MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The police operation, codenamed Liberation of the People, took place in the San Miguel area to the west of Caracas and was aimed at defeating local criminal gangs.
"Criminals have suffered 14 casualties," the minister said in a televised statement as cited by Venezuela’s El Universal newspaper. He added that one suspected criminal was wounded and 134 arrested during the raid.
According to Gonzalez Lopez, 32 of the arrested suspects were foreigners, and the ministry was investigating their link to paramilitary groups in neighboring Colombia, which suffered a rise in right-wing insurgency in the past decades.
In 2013, the official crime rate estimate was 39 murders per 1,000 people, although the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, an independent nonprofit, claims the figure to be much higher.
