Just like Antonia Turbay, many hostages are never presented with a conclusive act because there is no evidence to charge them with a crime. We will remember August 31, 2020, and the image of Antonia Turbay talking to her daughter on the phone, her sobs, her gray and disheveled hair, her look of helplessness… This episode will make us remember a feeling of infinite disgust
The attention of public opinion concentrates on an anguished woman who became a metaphor for a country martyred by a regime that has not spared it suffering. If Nicolás Maduro believed that he could rebuild his deteriorated image with the dismissal and release of a group of political prisoners, he was totally wrong. In the group was a woman of whom little had been said. She is not a member of parliament or any political party. She was not even arrested in a protest. The Maduro regime subjected her to a hellish Venezuelan prison for being the neighbor of Iván Simonovis, another political prisoner who escaped from his home where he was serving time for crimes he did not commit.
The name and trembling image of Antonia Turbay stood out among the nearly three dozen released prisoners (most of the others who saw their cases dismissed are in exile or had already been released). Maduro had sent her to arrest for living next to a fugitive. She was neither a friend nor a relative. She had nothing to do with the escape. They arrested her in June 2019, when she was giving statements about the escape of Commissioner Simonovis. Surely, in the middle of the interrogation, an “order from above”, as they say in Venezuela to justify every sort of abuse, decided to keep her behind bars… until Monday, August 31.
Antonia Turbay was imprisoned for a year and a month, without a single visit from a relative because there is none left in Venezuela. Her only daughter migrated to Colombia. “Not because she is not patriotic,” she told reporters when she was released from prison, “but because she was kidnapped. I preferred to have her far away, but safe and sound, rather than in Venezuela and dead.”
The outrage unleashed by the case of this woman, a 67-year-old lawyer, depressed and exhausted after more than a year in unjust detention is not because she was the only prisoner having no ties with the national parliament or the political parties. On the contrary, there are a few in the same situation. Enrique Perdomo, Simonovis’s lawyer, was also taken to prison for the crime of representing his client and was left in very poor shape, due to the mistreatment of which he was a victim and the infamous sanitary conditions that were imposed on him.
Among the freed political prisoners -who are not politicians- we find trade unionist Rubén González; doctor Williams Aguado, imprisoned for owning the El Junquito villa where Óscar Pérez took shelter; José Alberto Marulanda, also a doctor, imprisoned for being the partner of an officer who is accused of plotting a military uprising, who was tortured and hanged to a tube with handcuffs, according to reports from Foro Penal. Nor is she the only woman reduced to political imprisonment: other 27 women are also political prisoners.
The “goodwill” that Maduro’s regime suddenly shows has the face of Antonia Turbay, her desolation, her helplessness in the face of evil. It is evident that they kidnapped her to mortify Simonovis, to get revenge on him, and embitter his freedom. Such is the cruelty of the regime. Such is the complicity of individuals like Tarek William Saab, Prosecutor of the regime, speechless in the face of this infamy.
We wonder how many more are in Maduro’s dungeons. How many hostages to whom, like Antonia Turbay, the Prosecutor’s Office does not present a conclusive act because there is no evidence to charge them a crime. How much iniquity remains in the dungeons of Nicolás Maduro.
The image of Antonia Turbay talking to her daughter on the phone, her sobs, her gray and disheveled hair, her look of helplessness… That is what we will remember from this episode. That, and this infinite disgust.
Translated by José Rafael Medina
