Justice decayed

IT STARTED with a shooting. Two men, apparently on a motorbike, attacked a Venezuelan army anti-smuggling convoy on August 19th, close to the main border crossing with Colombia. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, quickly went on television and vowed to hunt down the “murderers” (though the four victims were injured, not killed). He decreed a state of emergency in six municipalities in the frontier province of Táchira and expelled more than 1,000 Colombians living in Venezuela. The Simón Bolívar International Bridge is closed until further notice.

The expulsions were summary and carried out brutally. But for once, the accusations levelled at foreigners, the usual scapegoats for any problem in Venezuela, were not entirely spurious. Colombians are certainly involved in the lively contraband trade in petrol and other goods, which are made artificially cheap in Venezuela by price controls and the weak currency, the bolívar. (Venezuelan mafias, some of them linked to its army, are equally enthusiastic smugglers.) But most Venezuelans, especially the 5m residents of its capital, Caracas, and its metropolitan area, worry more about home-grown killers and the country’s soaring murder rate.