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Maduro maintains extrajudicial executions to contain protests in Venezuela

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At the beginning of 2022, the Venezuelan dictatorship has kept in practice one of the mechanisms it uses, according to international organizations, to exercise social control. In the first half of January alone, the NGO Control Ciudadano counted 27 of the so-called extrajudicial executions.

Between 2016 and 2021, there were 9,211 cases of these murders, often carried out by the Faes (Special Action Forces, an elite police group) and by the Conas (National Anti-Extortion and Kidnapping Command, linked to the Bolivarian National Guard). According to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and Venezuelan NGOs, most of these executions take place in the poorest neighborhoods of large cities and in the countryside.

“It is a common and frequent practice in these regions, to exercise social control, contain protests and prevent these people from joining the calls made by the opposition”, he tells the leaf Simón Gómez, a human rights researcher at the University of Carabobo.

A survey by Cofavic, an organization that has been following the issue for three decades, indicates that 99% of victims are men from regions of greater social vulnerability, 80% of them under 25 years of age. According to the group, in 80% of cases there is some kind of threat or subsequent intimidation to the person who denounces the crime.

“The family members of former members of collectives also live in these areas. [força parapolicial] killed in action, people who lost relatives both in the resistance to the regime and in clashes with protesters”, points out Gómez.

Reports from NGOs realize that the actions of these security forces of the dictator Nicolás Maduro are, many times, disguised with staging. It is common, for example, for agents to feign a shouting match with those they are chasing or to simulate exchanges of fire, so that neighbors imagine that there has been a confrontation.

“Actually, everyone knows that it is an execution, because the pattern has been repeated for years. They enter homes, torture and threaten family members and execute the victim who, on that day, is the target. [As simulações] are tactics to prevent reports of these abuses being made”, he tells leaf Thairi Mora, from the Human Rights Center at the Andrés Bello Catholic University.

The accusations point out that the practice intensified from 2015 onwards. In that year, with the momentum of the 2014 protests, the arrest of Leopoldo López and the opposition’s victory in the legislative election, street protests were on the rise. They continued like this until 2017, with the appointment of the National Constituent Assembly, a maneuver by the Chavista regime to empty the power of the opposing Legislature.

“During this period, the major demonstrations in Caracas began in the eastern region of the city. [áreas de classe média e alta], but a process of adhesion by disaffected sectors in the so-called ‘rojas’ areas was also initiated [vermelhas, ou seja, populares e tradicionalmente chavistas]”, recalls Gómez. “The concern of social control of this average citizen, poorer, dependent on basic food baskets, in general black and brown, became important for the regime.”

Hence, the researcher points out, the reason for these forces linked to the dictatorship’s security agencies to start acting in these places — to prevent them from escalating this process.

The phenomenon was repeated in other regions of the country, such as in Barquisimeto, a city where the university population is large and joined in large volume to the La Resistencia movement, created by young people from Caracas in 2014 and whose greatest activity took place in 2017, during the election. of the Constituent Assembly.

“We saw an increase in extrajudicial executions again in 2019, with the emergence of Juan Guaidó’s project to assume the interim presidency and large street protests. The Faes and Conas acted strongly to prevent the participation of the poorest population”, he says. Gómez.

For Thairi Mora, the relationship that agents maintain in these communities is dubious. “You have to think that they are Venezuelans with few resources, a basic food basket makes a lot of difference. So this is the first resource to keep them out of protests, to distribute food. Then comes the threat of insecurity. The creation of these forces was celebrated by many inhabitants of these regions, who saw their safety at risk because they were robbed all the time”, he says.

If at first the creation of the Fae and Conas was celebrated, she reports, part of the people later realized the oppression and rebelled. “Then the murders started to increase.”

NGO reports also highlight that members of these forces do not simply appear in these neighborhoods, but live in them. “They become part of the community and, as a result, they have complete knowledge of the activities, routine and actions of those who rebel,” says Gómez. “[Os agentes] are a completely irregular resource of the regime, which imposes surveillance and torture, in addition to execution, among the instruments of social control aimed at poor, brown or black Venezuelan men.”

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet called for the extinction of the Fae in her report. The NGO Human Rights Watch, in its most recent report, stressed that extrajudicial executions in Venezuela target low-income victims in working-class neighborhoods in urban areas. It also points to impunity: only 7% of cases of the type that were denounced had an investigation started — still unfinished — and only one member of these forces was brought to trial as a defendant. There is, so far, no sentence or acquittal.

The dictatorship presumably denies the charge that its forces sponsor extrajudicial executions. Maduro justified the creation of these corporations to fight crime and never admitted human rights violations. Jorge Arreaza, the regime’s chancellor, classified the UN document as “signals lacking minimal support, made from a media matrix without contact with the country’s reality”.

CaracasJuan GuaidóLatin AmericaleafNicholas MaduroSouth AmericaVenezuela

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