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On September 9-10 Venezuela’s Attorney General’s office organized a conference called Prevention is Citizen Security. It sought to bring government representatives, academics, police, and community organizers together to discuss prevention “as an indispensable tool to...
A water tower in Catia with Hugo Chávez’s face on one side and the face of Lina Ron (founder of the Venezuelan Popular Union party and symbol of La Piedrita, another well known collective) on the other © Richard Snyder 2014 A previous version of this article was...
[We have updated and revised this from its original version (and may do so again) in response to participant comments and working through more of our notes. You can watch a webstream of the first two panels here.] What is to be Done? 4:55 Maria Casullo questioned...
“It is better to think of the police as providing support to the National Guard in the protests [as opposed to the other way around]. The National Guard has more experience and more training…and they aren’t restricted [in their use of force] like us…We can’t even...
“It makes no sense! You go into a Chavista’s house and Chávez and Maduro’s faces are everywhere but you open their fridge and it is empty! Empty!” This was the passionate reaction I received from an acquaintance I was chatting with yesterday when I commented that...
Images of burning tires, masked youth, and clashes between citizens and state security forces have accompanied almost all news coverage of Venezuela for the past few weeks. And these well-documented protests and the government response to them have, as blogger...
January saw an accentuation of the progressive remilitarization of citizen security under the Maduro government, with military officers placed at the head of the National Security University (UNES) and the National Police (PNB). These changes amount to a setback to...
Since our last article in this series there have been significant changes in the administration of citizen security in Venezuela. The murder of actress Monica Spear and her husband last month effectively provided the occasion for the Maduro government to accentuate...
The fact that President Maduro went on national television and directly addressed the tragic murders of actress Monica Spear and her husband should be welcomed, as it is all too easy for the government to ignore the issue of security in the country. Many Venezuelans...
In our previous posts in this series we aimed to understand the difficulties confronted by police reform in Venezuela. We showed that most Venezuelans do not blame the government or ineffective policing for Venezuela’s crime surge in recent years, and are more likely...