Military Abuses in Venezuela
David Smilde and Hugo Perez Hernaiz have a post on military abuses in Venezuela. What immediately came to mind was the irony that Hugo Chávez and other army officers were radicalized in the 1980s in part because they were being pressured to attack civilians and resented it.
The question here, then, is whether all the incidents they catalog are unconnected. If they are, it suggests a serious lack of discipline and control, which is a problem but quite fixable. If there something more systematic, then the problem is obviously much bigger and eventually could lead to discontent within the ranks, not to mention among the population.
4 comments:
I think the real problem is not a particular lack of discipline among ranks, but in putting the military on the streets to deal with citizen security issues, for which they are not properly prepared. All the cases are connected in the sense that we limited the post to army and National Guard cases since the implementation of the Plan Patria Segura.
Discipline and lack of preparation are directly related, no? They don't know what exactly to do, so overreact.
True
If there something more systematic, then the problem is obviously much bigger and eventually could lead to discontent within the ranks, not to mention among the population.
To attempt to make any sort of predictions about how people are likely to react to the new Maduro government policy and the periodic abuses that go along with it, I think one would need to properly contextualize the policy and to put it into some sort of comparative perspective. Determining how people are likely to react to a given policy is distinct from attempting to assess whether it is good policy. Based on the little polling I saw, it seemed that Venezuelans were initially reacting positively to the policy because it created the appearance that the government was finally "doing something" to deal with the horrid level of violent crime. Of course, that doesn't mean that the policy works or that people will view it positively over the long term, but contextual factors (i.e. the horrid level of violent crime) would obviously be central to one's understanding of how people are likely to react to the policy.
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