It is a novelty the fact that there has not been classic repression (tear gas, pellets, several people wounded, dead and detained) during this year’s massive demonstrations against Maduro – held in broad daylight at various points in Venezuela, with the eyes of more than 40 countries watching attentively and backing Juan Guaidó–. The 2017 protests of this kind left 157 murdered.
But in the poor neighborhoods, where the political capital of Chavism has been nurtured, nights have been dark. Repression has been occurring for at least four years, and it has intensified since July 2017, when the Special Action Forces (FAES) of the Bolivarian National Police began to operate.
In 2019, the milestone took place on January 21, in Cotiza, a popular area in the northern center of Caracas, where middle-ranking members of the National Guard rose up against the social situation. Neighbors accompanied them, other popular areas followed. The protests of 2019, unlike that of two years ago, have this peculiarity: they have had as protagonists the dwellers of the so-called barrios, the popular areas –in them, people have demonstrated, from them they have joined multitudinous demonstrations of this year. The government of Maduro has responden with bloody police state repression.
So far, in 2019, the FAES have killed at least 43 people. In four days, they detained 850 people, including 77 children and adolescents, in 21 states of Venezuela. In 2018, on the other hand, the FAES killed 205 people, denounced Provea, a solid and reputable human rights organization in Venezuela, in a January 30th report.
The pattern is the same: numerous hooded and armed troops take over a popular area, forcibly enter houses and kill in cold blood. Keymer Ávila describes this with his expertise as an advisor to Provea: “They militarily take a concrete zone, as if they were an army of occupation and generally ‘hunt’ for their objectives,” he wrote in an Efecto Cocuyo article.
“In most cases, the officials themselves transfer the bodies to the nearest hospital. The victims are wrapped in white sheets. Sometimes, according to relatives, they are tortured before being killed, and the relatives find it difficult to recognize the body due to mistreatment and beatings,” adds journalist Claudia Smolansky in her own investigation for Crónica Uno.
Before the FAES, between 2015 and June 2017, Amnesty International registered 8,200 extrajudicial executions by police forces in popular areas. The killings were made under the pretext of fighting crime. The Committee of Families of Victims (Cofavic) –created shortly after February 27, 1989 to fight impunity in murders at the hands of security forces of the time– denounces precisely 30 years later that in the last four years the repressive forces of Maduro’s government have killed almost 9,000 people, Smolansky reports.
The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), for its part, concludes in its 2018 annual report that, while violent deaths at the hands of criminals decreased in the country – due to a shortage of cash and general impoverishment -, murders committed by police forces increased, deaths “which are called resistance to authority, but which in good part and safely can be classified as extrajudicial executions”. According to OVV estimates, the “police and military forces” killed 7,523 people” that year.
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Academic researches by Keymer Ávila, also a professor of Criminology at the Central University of Venezuela, indicate that the Bolivarian National Police “is responsible for at least 32% of the deaths due to the intervention of the security forces in the country,” and is the second “most lethal” force after the Judicial Police (CICPC).
Maduro himself presented the FAES in July 2017 as a special force against criminality and terrorism. “The protagonism that the FAES has been taking since the decline of the terrible OLP campaign has been significant. All the rationality and deadly practice of these militarized police operations is now monopolized by this group of the PNB,” Ávila adds.
Testimonies confirm the pattern: the cold blood murder of their relatives, mostly young males, at the hands of FAES troops. The mothers, the sisters, the uncles narrate what they saw. Their faces in the photographs are the embodiment of bereavement.
Gabriela Mesones Rojo narrates in Caracas Chronicles what Desiré Cumare witnessed on January 8: her son Maikel Jesús Cumare, 21 years old, opened the door to the masked FAES policemen, who before threatened their mother with killing her if they did not let them pass.
“They burst in, pushed him to the ground and started kicking his head against the floor. That’s how they killed him. They cracked his skull.”Desiré told the Caracas Chronicle. Desiré tried to stop them to remove their masks. They beat her and took her out of her house. Outside, she saw 50 troops.
In one day they killed eight people in the area, the parish of Macarao, southwest of Caracas.
Nicole Rondón, Anthony’s sister, was noticed by a FAES police officer herself: “Go get him. We’ll leave him dead up there. We already killed him,” she said to her, as Rondón recalls in an interview with Crónica Uno’s Claudia Smolansky. Antony was killed with 20 bullets just below his mother’s house, Carmen, in Las Adjuntas, near where the other FAES killed Maikel.
“They also knocked down the door to Anthony’s room, where there is only one bed and one crib. There he slept with her two boys, ages 2 and 4. This young man’s plan was to migrate to Colombia in search for better opportunities. His partner had left the country a few months ago,” Smolansky wrote.
Rondón told Smolanski the FAES threatened her and her mother. On January 29, Rafael Uzcátegui, general coordinator of Provea, confirmed in an interview with Luz Mely Reyes that FAES officials coerced relatives of the murdered: they told them that, if they reported them, they would not hand over the bodies of their loved ones, those who they had just murdered.
Cecilia Buitriago saw on January 25 how FAES police pointed at her 29-year-old son Johnny Godoy. She was at her home in a neighborhood of La Vega, west of Caracas, she told El País’ Alonso Moleiro.
“I saw from above how the police had him gun pointed. ‘Son, get in’, I told him. I wanted to give him his ID so he could give it to the police. I went into the house and shots began to sound. I didn’t want to believe they were shooting at him. I said ‘Jehovah, help me, you have the power to help me. Lord, don’t let one of those bullets be for him.’”
But it was. She no longer saw her son, because they locked her in her room with her grandson. “I saw him no more. Then the policemen came into my house, and one told me that he had died in a confrontation. I told him that there was no confrontation here. ‘We’re following orders,’ they told us.”