Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and experts are ringing the alarm about the widespread, serious, and systematic human rights violations of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro regime. “The year 2024 was unprecedented in terms of the figures for politically motivated repression in Venezuela,” said Venezuelan pro bono legal aid organization Foro Penal in a recent report.
According to Foro Penal, there are at least a thousand political prisoners in Venezuela, including women, teenagers, and foreign nationals. Since 2014, there have been 18,059 politically motivated arrests in Venezuela, according to the NGO. Some 9,000 people are still arbitrarily subject to measures restricting their freedom.
The Maduro regime has kidnapped opponents, “it has imprisoned them and, in some cases, left them to die. The clearest example is the late General Raúl Baduel, who was imprisoned and neglected during COVID and died as a result,” Luis Fleischman, professor of Sociology and Political Science at Palm Beach State University in Florida, told Diálogo about Gen. Baduel, a former defense minister and a critic of the regime who died in 2021.
Protests against the regime have been violently repressed, Fleischman added. “The number of people killed and injured by forces loyal to the regime and paramilitaries is increasingly part of Maduro’s way of governing. It is an illegitimate regime that is sustained only by force.”
Brutal repression
Repression in Venezuela increased before the July 28, 2024 elections and escalated to “brutal levels” after the regime announced, without evidence, that Maduro had been reelected, said Human Rights Watch (HRW). “When thousands of protesters took to the streets, the authorities responded with brutal repression, including killings, arrests, and other repressive tactics,” the NGO said in a report.
HRW said to have received credible reports of 23 murders of protesters and bystanders and identified evidence implicating the security forces and armed groups supporting the regime, known as “colectivos,” in several of these murders.
Following the July elections, enforced disappearance increased as a weapon to silence the opposition. “In most cases, they have been temporary forced disappearances. But, in other cases, at least 43 people remain forcibly disappeared […], completely incommunicado and their whereabouts unknown,” Foro Penal said.
The United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), the European Union, the United States, and several Latin American and European governments have urged Maduro to make the election results public and to respect the will of the people.
Acts of terrorism
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an organ of the OAS, warned about the Maduro regime’s acts of terrorism to sustain the dictatorship. In its report Grave Human Rights Violations in the Electoral Context, published on January 7, the IACHR describes “the serious and systematic human rights violations” committed by the Chavista leader to prevent the opposition led by Edmundo González Urrutia and María Corina Machado from initiating the democratic transition in Venezuela.
“Before, during, and after the presidential election of July 28, the regime implemented a coordinated repressive strategy” to illegitimately perpetuate itself in power, the document says.
According to the IACHR, state terrorism was used to prevent the opposition from participating in politics, to hinder the development of a free, fair, competitive, and transparent electoral process, and to sow terror among the population. “These events could only take place, unchecked, because of the co-optation of the different branches of government, which has taken place over the last two decades,” the report adds.
The OAS also points out that the Maduro regime resorted to the power of institutions such as the Comptroller General of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Supreme Court of Justice, and the security forces to carry out arbitrary arrests of opponents and human rights defenders.
In addition, there were acts of harassment, persecution, and disqualification against opponents or those perceived as such, and restrictions on freedom of the press and denial of the right to vote abroad, which affected nearly 5 million Venezuelans, the IACHR report indicated.
“Today arbitrary detentions are an everyday occurrence. Political prisoners abound and these include opposition members, journalists, and NGO officials,” said Fleischman.
According to the expert, emigration continues due to repression and the mismanagement of the domestic situation, including lack of food and deteriorating health and sanitation services. “Illegal mining, which abuses indigenous rights and exploits and tortures the workers in these mines, is another great abuse of rights that evokes the era of slavery,” the expert concluded.
