Reporter Nima Elbagir and producer James Brabazon join thousands of pilgrims on the slopes of Quibayo mountain as they converge for a mass "spiritist" ceremony- the holiest night of the year for a religion that seeks the protection of local gods and invokes the healing powers of ancestral spirits. But the team discovers that adherents of spiritism have turned gangster-ism into an act of veneration, legitimising violent criminals with the trappings of mainstream religious belief. Murder is so commonplace that infamous gangsters are invoked not as criminals - but saviours.
From Quibayo, the team travels north to Caracas, where they meet Santiago Rondon, a leading self-styled Venezuelan witch. He tells them that increasingly large numbers of Venezuelans are turning to gangster-worship as a result of the country's unprecedented rise in murders -- and the failure of the police to halt it.
Venezuela, the world's fourth largest oil producer, has seen its murder rate triple after nine years of leadership by President Hugo Chavez. At least one person is murdered every 40 minutes and the government's own statistics show it now has one of the world's highest murder rates. The team visits one of Caracas's largest hospitals, where they're told by staff that between eighty and ninety per cent of the patients they treat have gunshot wounds. In spite of massive state revenues from oil, a senior doctor tells Elbagir that hospital facilities are bad and getting worse -- and that they don't have the capacity to deal with the constant influx of casualties.
Investigating the causes for the huge rise in murders, the team gains unprecedented access to El Rodeo Uno, one of the most violent prisons in the world. Inside, they discover that the prisoners govern themselves. One inmate, a knife-wielding gang-member and self-appointed "security guard" tells Elbagir he's witnessed around 500 of the 4,000 murders that have taken place inside the prison itself. Outside the jail, the team visits entire neighbourhoods in Caracas where police presence was rare or non-existent, and illegal weapons were rife. The residents increasingly rely on the advice and protection of spirit mediums claiming to be possessed by the souls of criminal-saints. In one secretive ceremony, the crew films a teenage boy as he produces an automatic pistol to be blessed according to the rites of the gangster cult.
The Venezuelan government tells Unreported World that crime is a capitalist problem -- and that they have eliminated the causes of crime after nine years of socialist policies. "In Venezuela," the National Director of the Prevention of Crime tells Elbagir, "there is no such thing as a nine-year-old criminal."
And since when is someone whose beliefs aren't Christian, or Muslim, etc., deserve to slandered as "a witch"?
ReplyDeleteQ: what's the difference between superstition and religion? A: an army.
This website increasingly seems to have been taken over by the CIA or self-styled reactionaries.