Imagine a region of some 2.300.000 inhabitants. Imagine in one year 1816 of them get murdered. That means every year about 80 persons are killed for every 100000 inhabitants. Carabobo is that region, but there are many others as mortal as that in Venezuela.
Here I present a little update about violent crime in Carabobo. I use the data for Carabobo simply because I have all the details for that state, not for any other reason. I wish I had the level of detail for other regions. Unfortunately, the CICPC, the state office in charge of that, stopped publishing data nationally since Jesse Chacón became minister of "Information" in 2002 (he has been minister of many other things since then). We just have the reports from the mortuaries and some from local police, we (and journalists mainly and NGOs) have to do the count and go through mortuaries. For Carabobo we do have more details. There are two critical newspapers still there and they also have presented the data month after month since well before Chávez came to office. One can -if one were an investigative journalist- even go through the list of names for most murders, so that one can double-check.
Basically, violent murder rose in the early nineties and then stabilized a bit shortly before Chávez came to office. Since 1999, the number of murders has skyrocketed. The murder rate in Venezuela 1998 was 19 murders per 100,000 inhabitants per year and now it is over 65. Still, those are not exact numbers, just low-range estimates.
It seems Carabobo's murder numbers have stabilized a bit since the end of 2008 (when the new governor was elected). Still, they are incredibly high.
On this map you see a red spot for every 10 murders. I have rounded up or down. The vast majority of murders take place in Southern Valencia, where half a million people live. Still, Libertador and Los Guayos municipalities have a higher rate of murders for their population.
And here you see the progress of violent death in Carabobo since 2004. For the years before 1998 numbers were much lower, but I don't have all the data for every month. Still, one can see how things have evolved.
