Eduardo Vegas, director of marketing and sales for Notitarde, a newspaper in the Venezuelan industrial capital of Valencia, stoically paged through the newspaper in the center of the newsroom as he read off the day’s headlines in a solemn tone. “Triple Homicide.” On the same page, “Nine Homicides in Last 48 Hours.” On the next, “Murdered Journalist in Maracay.”

While there is always enough crime in Venezuela to fill the pages of Vegas’ daily newspaper, murders can hardly be considered “news” for most Venezuelans. Almost every Venezuelan knows someone who has been touched by crime, and fear of crime dictates patterns of daily life. When Vegas showed off the large basement room where Notitarde is printed and went on to talk about the paper’s distribution, he scoffed when the question of subscriptions was raised. “Subscriptions are hard,” he explained of Notitarde, which has a circulation of 100,000. “People don’t like you knocking on their door—even if you are delivering a newspaper—because of security reasons.”

In 2005, the United Nations identified Venezuela as the crime capital of the world, with the highest per capita rate of gun-related deaths each year. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), crime has more than doubled since President Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998. Murders are now the leading cause of death for adult males in Venezuela and the third leading cause of death overall. These soaring crime statistics mean that Venezuela now has more murders per year than its neighbor, Colombia, which has been battling to suppress armed militias for decades.

Criminal Rhetoric

In many ways, Venezuela’s high crime rate tells a classic story: that of the marriage between poverty and crime. While Chávez purports to have dramatically reduced poverty during his presidency and has initiated countless social projects and reforms for the poor, there is skepticism about whether Venezuela and its economically marginalized citizens have truly experienced wide-scale improvement. In fact, in 2005, the National Statistics Institute, overseen by the Venezuelan government, estimated that poverty hovered at 53 percent, compared to 43 percent in 1999 when Chávez took office. This puts the Venezuelan experience in line with international trends that correlate high levels of poverty with high levels of crime. Yet, at the same time, Venezuela’s security situation defies convention. It cannot be explained by poverty alone, as political ideology and rhetoric have also played roles in promoting violence. Chávez’s fiery speeches about the arrogance of the United States are perhaps the best-known example of his tendency to speak about provocation and struggle, but he speaks about these same things when addressing domestic issues as well. His frequent mention of class struggle invokes a vocabulary that encourages unrest among the poor.

Chávez, from a poor background himself, has built his political career on a platform of empowering Venezuela’s lower classes by fighting poverty. Yet, Chávez sees the fight against poverty as exactly that—a fight. Chávez once famously declared when visiting a prison, that he understood the victimization and hardship the convicts had faced in providing for themselves. “If I didn’t have anything to eat,” he sympathized, “I would also steal.”

Opponents of Chávez cite this speech as an example of how Chávez’s policies have become misguided. “It’s not ‘if I were poor and hungry,’ I would work,” Alessandra Roveri, a native of Valencia, pointed out. “People now feel that they are allowed to steal.” When stealing is described as an equally appropriate course of action as gainful employment, it becomes hard for those who have anything worth stealing to survive unharmed.

After all, the poor are also victims— and, in fact, more frequent victims—of crime. When Notitarde’s Vegas described crime in Venezuela, he was quick to point out this reality. He recollected that someone had murdered a young boy just a day before simply in order to steal his shoes. The police, though known for their corruption and afterhours vigilante justice, are regardless difficult to spot in Venezuela’s poorer areas. While the wealthy municipality of Chacao in Caracas had 1,228 policemen per 100,000 inhabitants in 2005, the poor municipality of Libertador had only 63 policemen per 100,000 residents. Chávez may be focusing on combating economic inequality, but by failing to strengthen police presence and conduct in poor areas, economically marginalized Venezuelans remain the most vulnerable.