In the pre-Chávez era, let's say, certainly it was a democracy. Alternating political parties took office, but a large group of people in the poorer sectors felt excluded and felt invisible. For example, they didn't all have identity papers, and therefore voting rights, and weren't able to participate. This government has tried to address that issue and bring them all in, in terms of those political rights, to participate more.
As I said, prison overcrowding and crime in the slum areas have always been an issue. When I first started spending time in Venezuela in 1983, I lived with a middle-class person in what were more or less the suburbs of Caracas, and we didn't go out at night. People were afraid. Since I have been going to Venezuela, crime and security have always been an issue.
Nevertheless, those issues seem to be exacerbated now. It's worsening now, but it's not that it's new. In the past, there were different kinds.... It's more that there's collusion between the two political parties to protect their interests in terms of not investigating corruption of one or the other once they were out of office. The press was actually politicized in the sense of being sympathetic to one party or the other.
Many of these issues are not new. What's new is that there is a concentration of power now: instead of it being in two political parties, it's now in one political party, and there's particularly a concentration of power in one man, one person. That's where the concerns are based.
Then there is the concentration of power or influence through his party over the institutions, so that even if you had collusion in the past in the institutions—in the judiciary, etc.—at least there was some check and balance between two political parties. That disappears when you have only one strong political party.