Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): The death toll on the roads during the Carnival festivities fell to 76 this year compared with 83 in the comparable period of 2007, according to Civil Protection National Director Antonio Rivero. The number of people injured in road accidents also fell on the same comparison, from 653 to 628, he added.
Rivero attributed no less than 95.6 percent of accidents on the highway to imprudent driving.
The authorities imposed strict limits on the sale and consumption of alcohol throughout the long weekend break and into Tuesday, when many people were still on the way back from their vacations. The restrictions applied to non-drivers who stayed at home as well.
Nationwide, an estimated 3.4 percent of accidents were due to the state of the roads, and one percent to mechanical failures, Rivero added.
In Miranda State, which takes in the eastern part of Caracas, Governor Diosdado Cabello claimed that road accidents had dropped by 40 percent. Six people were killed compared with 10 a year before, he said.
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It's not the job of the still-bourgeois venezuelan state apparatus to take their cue from the authoritarian "democracies" of the West, or from the stalinists even, to legislate morality for the populace. The real problem with "impunity" in Venezuela is obviously the still widespread lack of revolutionary consciousness thruout the country. Using state administrative methods of coercion to change social behavior is really only about adding to the power of the bureaucracy implementing the measures -- and seldom has the effect desired -- leaving us with only the increased power of the state, not the people, as the result.
ReplyDeleteThe selfishness and drunk driving on the highways, for example, demonstrates the utter lack of solidarity and empathy too many venezuelans have for their compatriots, after decades of capitalist indoctrination in pathological individualism and consumerism. Social pathologies like drunk driving have to be largely dealt with at the community level, barrio by barrio, council area by council region. The people themselves have to be responsible for e.g. the public drunkeness in their own areas: leaving any residual police measures for application in such places as the highways and possibly the urban cores, etc. For now, anyway.
The much-needed end to public disorder in Venezuela will be best served by strengthening the power to act of these very social organizations -- which is supposed to be the goal of the socialist Revolution, isn't it?