Venezuela Bans Video Games, Toy Weapons

Venezuela recently outlawed the sale of video games and toy weapons. Violators will be subject to a prison sentence of up to five years. The new law continues the steady drumbeat of strange news coming out of Venezuela.

Last month, the country nationalized a Hilton hotel on Margarita Island in what President Hugo Chavez characterized as an effort “to rescue the country’s tourism and improve the economy.”

The anti-video game law is part of Chavez’s continuing efforts to quell the crime and violence that plagues Venezuela.

The country’s overall per capita murder rate is cited as one of the highest in the world, according to the U.S. State Department’s overview of Venezuela.  Caracas was listed as the murder capital of the world in the September 2008 Foreign Policy magazine.

Government Figures. According to government figures, the number of homicides rose from 5,974 in 1999 to nearly 13,000 in 2007, then declined to fewer than 8,000 last year, in a national population of approximately 28 million, the website Venezuelanalysis.com reported last week. But Foreign Policy magazine says that Venezuela’s murder count is suspect, at least as far as Caracas is concerned. It notes that the:

city’s official homicide statistics likely fall short of the mark because they omit prison-related murders as well as deaths that the state never gets around to properly “categorizing.” The numbers also don’t count those who died while “resisting arrest,” suggesting that Caracas’s cops—already known for their brutality against student protesters—might be cooking the books. Many have pointed the finger at El Presidente, whose government has failed to tackle the country’s rising rates of violent crime. In fact, since Chávez took over in 1998, Venezuela’s official homicide rate has climbed 67 percent—mostly due to increased drug and gang violence. Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, who recently resigned as interior minister, claimed in July that homicide has dropped 27 percent since January—but experts say he’s just playing with numbers. As for Caracas, some speculate that its murder rate is closer to 160 per 100,000.

While almost everyone agrees that there is a problem, video games and toys seem like an odd place to start.

Venezuelan Gamer Reacts. On the blog Boing Boing, an avid 26-year old Venezuelan gamer voiced his opposition to the new law. He says:

These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. What I have achieved, all my research, how I have been able to travel even though I’m always broke, the hard work I’ve done to convince people to fund a start up for cheap biotech for developing countries and regular folks, none of that would have been possible hadn’t I learned English through video games.

Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother’s chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.

For years, repressive governments have blamed books for society’s ills. More recently, it was movies and television. Now, it’s games and certain toys. If nothing else, Chavez’s grand experiment will offer an interesting case study in the future for people who write about the quirky outcomes of social policies like Malcolm Gladwell or the Freakonomics guys. I’m sure they’ll have something interesting to say, regardless of how banning video games and toy guns affects the crime rate.

Photo by Life in LDN (Via Creative Commons)