The Wilson Ramos Kidnapping: Another Major League Reminder of Venezuela's Crime Crisis
Catcher
Wilson Ramos #3 of the Washington Nationals walks to home plate during
the game against the Florida Marlins at Nationals Park on September 16,
2011 in Washington, DC. Ramos was kidnapped in his home country of
Venezuela. (Photo: G Fiume / Getty Images)
When I was a graduate student in Caracas in
the 1980s, some of my best memories were hanging out at the Estadio
Universitario during the winter baseball season, when Venezuela's Major
League Baseball stars would come home to play for teams like the Leones
and the Tiburones. I used my expired Chicago Sun-Times intern
press pass to get into the clubhouse and chat up heroes like Ozzie
Guillen (Was he crazy then too? my kids ask. Not as much, I tell them)
and Andrés Galarraga. And it never occurred to anyone that these guys,
revered as they were in Venezuela, could be the targets of pickpockets
let alone kidnappers.
But that was a generation ago, unfortunately, and today Venezuela is
awash in some of the worst violent crime the oil-rich South American
country has ever experienced – the latest example being the armed
abduction yesterday, Nov. 9, of Venezuelan MLB star Wilson Ramos,
catcher for the Washington Nationals. Ramos, who at 24 just finished his
rookie season and is already considered one of the Nationals' best
players, was at his mother's house in the industrial city of Valencia
southwest of Caracas, home for his winter ball stint with the Tigres of
nearby Aragua state, when four men came and took him away at gunpoint.
Ramos is the fourth MLB player in three years to be touched by
kidnapping in Venezuela: three others have had close relatives abducted
there, one of them killed.
Federal detectives in Venezuela said today they believe they found,
in the town of Bejuma outside Valencia, the car used in the Ramos
kidnapping. Venezuelan Justice & Interior Minister Tareck El Aissami
said “the best specialists” were on the case. But the incident is sure
to remind Venezuelans of how dangerous their streets have become.
Venezuela in recent years has acquired a worse kidnapping rate, for
example, than neighboring Colombia, where leftist guerrillas have made
the crime a quotidian fact of life. Venezuela has a murder rate of more
than 50 per 100,000 residents, one of the worst in the western
hemisphere; in Caracas it's 140 per 100,000 residents, making it the
most dangerous city in South America, second in the hemisphere only to
Juárez, Mexico, the deadliest in the world.
This could well be the issue that socialist President Hugo Chávez has
to answer for most when he hits the re-election campaign trail next
year. The former army paratrooper officer and anti-U.S. firebrand, who
revealed over the summer that he is battling cancer, has done much to
reduce the inexcusably high poverty (Venezuela has the hemisphere's
largest oil reserves) that existed when he took office in 1999. But
critics say his leftist Bolivarian Revolution, despite benefitting from
record-high crude prices, has failed on two crucial fronts: one, of
course, being security, and the other being management of the economy,
where power outages and food shortages have become commonplace.
Together, those factors have helped exacerbate a violent crime crisis
that admittedly plagues the rest of Latin America, especially Mexico and Central America,
as the region pays for centuries of neglect of police and judicial
institutions. Granted, Venezuela's problem pre-dates Chávez: well before
he came to power, friends and relatives of mine had been shot
(fortunately none fatally) in armed robberies from Caracas to Puerto la
Cruz. But according to the Venezuelan Observatory on Violence, an NGO,
murders per annum in Venezuela quadrupled during Chávez's first decade
in office, from 4,550 to 16,047, leaving it with a homicide rate of 54
per 100,000 residents in 2009. The Chávez government claims the rate was
closer to 45 per 100,000, but even that would be more than eight times
the U.S. level and still put Venezuela in the company of murder-racked
Latin American countries like Guatemala.
More than 90% of Venezuela's crimes still go unsolved. For all his
revolutionary zeal, Chávez has in large part fallen to the same flawed,
age-old penchant of other Latin America leaders: an inordinate emphasis
on the military (Chávez is known for weapons-buying binges) and too
little regard for developing modern police forces. As if mindful of the
voter heat Chávez stands to face on security before next October's
election, El Aissami also said today that the country's constabulary is
undergoing major reform and restructuring that he promises will be “a
point of reference for this kind of process in the eyes of the world.”
For the moment, when it comes to Venezuela, the world's eyes are on
Valencia, where it's hoped that Ramos may have been the target of what's
known in other abduction-plagued countries like Mexico and Colombia as
an “express kidnapping,” in which the victim is held for a short time
for a relatively modest amount of money compared to other ransom
kidnappings.
Still, it's hard to believe that Venezuela's baseball heroes will be
as enthusiastic in the future about coming home in the off-season to
regale their countrymen with their major-league talents. And, should
Venezuela's feckless political opposition actually get its act together
next year, the country's unabated violent crime could make fewer
Venezuelan voters as enthusiastic about Hugo Chávez.
Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/11/10/the-wilson-ramos-kidnapping-another-major-league-reminder-of-venezuelas-crime-crisis/#ixzz1dMeOkHcw
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