By Jeremy Morgan
Latin American Herald Tribune staff

CARACAS -- President Hugo Chavez has made one of his rare references to Venezuela's at times appallingly high and apparenty sharply rising crime rate. Even as he did so amid a by now customary lack of official statistics, unofficial estimates had it that at least 40 people died by violent means in Caracas last weekend.

The president said that the way to resolve the lack of security in the country lay in "socialism," which was also the means of dealing with "the problems of violence in the world." As an example of where leftist ways worked in this respect, he pointed to Cuba -- where, he said, crime was low compared with "capitalist" countries.

At the other end of the scale was the United States, "one of the unsafest countries, but the media cover it up," he continued. "They hide the figures, the facts, the persecution, the racial violence, against the woman, against the children, the Latinos."

The president didn't make his comments during his regular Sunday broadcast, in which he tends to extemporize at length on a broad range of subjects but makes scant mention of crime, even though opinion polls consistently rate this the leading cause of public concern. Instead, he'd been ambushed by a question from a journalist, who had equally unusually broken the undeclared rules of the game by directly quizzing the head of state.

Reaching a rough estimate of how many people were killed in Caracas last weekend was all the harder this time round because the city morgue stopped accepting dead bodies halfway through the weekend because by then it was already full. One version of events had it that the death toll might have been as high as 60, including 40 in as pace of barely 36 hours from sundown Friday to dawn Sunday.

The Metropolitan Council of Caracas, which is controlled by the Opposition but has been largely stripped of its powers and functions since Chavez appointed a new city "chief executive" from his party earlier this year, formally declared the capital an "emergency zone" because of the high crime rate.

Officials claimed that the crime rate in Caracas was up 20 percent on a year before, and they blamed the government for this. There had been 1,448 murders in the city during the first half of this year, and this translated into an average of eight a day, a spokesman said. Councillors from Chavez's ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) abstained from the vote.

Councillors also called on the National Assembly to amend the 2010 Budget Bill -- which includes a much-questioned 63.75 percent cut in spending on security, from BsF2.4 billion ($1.116 billion at the official exchange rate) this year to BsF870 million($404.6million) next year.

One of last weekend's victims was an 18-year-old volunteer with one of the president's "missions" or social welfare programs in the barrio where he lived and worked helping the poor. "This happens all the time," lamented one of his relatives. "We're sick and tired of so many deaths and nobody doing anything about it."

Law enforcement officers also found themselves on the receiving end of violent crime. An inspector from the state security service DISIP was shot four times inside his own home by a group of men who made off with his regulation issue gun as well as some valuables. Four men were held in a manhunt hurriedly organized by DISIP and the scientific and investigative police, CICPC.

Early on Monday morning, an officer from the Metropolitan Police was gunned down as he drove to work through Catia, a notoriously rough district in the west of the capital. The killers were thought to have stolen BsF12,000 from Officer Victor Jose Gomez Briceño, 24, who had saved up the money for a religious rite that was due to take place on the day when he was instead buried in a yellow suit.

By then, police had caught up with two suspects, both of them young males. One of them, nicknamed "Poison," ended up in hospital with a bullet wound, where he was identified in the wake of a shoot-out. Two other bad guys got away, one of them after he'd briefly held a coffee lady hostage in an unsuccessful bid to rescue his partner in crime.

Afterwards, the lady in question demonstrated a degree of aplomb. It wasn't unusual, she said, for criminals to burst into a ward and threaten the doctors. But, she added in a reference to her brief experience of herself being held at gunpoint, "it's the first time in many years that something like that happened."

Gomez Briceño was the 52nd police officer slain in the capital this year so far. The preceding Friday, a detective from CICPC was shot dead after he tried to take on an armed assault on board a bus in which one of the robbers was also killed. During a raid on the dead bandit's home, his common law widow told the police that the gang included a cop suspected of wrongdoing who was in the process of getting kicked out of the municipal force in Libertador, west Caracas.

The gang specialized in robbing bus passengers at gunpoint on Avenida Urdaneta near the presidential palace, Miraflores. Two other suspects were held; one of them was on the Wanted list and the other already had a record.

Multiple gunshots did it for Jose Antonio Velasquez, 33, as he walked home in La Vega, south Caracas, with a woman friend who is now said to be under suspicion of setting him up for a robbery. In San Blas, a barrio with a brutish reputation in Petare in the east of the city, another 18-year-old lad bought it after he unwittingly found himself in the middle of a gun battle between two rival gangs.

Elsewhere in Petare, in a barrio known as Alcabala, two brothers were gunned down as they chattered in the street with another of their siblings and his wife. A group of thugs who are thought to belong to a local gang had turned up and thrown an object at the brothers, and a vehement argument had broken out, during which death threats were heard, witnesses said.

There was a quadruple murder In Maracay, capital of Aragua state, in which four men were blown away at point blank range by gunmen who rode by in a car outside an office block in the city center. The murders were thought to be out to get one of the four victims, a 40-year-old Argentine businessman called Casanova.

Carrying a cellular telephone continues to have the potential to make the owner a target of attack. According to police estimates, robbers make off with an average of 117,000 mobiles a month, and they seem to know their technical stuff. Over a fifth of the stolen telephones are the latest state-of-the-art models, police say.

A man was delivering a package during the course of his work as a motorbike messenger. What he didn't know, but apparently the thieves did, was that he was carrying four top grade cellular telephones equipped with all the latest bells and whistles.

He was stopped at gunpoint in broad daylight in a traffic jam on a highway in east Caracas. At the time, his attention is thought to have been distracted by a girl with a shapely backside, which must be one of the oldest tricks in the world.

CICPC announced that they had "dismantled" what they described as a clandestine laboratory that was being used to distill illegal liquor. They said the raid was all the more important because the stuff was then found to contain poisonous substances which they declined to identify but said was being readied for sale to bars and restaurants. Cases of the real stuff were also found, a spokesman added.