Airships to Patrol Venezuela's Skies

bprime writes "The BBC reports that officials in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, have bought three airship UAVs to keep tabs on the local populace. From the article: 'The 15 metre (49 foot) long air ships are emblazoned with government slogans. Written in bright red are the words, We watch over you for your security.' They're not exactly black helicopters, but how long do you think until we see similar measures in high-crime American cities?"

Comments

Re:Damn!

[Rei]

This seems to be OK with the people. That just surprises me since it doesn't really add that much to the safety and has the very likely possibility of being abused.

It doesn't surprise me one bit. It's easy to scoff at people willing to give up civil liberties for the prospect of safety from our ivory towers at home. It's an entirely different thing to live it.

I have a friend who immigrated from Peru to the US. She is a staunchly anti-Bush person and considers him an overreaching warmongerer who wishes he was a dictator and is taking steps in that direction. She's a major civil liberties and human rights advocate. Yet, in Peru, she was a supporter of hardline dictator Alberto Fujimori. Knowing just these two facts, one may well say, "what gives?" and see this as contradictory. Yet, when you talk to her about life in Peru when she grew up, it's not hard to understand where she's coming from.

In her early life, she grew up in a town called Tayabamba, out in the Andes. The sort of place for which it was a real journey just to get to the next town. When Shining Path started sweeping across the countryside, this was a real threat -- not a mostly imaginary threat like American paranoia about terrorism. The group kept its membership up by sweeping through villages and rounding up all of the men who could carry a gun; people were terrified of them. Later, she moved to Lima, and there had to worry about the drug lords. They would call "strikes" to punish the country; what this basically meant was that if they saw you going to work, they'd shoot you on the spot.

Fujimori largely changed this. He launched a brutal crackdown on Shining Path. When members fled to the universities, which were constitutionally protected from raids, he ignored the laws and sent in troops anyways (greatly angering the students). When drug lords called "strikes", he essentially declared martial law and dispatched the military to the street. Armored vehicles would pick up anyone who was afraid to work and take them all the way there. Fujimori himself stood in the middle of the street downtown, daring them to shoot him, to demonstrate that they had no power over the city. The same sort of thing happened with corruption and monopolies; he largely disregarded the law in his quest to take down the Peruvian equivalent of our 19th century robber barons. Imagine where, if you wanted to buy a bar of soap, it was not only ridiculously priced, but you had to buy it as part of a "bundle" with other, less popular products that weren't selling. That's the sort of control that these people had over the market. While most of Peru lived in utter poverty, these people lived in obscene luxury.

Then there's just plain regular crime. My friend's brother once had the shoes stolen right off his feet. Literally. People would go around in pairs -- one would grab the victim from behind and lift him up while the other grabbed the legs and untied the shoes. They weren't emotionless thugs, like a lot of American crime seems; they were just desperate people who really needed the money they could get from selling his shoes, simply in order to eat. They even left him a pair of flip flops to wear home. When people would go to parties, they'd often wear cheap shoes and other clothing on the way there, then change into the nicer stuff when they neared or arrived at their destination so that they wouldn't appear rich and get mugged. This sort of crime was everywhere, part of the daily reality you had to consider for everything you did. When she moved to the US, she had to get used to not having to do all of her old anti-theft habits.

If people see a blimp as having the potential to even reduce these sort of crimes, I'm not surprised that they'd welcome them with open arms.