By Jeremy Morgan
Latin American Herald Tribune staff

CARACAS -- President Hugo Chavez's new National Police Force formally came into being last Sunday and officers were promptly despatched to take up the battle against bad guys in arguably the single most dangerous district in a city that's widely regarded as one of the most perilous places in the world that's not actually in a war zone.

Sucre, a poor district in Catia round the back and down the hill from the presidential palace, Miraflores, boasts an average of atleast one murder a day -- and that's regarded as a cautious estimate -- along with serious injuries inflicted by violence on three people a day. The rough reckoning is that buses fall victim to at least 15 armed robberies each and every day.

Catia as a whole chalked up 295 unlawfull killings during the first half of this year alone, and a further 120 victims have followed since. One of them was Delío Hernández, a major in the National Guard who was chief of security in west Caracas under the government's much-vaunted "Safe Caracas Plan" when he was mown down in a hail of bullets on October 30.

This is gangland with guns, and with a vengeance. The great majority of attacks on persons involve the use of firearms ranging from revolvers to automatics and the occassional machine gun. It's an armoury waiting to explode.

The rough reckoning at the latest count is that something like 28 different gangs fight over turf in Catia. The centerpiece of this inglorious activity barely a kilometer from the seat of power in the country is Sucre.

It's motorbike-man country, and the hostility is out there for all to see in the suspicious glares that meet a stranger walking down the main avenue. There's no question that it's going to be him who steps into the gutter as they mess around with their machines on the sidewalk.

To the side, narrow alleys and steep stairways lead into zones of brick-built hovels crammed together and on top of each other. A discarded syringe lies at the side of a pile of garbage and excrement strewn in the passageway. Enter at your peril.

School's just out, and a harrassed young mother nervously urges her two little children up the hill to the only home they've got -- a ramshackle cinderblock hut-like apartment -- and the worse thought of all, perhaps the only one they'll ever have.

Looming over this scene are the tower blocks of 23 de Enero, a housing scheme erected by Venezuela's last dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, as a landmark solution to the housing shortages that plague the country to this day. Today, things up there aren't any better than they are down below.

At the corner of the alleyway stand two young males, lounging against a wall and staking claim to overlord their tiny domain. Nobody even murmers a neighborly greeting; it's as if all of us are in parallel universes in which the little family has nothing to do with the clear and present danger at the top of the stairs, much less the gringo outsider looking up from the avenue. A mangy cat scuttles by and, somewhere, as ever, a dog barks repetetively for no apparent reason.

The hard men stand motionless. No attempt is made to conceal what looks like, and most likely is, the wooden butt of a handgun jutting out of a wasteband. Time was, maybe, when this was a standard issue weapon used by the forces of law and order.

There isn't a police officer in sight and one wonders whether the threatening poise adopted by the two thugs would be any different if there were.

All this is in broad daylight. Just about the only friendly note in this seemingly God-forsaken place comes from the sun, benevolantly blazing down on one and all in this sinister and bleak human landscape. Down the hill lies Manicomio, perhaps one of the most appropriately named districts in the entire city. The name means Madhouse.

As the sun goes down, there's all the more reason to get indoors or, better still, well away from it. This is when the demons come out and for them, the primary task is to ensure that members of one gang don't stray into the territory of their gang, never mind that all we're talking about might not amount to more than a couple of blocks.

Impromptu barricades are slung across the alleyways, manned by individuals wielding firearms and baseball bats. Nobody bothers to wear a mask over their face: on the contrary, this is an identity parade and a show of strength to friend and foe alike.

This isn't the first time that Catia in general and Sucre in particular have been singled out as the centerpiece of a high-profile crackdown on crime. In 2001, a new police station was built in Sucre to herald what was supposed to be the start of a new era of order.

The building repeatedly came under attack. In the end, it was the police who moved out. Today the abandoned building is being "remodelled" for the National Police. It still wasn't ready on Day One.

Whether this was an omen of the shape of things to come remains to be seen.

That said, the high-profile debut by the National Police did not get off to the best of starts.
All the officers were supposed to be issued with brand new caliber 9mm Barretas. But only 500 were actually handed out because of delays in delivering the rest.

The new uniforms hadn't arrived, either. The patrol cars and trucks inherited from the discredited old Metropolitan Police hadn't been repainted in the new livery.

The original plan was for all 1,064 subordinate officers belonging to the first phase of the new force to hit the streets in Sucre on Day One. In the end, 952 were deployed.

The official rationale for the shortfall was that background checks on some officers who've stepped forward to join the force still hadn't completed, even though the great bulk of recruits come from existing forces.

Nobody was quite saying it out loud, but the implication was that the powers that be still hadn't finished weeding out potential or actual rogue cops.

Internal and disciplinary problems aside, the police are going to have their work cut out with the public in Sucre. Faced with the ingrained attitudes inherent in this brutalized community, the police are going to need all the help they can get, and then some.

But all the signs are that for all the myriad difficulties of their own lives, the locals simply aren't on the side of the cops. If anything, this would appear to apply especially in the case of the tough young males at the center of the problem.

Negative feelings towards the police stem partly from the dubious actions of all too many cops in the past.

But there's also a Macho Camacho attitude that a hard man looks after himself in a dog-eat-dog world. And, in any case, the record of many young toughs here probably wouldn't stand up to examination.

The threat of violence, or the actuality of it, are never distant in this part of the world. The nearest Metro subway station is Capitolio, a stone's throw from the National Assembly and the lay preachers pontificating in Plaza Bolívar.

It's getting close to rush hour and long queues are forming to buy tickets to go home. Suddenly, two men streak up the escalator from the trains and leap over the ticket barrier. In close and hot pursuit are about a dozen other men, all shouting as they go after their men.

Neither of them gets away. One is dragged down the steps leading up to the street and manhandled to the floor, where three men set about him with heavy blows to the head. The other tries to escape into the scatterring crowd of petrified onlookers, but he's caught, too, and suffers a similar fate. And then, just as abruptly as it began, it's all over and done with.

Time was when the Metro was widely seen as safe and secure, regardless of whatever mayhem was going on elsewhere. It was new and orderly and seen as a sanctuary and neutral zone by good and bad alike. Robbery there was unheard of. Perhaps no longer: recent weeks have seen several reports of robbery at gunpoint on trains and assaults at stations.

Just what the incident at Capitolio was about remains unclear. The men giving chase weren't police officers, or at least didn't declare themselves as such or show anything to that effect. What took place had an air of personal grudge or vengeance about it. Maybe the feuds that wrack what passes for everyday life in Sucre had come up the hill.