Church in the World

Church speaks out on killings in lawless frontier state

Venezuela

MORE THAN 50 murders have been reported so far this year in just one district of Venezuela's frontier state of Apure. But, according to Ra?za Cepeda, who runs a local church radio station, the security forces in this heavily garrisoned area have taken little action, and are not even keeping a proper record of the incidents.

"The military are running around like headless chickens, organising pointless operations," she told El Universal newspaper this week. Local people organised a "March for Life" in Guasdualito, the region's main town, earlier this month, after a 16-year-old schoolboy was kidnapped.

Further north, in Zulia state, also on the Colombian frontier, church representatives joined cattle ranchers, farmers and local businessmen last week to launch their own "Crusade for Life", in protest at what they said was the security forces' failure to control spiralling violence, much of it brought across the border from Colombia by left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and armed drug-traffickers.

Dressed all in black, some 600 people held a demonstration outside the National Guard base in the town of Machiques, in the lawless Sierra de Perij? region, to call for action against a wave of kidnappings, extortion and murder. The outcry was provoked by the killing of the local ranchers' leader, Luis El?as Mart?nez, in an ambush that ranchers said was carried out by guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) inside Venezuelan territory.

The Colombian Government has accused Venezuela's President, Hugo Ch?vez, of giving covert help to the FARC, but he denies any links with the guerrillas, and his Government insists that most of the violence in the frontier region is caused by Colombian right-wing paramilitaries.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that Zulia is regarded in Caracas as a hotbed of opposition to Mr Ch?vez's "revolutionary" Government.