The corruption of the police and the levels of corruption in Venezuela reveal a lack of discipline at the top. Other countries in the region, other countries with far fewer resources than Venezuela, have managed to have less corrupt police forces.
An interesting example is Nicaragua. Nicaragua has a government that is ideologically on the same wavelength as Venezuela, but one of its great virtues is that it has an apolitical, relatively independent armed forces and a relatively independent, apolitical police force. They function reasonably well. The American DEA, for example, cooperates extremely well with Nicaraguan police; they don't cooperate at other levels, though.
I think that's a fault that can be laid at the Chavez door. And something else very often happens. It happened with Cuba, and it certainly happens with Chavez. He has painted his changes, the changes to Venezuelan life under his administration, and contrasted them with what life was like before. I was there before, and he paints these changes in too-bright colours. There was a lot wrong, but it was not as desperately dark and wrong as he is describing it. There was a much more balanced economy. The court system worked not exceedingly well--there was corruption--but it worked a lot better than it does now.