The police forces in Venezuela are being emptied. Resignations, leave requests and desertions have multiplied in recent months. The economic crisis worsens, after a diffuse recovery during 2022, and the police are leaving one after another, from the institutions and from the South American country, perhaps with better physical conditions to cross the dangerous Darien jungle among the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have tried this year. This was done by chief officer Omar Rincón, a local police officer from Caracas, who began the journey in mid-July and a week ago arrived in the United States via Arizona. “I waited more than a month for them to give me my leave, I sold my motorcycle, I got a few savings and I came.”
Rincón brought canned goods, cookies and changes of clothes. He took boats, canoes and buses; He walked along trails at night, dodged immigration in the most complicated countries on the way north and arrived in Mexico City where he made an appointment to apply for admission through the CBT One application that the United States Government implemented this year. United to try to prosecute the enormous flow of migrants that accumulates on the southern border. The money he brought with him was left at each stop to pay for transportation, coyotes, and guides. Caracas, Cúcuta, Medellín, Necoclí, the Darien jungle, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, “another country called Guatemala”, Tapachula, Mexico City, Hermosillo, Nogales, Arizona, New York, and will soon travel to Atlanta where he has gotten a job. “On the way I found six police colleagues waiting for their appointments, some of them took the beast (a freight train that runs through Mexico and which migrants get on irregularly to reach the border). So far, out of my group, I am the only one who has already entered the United States. I think I’ve been lucky.”
This group of Venezuelan migrants not only share their uniformed past, but also their motivations for leaving. “I had 15 years of service and everything was going downhill. I left for myself, for my daughter,” Rincón says by phone. “The interference of politics in the police has complicated things. The salary, the conditions, you do not have the logistics to practice the profession as a dignified civil servant”. The provision of uniforms and boots, sometimes even ammunition in an informal market, are paid by the official in many institutions, whose salaries are around 20 dollars a month on average.
The group of the 618 “courses”
During one of the many operations carried out against the dangerous Koki gang in the Cota 905 neighborhood, in western Caracas, shrapnel from a grenade hit another police officer, who prefers not to identify himself. The institution for which she worked did not have active medical insurance due to non-payment, so she had to pay for the care of the wounds with the 14 dollars a month that she received then. He has been in the United States for a year and two months, after 11 years of service in various police forces in Venezuela and after having crossed the Darién in one of the toughest seasons, when the camps of humanitarian agencies and the journey was made in more than a week walking. “On the way I saw about 12 dead and we saved the life of a Cuban woman who was decompensated with the first aid tools that I know as a police officer,” she recalls by phone from New Jersey, where she delivers in her own car.
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These days one of her daughters is walking the same road to the Darién with her mother and she will take the other later. The migration of Venezuelan police officers is so large that they are already a network in the United States. The former official says that he is in a WhatsApp group where there are 618 “courses” (as fellow police students call each other) from the third promotion of the National Experimental Security University, created by Hugo Chávez in 2009 to professionalize the police function and massify the foot of force. In that digital community, he learned that supposedly in the state of Indiana they are accepting migrant ex-police officers to cover the deficit in the local security forces, which he considers an option for those who want to continue their profession. “Now, while I’m talking to you, I’m talking to four other colleagues who are on their way and I’m going to receive them in the United States.”
The Government of Nicolás Maduro has made a huge investment in money and resources for the country’s police forces, especially for the Bolivarian National Police, founded in 2009 together with the university, based on the principle of the “civic-military-police union”. as a source of power and social control of Chavismo. The foot of the PNB is about 40,000 officials. State and regional police forces, once powerful and autonomous, now fall under the Ministry of Interior and Justice. With few exceptions, they have been weakening in resources and personnel in recent years, particularly if they are governed by opposition politicians, since the central government denies them the resources that correspond to them. They have fewer powers and weapons to face the underworld than the PNB, although the precarious salary equals them.
The lawyer and criminologist Luis Izquiel points out that the salaries of the Venezuelan police are the lowest in South America. And they are even lower in the regional police forces. “A police officer earns a salary of between 100 and 20 dollars a month if he is just starting out. There are premiums, benefits, insurance, but they are modest. However, there are lines, many volunteers who want to join the PNB”. Javier Gorriño, an experienced commissioner, criminologist and university professor, who directs the citizen security area of the Mayor’s Office of El Hatillo, an upper-middle-class area in eastern Caracas, agrees with this. “The boys really like the job, but with the salaries you can’t have a family, because the main headache here is the daily food,” he admits.
“You have to consider the spirit of adventure of every police officer, his vocation implies all that. That is why there are some who take paths like the Darién, very fashionable among the police, but there are others who unfortunately take the path to the left, which is that of corruption, the so-called rattling (collection of bribes in money, favors or services to merchants and individuals), to round out the income and even to alleviate the deficiencies of the institutions, which leads to a confusion of values”.
This week, the mayor of Maracaibo, Rafael Ramírez, the second largest city in the country, located in Zulia, a state bordering Colombia, also acknowledged the exodus with concern. “Our police officers are the first to feel in a physical condition to leave for the Darién. Last week at least 22 officers had left, they are asking to leave and cross through the Darién,” he said at a press conference in which he added that the number of agents was insufficient to protect the city and that with the active police officers barely covering 10% of the territory.
Deprofessionalization and lethality
“It is difficult to have data on the number of police or security agents who have emigrated, because the Government has encrypted that information since 2012,” says Rocío San Miguel, lawyer and director of the NGO Control Ciudadano. “But it is very evident that the number of officers requesting leave, of police officers who emigrate through border areas, especially regional ones, is increasing.” Control Ciudadano distinguishes as causes, both for police and military, “insufficient salaries, job stability, political participation and de-professionalization.” Chief Officer Rincón, recently arrived in New York, says that the generations being formed now have no expectations and no real chance for promotion. “They’re not getting the training and discipline that others of us are getting.”
This de-professionalization and politicization also has its correlate in other alarming figures that describe the Venezuelan police institutions as the most lethal in the region: 1 out of every 3 homicides in Venezuela are committed by state security agents, according to a report by the Monitor of Use of Lethal Force in Venezuela presented last year. Added to this is the file on extrajudicial executions being investigated by the Fact Finding Mission ordered by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, from which they called for the suppression of the elite body of the PNB, the Action Forces Specials (FAES).
Maduro himself has declared that he wants to bring 100,000 officials to the PNB, an institution with “very broad” filters to graduate officials, who receive Chavista doctrinal training. “In Democracy there was a weaker police design, but with more money, the policemen made a career, had strong insurance, and bought apartments,” says Izquiel. “Now the body is growing, but many civil servants drop out quickly or emigrate looking for options.” Maduro has completely militarized all police functions in the country, recalls Izquiel. This has had consequences in the operation and misgivings among police career personnel, with a different preparation. “A policeman spends years studying to be a director and they come and put a soldier on him,” says the former policeman reinvented as a delivery man in New Jersey.
An active municipal police officer in Caracas says the disappointment is widespread. He has decided to take his vacation to be able to seek other trades such as mechanics, but he has no motivation to return to his command. They have lost bonuses for extraordinary procedures, bonuses for children or studies, endowments and other benefits established in contracts, manuals and labor regulations, which the public administration in Venezuela has ceased to comply with. Other police officers also work as delivery men, motorcycle taxi drivers or escorts, taking advantage of the 24-hour on-duty, 48-hour-off schedule that has been standardized in various institutions to lighten the load and manage the deficit. In some police forces they have begun to delay the granting of casualties, to stop the exodus. But given the progress of the crisis, there are more and more police officers who simply desert.
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