Law enforcement in Venezuela

Law enforcement in Venezuela is highly fragmented, being split across multiple police agencies of various types.

The National Guard, with around 33,000 officers, is attached to the Ministry of Defence. The Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y Criminalísticas, with around 8,000 officers, is the primary criminal investigation agency. The new Policía Nacional Bolivariana, created in 2009, had 2,400 officers in July 2010 (with a further 1,400 in training).

The Dirección de los Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención (DISIP), part of the Ministry of Interior and Justice, is the counter-espionage police agency.

In addition, each of Venezuela's 23 states has its own police force, numbering around 50,000 officers altogether. Finally, since 1989's decentralization legislation, many municipalities have set up their own police forces. Both state and municipal/city police forces report to the Federal Ministry of Interior, Justice and Peace through their respective state governments.

In 1958 Venezuela overthrew the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, but for much of the 1958-1998 period the criminal justice and law enforcement system established under Jiménez and the earlier dictator Juan Vicente Gómez was not substantially reformed, and "the criminal justice system remained a blemish on this image of democracy". A small 1987 survey found that 74% of prisoners said that the police tortured them. The police relied heavily on obtaining confession evidence, and for poor defendants a lack of effective defence lawyers "led to frequent convictions of innocent people".

Other aspects of the justice system conspired to make this worse: "Venezuelan criminal procedure crushed poor and uneducated defendants in its Kafkaesque gears." Prisons were extremely violent, with a high probability of death or rape; and about 70% of prisoners were awaiting a judge's decision. After some years of public pressure, 1998 saw the drafting of a radically reformed criminal law, which came into effect in July 1999.

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