Hugo Chavez may have smelled sulfur at the podium in Copenhagen after Barack Obama addressed the global-warming conference, but he also smelled pure gold in one of Obama’s favorite rationalizations. Chavez rolled out a new national police force to impose his dictatorial will fight crime in the poor barrios of his worker’s paradise, saying that he “inherited” the crime problem he purports to address (via HA commenter Buy Danish):
President Hugo Chavez launched a federal police force on Sunday that he hopes will change the overwhelmingly negative image most Venezuelans have of their public security forces while reducing crime in one of Latin America’s most violent countries.
“We are going to defeat crime,” Chavez told uniformed cadets belonging to the newly formed National Bolivarian Police Force during his weekly television and radio show. “We are tackling one of our population’s most sensitive problems: crime prevention.” …
“The National Police will impose a culture of peace in the barrios to eliminate the violence of the capitalist, bourgeois model that we’ve inherited,” El Aissami said.
That’s even more shameless than Obama’s use of the “inherited” meme on the American economy and deficit spending, which implies that Americans are too stupid to remember that Democrats controlled Congress for the last three years — including a Senator named Barack Obama. Chavez has been in office for ten years, and has had near-dictatorial powers for at least half of that time. The crime doesn’t come from an inherited economic model, but from the economic failures of Chavez and his socialist idiocy.
How bad is violent crime in Chavez’ paradise? Venezuela had eight times as many murders as Texas with roughly the same population. Local police are seen as corrupt, and even participatory in the violence. Under those circumstances, creating a new police force to bypass the corruption and impose order might be seen as a wise move, especially since it impacts his best constituency most, the poor.
However, any kind of move by a socialist dictator to create a Praetorian Guard should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Chavez could easily be using the “inherited” meme to create an army of Venezuelan commissars to enforce ideological adherence and personal allegiance to the Caudillo. Chavez and his paranoid approach are much more likely to view dissent as more of a priority than crime, after all, and any police force formed by him will have Chavez’ personal motives as its mission.
Chavez is just taking another step towards his goal of become Fidel Castro, Junior.
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