AP PHOTOS: Buenos Aires a street art Mecca

BUENOS AIRES. Argentina (AP) — In most major cities, street artists create their works under cover of darkness, spray-painting their graffiti quickly to elude arrest. Not so in Buenos Aires, where painters have found a surplus of empty walls to splash their colors on, building owners who readily consent to having their walls painted, and a local government that has subsidized some of the urban murals.

Buenos Aires' welcoming attitude has made it one of the world's top capitals for international street muralists, drawing well-known urban artists such as Blu of Italy, Jef Aerosol of France, Aryz of Spain, Roa of Belgium, and Ron English of the United States.

International artists come here to spray-paint graffiti as well as other styles and methods of street art on the walls of plazas and buildings because local authorities have shown themselves receptive to the creations, said Matt Fox-Tucker, an Englishman who created the website buenosairesstreetart.com, focusing on the city's urban murals.

While it's illegal to paint on the side of a building in the public right of way without an owners' permission, artists can do pretty much as they please with an owner's OK.

"In most cities in Europe this is not possible and the owner of the building needs planning permission or consent from the local authority to alter the appearance of the building," said Fox-Tucker, who leads tours of the local street art several times a week.

The urban artists generally go door to door seeking approval from building owners before starting a mural. Owners usually agree, especially if the mural of aerosol, acrylic or oil paint will cover up political slogans and other graffiti already painted there.

With an abundance of unoccupied and abandoned structures and dividing walls between buildings, there are plenty of spaces for urban artists to create their work.

Blu painted one of the city's better known pieces of street art on the side of an enormous concrete building once scheduled for demolition in the Villa Urquiza. The 2007 painting shows a giant baby on his back, holding a pill in his right hand. White, black, red and orange dominate the work showing the inside of the child's body invaded by machinery and people pushing wheelbarrows and performing other tasks, alluding to the exploitation and corruption of human beings.

Local painters, including Argentine Martin Ron, also take advantage of the relatively lax rules for street art, and they consider the traffic patterns of cars and pedestrians to get the best exposure for their work.

"The paintings are seen in the most routine" of circumstances, said Ron, such as the commute from home to work. "The works take you by surprise."

"For those who are interested, it helps you interpret and discover things," said the artist, who has painted a series of murals of popular idols such as soccer player Carlos Tevez.

A towering Tevez rendered in turquoise and white, his long dark hair flowing behind him, looms over a soccer field in the humble Fuerte Apache apartment complex where the athlete grew up. The mural serves as "a stimulus and motivation" for local kids who play soccer, Ron said.

Along with fellow painters Lean Frizzera and Emy Mariani, Ron also recreated the legendary "Hand of God" goal scored against England by Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona during the 1986 World Cup in Mexico City. That mural, which shows Maradona thrusting his left arm into the air, stretches about 30 meters long and six meters high under a commuter train bridge.

The murals of both soccer players were subsidized by local authorities to spruce up the neighborhoods around them.

Martin's other creations include a smiling version of celebrated writer Ernesto Sabato and a powerful rendering of retired erotic film star Isabel Sarli.

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Google adds street views inside Japan nuclear zone

TOKYO (AP) — Concrete rubble litters streets lined with shuttered shops and dark windows. A collapsed roof juts from the ground. A ship sits stranded on a stretch of dirt flattened when the tsunami roared across the coastline. There isn't a person in sight.

Google Street View is giving the world a rare glimpse into one of Japan's eerie ghost towns, created when the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami sparked a nuclear disaster that has left the area uninhabitable.

The technology pieces together digital images captured by Google's fleet of camera-equipped vehicles and allows viewers to take virtual tours of locations around the world, including faraway spots like the South Pole and fantastic landscapes like the Grand Canyon.

Now it is taking people inside Japan's nuclear no-go zone, to the city of Namie, whose 21,000 residents have been unable to return to live since they fled the radiation spewing from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant two years ago.

Koto Naganuma, 32, who lost her home in the tsunami, said some people find it too painful to see the places that were so familiar yet are now so out of reach.

She has only gone back once, a year ago, and for a few minutes.

"I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited I can take a look at those places that are so dear to me," said Naganuma. "It would be hard, too. No one is going to be there."

Namie Mayor Tamotsu Baba said memories came flooding back as he looked at the images shot by Google earlier this month.

He spotted an area where an autumn festival used to be held and another of an elementary school that was once packed with schoolchildren.

"Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forbearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children," he said in a post on his blog.

"We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie-machi in the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster."

Street View was started in 2007, and now provides images from more than 3,000 cities across 48 countries, as well as parts of the Arctic and Antarctica.

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Online: Namie Street View link: http://goo.gl/maps/iFIWD

Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter at www.twitter.com/yurikageyama

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Surviving a surge in street violence in Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — On their daily cable car rides to and from home in Venezuela's capital, Maria Gonzalez and Jose Rafael Suarez soar in a bubble of safety far above the deadly, trash-strewn streets below.

Untouchable for 17 minutes, they peer at the expanse of dank, narrow alleys and the zinc roofs of shanties, some built four stories tall. Stray bullets and thugs on motorcycles fly through the streets, and people scurry home as soon as night falls.

"There are a lot of kids in the street using drugs, with guns," said Gonzalez while riding the newly inaugurated cable car one afternoon to the plastics factory where she and Suarez work.

Her 27-year-old friend gazed down at the sea of slum roofs.

"It's very hard to change all this," he said.

That frustration defines this 28-million-person country, which has seen shootings, kidnappings and other crime infiltrate every aspect of daily life. Whole neighborhoods that used to buzz with street life are abandoned at night, while foreign diplomats and working-class Venezuelans alike fall prey to so-called express kidnappings that whisk victims away to the nearest cash machines.

Amid a list of woes, including double-digit inflation and crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime is seen by many as the main failing of the late President Hugo Chavez's government, and one that a whole swath of this shell-shocked country has lost hope of correcting.

Just last week, the U.N. Development Program found that Venezuela suffered the world's fifth highest homicide rate, with 45 out of every 100,000 people killed in 2010, trailing only Honduras, El Salvador, the Ivory Coast and Jamaica. The nonprofit Venezuelan Violence Observatory estimates the homicide rate was much higher last year, at 73 per 100,000 people.

That murder rate has doubled since 1999, when Chavez was first elected president, officials say. And kidnappings increased 26-fold from 1999 to 2011, according to a study by the civic group Active Peace, which studies safety issues.

The government not only can't rein in the problem, it won't even say how bad it is. Officials stopped releasing official crime statistics in 2005, leaving it to nonprofit groups to sort through the casualties.

"I calculate that 20 to 25 years back, we had a problem that was moderate to grave and became a critical one in the last 15 years," said Active Peace's director Luis Cedeno. "We are at war with each other."

Now, the violence has emerged as a top campaign issue as opposition Gov. Henrique Capriles challenges Chavez successor Nicolas Maduro in an April 14 election to replace the late leader.

Capriles has repeatedly blamed Maduro for failing to stop the killings and assaults, although he has offered few details on the campaign trail about what he would do.

"We are living the worst situation of public safety in the history of our country in the last 100 days," Capriles told thousands of supporters Saturday.

Capriles campaign public safety coordinator Luis Izquiel said the opposition plan advocates spending more federal money on the fighting crime, depoliticizing the criminal justice system and building more prisons.

In a Twitter message Monday, Maduro acknowledged the "doubling of homicides" nationwide, but said it was also happening in the state of Miranda where Capriles is governor. The message was later removed from Maduro's account.

"The government is conscious that insecurity and social violence is not a game," Maduro said on national TV Sunday. "Because of this, we are going to attack this plague with strength. We are going to exchange firearms for musical instruments and for sporting equipment."

When explaining the reasons behind the bloodshed, experts focus on one concept: impunity, and not just for street thugs, but also for police and politicians who many say have aggravated the problem.

Only 9 percent of homicides result in an arrest, according to the nonprofit Venezuela Violence Observatory. And even the government estimates police commit as much a quarter of the country's crimes.

The extreme politicization of the Chavez years has also made it impossible for federal, state and municipal officials to work together on basic strategies such as neighborhood watches or cross-jurisdiction police patrols.

Small-time gangs and criminals commit most of Venezuela's violence, as opposed to the well-financed drug cartels that have terrorized Mexico and Central America as they fight over lucrative trafficking routes.

"There's been a situation where an opposition governor doesn't have a way to coordinate with mayors that come from Chavismo to fight crime," said Marino Alvarado, general coordinator of the human rights group Provea. "It's just impossible in Venezuela to create a public policy without convoking all the sectors."

The 3.5 million-person capital is a perfect example of the broken chain of command.

The city used to run its own police force, in conjunction with those of its five independent municipalities. After Caracas' mayor began clashing with the president, Chavez replaced citywide police with a national force but brought on only 12,000 officers, most of them based in Caracas. By contrast, the phased-out force had nearly double the personnel.

That's left Caracas bleeding. In 2011, the city suffered a homicide rate of an astounding 99 killed out of every 100,000 people, making it the sixth deadliest city in the world, according to the Mexican public safety group Security, Justice and Peace.

Chavez's government certainly tried to show it was tackling the problem, launching 16 public safety plans in 14 years, with the last one, dubbed Mission to All Life Venezuela, coming out in June. That strategy allocated money to expand training programs for police, grow a fledgling national police force and target law enforcement resources in high-crime areas.

Yet the efforts have always broken down in the execution, casualties of a government that distrusted any outsiders with power, Alvarado said.

And while Chavez did control countless neighborhood "collectives" that enforced political loyalty, those same groups often participated in street crime rather than protecting residents, Cedeno said.

"Chavez was very strong with the opposition of course and he was strong politically," Cedeno said. But at the same time, "public security policy in Venezuela has been very weak. ... Chavez almost never talked about security issues, and he was very lenient with those collective groups and even criminal groups."

What Chavez did say about the crime problem often boiled down to political rhetoric, as he argued that criminality was a result of poverty, which was a consequence of capitalism.

Yet poverty rates have fallen in Venezuela, from 49 percent in 2002 to 30 percent in 2011, partly as a result of oil-revenue-funded social programs, according to the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

"If you tell me that poverty is related directly to crime, if it has fallen, why hasn't crime fallen?" Cedeno asked.

Motorcycle courier Emerson Hernandez, who lives in the poor neighborhood of Catia, said all Venezuelans were to blame, from the ruthless thugs to thieving police.

His job means risking potholes and traffic everyday while fearing assault at every turn. He said thieves have stolen his motorcycle seven times, the last instance six months ago.

"Improving public safety means changing the behavior of Venezuelans," Hernandez said as he leaned against his front doorway while holding his infant son in an arm. "It's not a matter of policies."

Suarez said he had to quickly learn how to survive after moving to Caracas from western Venezuela at age 22. That meant commuting for four hours every day through treacherous slums to get to work, even as other young men in the neighborhood robbed and killed to survive.

"There is work, although it's a pain to find it," Suarez said. "But the situation is everyone has his own ideas and these guys look for the easiest work and the easiest is stealing."

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Associated Press writer Jack Chang contributed to this report.

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Fight for future of Bangladesh plays out in street

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — The fight for the future of Bangladesh is playing out in the streets of this troubled south Asian nation.

For a month, masses of moderate activists have camped at a Dhaka intersection demanding harsh punishment for those accused of crimes during the 1971 independence war from Pakistan, a stance that dovetails with the prime minister's position.

Meanwhile, their bitter enemies in a hardline Islamic opposition party that wants to install Shariah law have been attacking government buildings and setting fire to trains in a rampage that — along with a crackdown by security forces — has killed more than 60 people. The party, Jamaat-e-islami, says the government is using a war crimes tribunal to decimate the party leadership, and claims it is in a fight for its very existence.

"Our backs have been pushed to the wall. If we can't stop the fascist government from holding the trials, all our main leaders will be hanged," said Rafiqul Haq, a Jamaat leader based in Dhaka's Uttara district. "We will die rather than let the government kill our leaders."

The latest round of violence — sparked by the tribunal sentencing a party leader to death — has prompted calls for Jamaat to be branded a terrorist organization, and Law Minister Shafiq Ahmed told Parliament this week that the government was looking into ways to ban the party.

Looming over the protests and violence are general elections expected within the next year, and fears that in this fledgling democracy with a history of coups, the military might take over if the situation in the streets gets too far out of hand.

"The people are deeply worried about what is going on," said Hassan Shahriar, a political analyst. "If the violence continues, the government may hit back with harsh measures like a state of emergency." Military intervention is possible as well, he said.

Much of the chaos centers on the fate of Jamaat, the country's largest Islamic party. Its leaders are facing charges they helped Pakistani forces in the fighting four decades ago, which Bangladesh says left 3 million people dead and 200,000 women raped.

Jamaat had opposed breaking away from Pakistan, arguing that staying as one strong Muslim-majority nation would be better for Islam. Citizen brigades formed by Jamaat helped Pakistani forces, unfamiliar with Bangladesh, identify independence activists. Jamaat leaders deny any link to war crimes.

After independence, founding President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, father of current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, banned the party and stripped many of its leaders of citizenship. But he was slain in 1975 and military ruler Ziaur Rahman, husband of current opposition leader Khaleda Zia, lifted the ban and wooed Jamaat as an ally for his Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Though Jamaat has never won big at the ballot box, routinely garnering around 4 percent, it has been an important coalition ally for Zia, and even received Cabinet posts when she won elections in 2001

Despite its violent history, Jamaat developed a loyal cadre by devoting attention to the poor. It runs a bevy of charities, hospitals and hundreds of Islamic schools. It has gained the loyalty of poor students through its scholarships and earned a reputation, even among opponents, for honest behavior amid the usual government corruption.

"The activists are highly dedicated and Jamaat also has lots of money to maintain a huge army of trained cadres," Shahriar said. He noted that its loyalists are trained almost like guerrilla fighters.

At the same time, its ideology has failed to make much headway in the country, where many look down on it as a local version of Pakistan's Taliban. And many remain angry that the party never apologized for its role in the war.

When the war crimes tribunals inaugurated by Hasina began handing down decisions earlier this year, lines were drawn. Many cheered that the country was finally dealing with its past. Others lashed them as a plot to destroy the opposition, since 11 of the 12 defendants are politicians from Jamaat and Zia's opposition party.

"The trials are nothing but a ploy to hide the failures of the government," Zia said last week.

When Abdul Quader Mollah appeared smiling last month after being given a life sentence, people poured into the streets, demanding his execution. Many here believe that if Zia wins the upcoming election, she will grant clemency to those convicted, leaving a swift execution as the only way of ensuring justice is delivered.

"I'm not bothered about politics," said Nazrul Islam, a Dhaka University student who was among the protesters. "What I want is that those who killed our people, raped our women must be punished."

When Delwar Hossain Sayedee, a top Jamaat leader, was then given a death sentence last week, Jamaat struck back with violent attacks.

In northern Bogra district, Jamaat activists used loudspeakers to urge supporters to pour into the streets and then led them to attack police stations, dragging four policemen from the outposts and beating them to death, police and private TV stations reported. In eastern Noakhali and Comilla districts, Jamaat activists attacked about a dozen temples and dozens of Hindu homes, police said. Hindus are seen as supporters of Hasina's ruling party.

Images of bloodied and bullet-ridden bodies heaped on ashes of burned homes were shown on television.

With most of Jamaat's top leaders in jail, including its president, Matiur Rahman Nizami, the party is being run by mid-level leaders, most of them in hiding.

"It's a do or die situation for Jamaat," said political analyst Mofizur Rahman, with Dhaka University. "The entire leadership of Jamaat is facing elimination."

Many people left homeless after their houses were torched were confused and devastated that they were dragged into this national crisis.

"Have we committed any crime?" asked Pushpa Das, a 45-year-old woman as she sat on the wreckage of her tin-roof house, destroyed by attackers in Chittagong district, southeast of Dhaka. "Why have they attacked us?"

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