful about what we carry with us on the streets (i.e., how much money, passports, etc.) While we were at the B&B, we never left our bedroom without checking to make sure the dog was alive and present in the patio.
Surprisingly, and I must admit a little irritatingly, many men have either said or implied that I should have put up resistance. Aside from the fact that, as noted, the robbers had the advantage of numbers, surprise and weapons (I was naked and about to take a shower so was, shall I say, only lightly armed at the time), I was quite aware that even being coshed by a pistol on the skull could provide years of pain, that there had been violent deaths in the village only recently and that the police always advise cooperating. Anyway, I think most men seem to have watched too many Bruce Lee films. But, who knows? Maybe they could have got out of this one without injury, death and loss of property.
You can check out the statistics by visiting
http://www.nationmaster.com/.
Other interesting articles:
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4349
(Human Rights and Police Reform in Venezuela: A Venezuelan Perspective)
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4338
(Crime in Venezuela: Opposition Weapon or Serious Problem?)
Bahia de Caráquez, Ecuador, Domingo, 03 de junio de 2007
The following is the text of an email I sent a few weeks ago to the landlady of the house we were caring for in Venezuela over the past six months:
QUOTE
La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, 08May07
Dear ….:
Well, first the bad news. This morning Kathleen and I were taken by surprise by two masked and armed robbers, trussed up naked on the hall floor while they rifled through everything in the house, stealing the computer laptop, the digital camera, I pods and cash.
I was awake from about 0430 and was working in the hallway at my computer. The doors and gates were still locked. About 0615, i.e., after it was already quite light but before the sun was actually shining into the patio, I opened the front wooden doors and then the gate from the house proper to the patio. Dropping the house key on the garden table, I went to the patio shower. I noticed some strange papers and one white sport sock lying there. Before I could check it further or even turn on the water two men, young and athletic, I would estimate about twenty-something, came swiftly from behind the Daewoo Tico car parked in the patio. They had T-shirts wrapped around their faces. Each held a silvery pistol and they were aimed right at my face. They were not noisy but were insistent that I get down on the shower floor on my knees while one held my arms behind me and the other held a gun pressed to the back of my head. From that point I never actually saw them except occasionally for the sneaker of one of them. They were asking me something about “Plata” but I kept saying "No intiendo! No habla Espagnol". It is amazing how my Spanish deserted me as I was looking down the barrel of a gun or having it pressed to the back of my skull.
After a very short time they got me to my feet and pushed me in front of them toward the open back gate to the house and down the hall into the house itself. They pushed me down on the floor opposite the doors to the apricot bedroom, tied my hands behind my back using the rope for the hammock and threw a cloth over my head. Then I could hear them rifling through the desk and the books and the mattresses. They whispered the whole time quietly.
At some point they went in to the apricot bedroom where Kathy was still sleeping and woke her. She looked up to see a pistol touching her forehead. From the hallway I could see nothing but I heard her scream about three or four times till they told her to be quiet. Then she was brought out into the hallway, also naked, told to lie down on her back next to me (I am lying on my face the whole time). She asks them for her "ropa" and they throw a bedsheet over the two of us while they continue to search the house. Eventually they had looked through all the rooms including the kitchen, bedrooms and library and then they left. They took my red backpack - probably to carry the loot-, my laptop and charging cord, our new digital camera, three small I-pods, your cellphone from the house (they might be stupid enough to telephone on it and then the police might be able to trace them by going to the recipient of the call) and our money (US$100 & Bs 350,000) and the Bs 200,000 destined for Paola. They rifled through your armoire but did not find your Bs 168,000. I cannot tell with absolute certainty but I don't think they took anything else of yours either. They did not damage things and were, surprisingly, not brutal to us. They probably figured we couldn't tell them in Spanish anything that would help them. But even when they were tying us up they were not in any way rough. But, having a gun stuck in your face and then being tied up for half hour causes you to live in uncertainty about whether they are actually going to get tough with you. A little unnerving, in case you ever wondered.
We kind of heard them leave. They had closed the front wooden door when they started searching and they left with their booty through the patio. (Clearly, we realise now, they had been waiting there for some time for me to open the patio house-gate. Who knows how long really. But while they were waiting they needed to take a crap or two and did the job(s) in the outside shower using a roll of paper towelling that they found in the patio plus one of our towels to clean themselves). Once we were sure that they were gone (how/where did they get over the wall?), we could shake off the sheet they had thrown over us. We were both bound hand and foot before they left (I had been tied with my hands behind my back the whole time; Kathy was tied with her hands in front. Before leaving they tied our feet as well with t-shirts and underwear. So Kathy could untie my hands and then we could free ourselves. We hoped they were not lowering around the patio. Within a few minutes we were free. I checked the clock: it was 0650 so the whole thing was going on for about 35-45 minutes. The rope marks on my wrist were still visible several hours later.
We left everything as was – they had strewn content of drawers etc all over the floor- and walked over to get Jens to go with us to the police. Trying to speak Spanish in the detail required and in our state was more than we could handle. The local station was however unmanned and we drove to Sanjuan. There were lots of policemen and women around but they took no interest in us. The desk constable told us to wait for the secretary to arrive so we could make statement. She arrived at about 0800, we gave a statement and we were back home by 1030. I used Jens's camera to take some pictures and then we began tidying up.
As you can imagine, we are a little shaken by the hospitality in La Guardia. At the moment Kathy does not want to sleep in the house any more. Paola's sister and family will be staying with us from tomorrow night for a while from Caracas so the house will be fuller (or does that make it more attractive). Fortunately, the “ladrones” did not take our plane tickets for Guayaquil: Kathy wanted to change them to fly tomorrow. We are still trying to deal with all this.
The good news is that we were not hurt, although we were clearly in a very dangerous situation. No weapons or pepper spray or anything else in the house could have prevented this since the bad guys waited in the garden, quietly completing their ablutions as it turns out, until I opened the locked gate. Even if I had been packing a weapon (on my naked body?) I would have had no time to get to it since I was being threatened by two men with guns and would have been disarmed immediately or even plugged, a term that takes on new meaning when you are in the shower and pistols are being held to your forehead. They had the advantages of surprise, superior numbers and weapons. If they had found a gun in the house while I was tied up, who knows how they might have reacted. At best the gun would have been stolen too. But a watchdog like Kira would have been useful and so probably would have been electric wire around the wall.
Jens was a terrific help with the lackadaisical police and offered to put us up at the B&B if we need it. I suspect the bad guys are not coming back since they got everything they wanted anyway and we will now be more on the qui vive.
Thought I would let you know and tell you that we are trying to decide what we should do and what we can cope with. Wondering however if your house insurance covers robberies and break-ins. Taken altogether the new value of the stuff and money we lost was about $2,500 to $3,000.
A little shaken but still alive and kicking
Ronald
UNQUOTE
Our landladies were very supportive in the aftermath of the incident. We had been having smaller security breaches over the half year we were there, and we should doubtless have done something more aggressive like get a dog. But one is always smarter after the event. As it turned out there is a small burglary wave in La Guardia and several other houses have also been burgled or invaded. Also, a local bakery was invaded by two masked men a few weeks earlier and the baker and his apprentice shot dead. Had they resisted? Was there some other issue at stake like a drug related incident? Also, Jens, our German friend, had his motorboat stolen one night with both new outboards. They were found the next morning, the boat on a deserted beach near Juangriego and the motors mounted on a completely different peñero miles away near the Restinga beach. The Guardacosta (Venezuelan Coast Guard) put it down to narco-trafficking and reckoned it the case was unsolvable.
After spending one sleepless night after the burglary in the house, we decided to move over to Jens’s house. He was planning to make a quick trip to Germany anyway and we could stay at his house with Kira, his Rottweiler/Dobermann dog. His house also has rather more passive security so we felt much better. Having the dog also got us out on the beach ach morning to take her for a run.
Crime wave
Venezuela is in the midst of a crime wave that has lasted nearly a decade. The murder rate doubled in ten years, cresting in 2003 with 12,000 murders or a murder rate of 0.316 per 1,000. That ranks Venezuela No. 4 worldwide after Columbia (0.61 per 1,000!), South Africa (0.496) and Jamaica (0.324). By comparison, for example: the USA ranks 24th while Australia, Canada and the UK are 43rd, 44th and 45th respectively.) Other violent crimes are also well up over the mid-90’s.
The Venezuelan opposition and the ex-pat community on Margarita are uno sono the opinion that it is all the fault of left-wing President Hugo Chavez. The crime wave has, of course, happened on his watch. But this finger-pointing seems a little simplistic especially in view of the fact that Columbia’s murder rate is twice that of Venezuela’s and neither Columbia nor Jamaica are governed by Hugo Chavez. If you blame every deteriorated crime statistic solely on the head of state, then you would have to blame Prime Minster Stephen Harper for the fact that Canada has the world’s fifth highest rape statistics.
I have no understanding of why there is a crime wave in countries like Columbia, Jamaica and Venezuela. I now know what it feels like. I remember when every New Yorker had at least one mugged tale to tell and advised newcomers how to behave on the streets. Nearly every visitor to Quito or Caracas has a mugging story too. It is hard to believe that rampant street crime, burglaries and violence does not have at least something to do with widespread poverty and economic class differences. But how they related directly is more difficult to assess reliably. The opposition tried to raise crime as an issue in the presidential election campaign last fall in Venezuela. Chavez never responded to the issue. Some say he is hesitant about cleaning up the police as he might need them to resist violent attempts to remove from office as have already occurred.
I read once that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been thrown into jail overnight. I was pretty angry at first and, since the police had done nothing to prevent the crime and nothing at all to follow up on it, I was hot for vigilante justice for a few days, especially after we heard through the village grapevine that the robbers were local guys and the cell phone had already been sold! (The police had shrugged their shoulders when we reported the crime and said only that there were a lot of riffraff coming over to the island from the mainland and they were undoubtedly responsible.) But I cooled off. We were leaving for Ecuador within a week or so and we had learned to expect nothing of the police.
In cases like these the police always advise reacting totally passively. The robbers are usually armed with firearms or knives and what amount of your property is worth serious injury or death? Researching armed violence against boaters in the Caribbean (there is a lot), we noted that injuries to the boaters occurred when they put up a fight. Kathleen and I had discussed in advance that we would take strong passive measures (locks, shutters, etc.) but that we would react passively of someone attempted to rob us. This stood us in good stead in this case.
The only thing I regret losing really is my work and photos on the laptop and camera and I have even been able to replace many of them. Let this be a lesson to back everything up off the computer. I do so now more avidly on my Hotmail account and have opened a Flickr account for storing photographs. We have also become much more careful about what we carry with us on the streets (i.e., how much money, passports, etc.) While we were at the B&B, we never left our bedroom without checking to make sure the dog was alive and present in the patio.
Surprisingly, and I must admit a little irritatingly, many men have either said or implied that I should have put up resistance. Aside from the fact that, as noted, the robbers had the advantage of numbers, surprise and weapons (I was naked and about to take a shower so was, shall I say, only lightly armed at the time), I was quite aware that even being coshed by a pistol on the skull could provide years of pain, that there had been violent deaths in the village only recently and that the police always advise cooperating. Anyway, I think most men seem to have watched too many Bruce Lee films. But, who knows? Maybe they could have got out of this one without injury, death and loss of property.
You can check out the statistics by visiting
http://www.nationmaster.com/.
Other interesting articles:
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4349
(Human Rights and Police Reform in Venezuela: A Venezuelan Perspective)
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4338
(Crime in Venezuela: Opposition Weapon or Serious Problem?)
posted by rjb @ Sunday, June 03, 2007
1 Comments:
At Thursday, June 07, 2007 1:24:00 am,
rob said…
You need have absolutely no personal recourse to your actions and behaved impeccably, in my opinion. What price a life? Great blog thank-you for sharing it with me.
Rob
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