“You can be the light among darkness.” It was one of the handwritten messages on one of the banners that were raised upon her arrival. It was transmitted by the victims and their relatives, who waited for Michelle Bachelet in silence, but with much expectation.
The afternoon was falling, and they were waiting to meet with the former president of Chile who is now the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In the midst of his short official visit to Venezuela, dozens of relatives and human rights defenders dispersed at La Plaza del Samán at the Metropolitan University (UNIMET). Since 3:00 pm the place was filled little by little.
The wait ended when the clock struck 5:25 pm. “Justice, justice, justice, justice!” Was the collective clamor that resonated as soon as Bachelet got out of the truck, guarded by security officials, accompanied by the technical team and other members of the Caracas office.
They surrounded her and toured part of the plaza next to her. While the UN spokeswoman walked around, she was looking at the more than 100 people who came to receive her and show her the demands that were reflected on their posters. She entered the central corridor of the building, while the relatives of victims of extrajudicial executions from different states of the country, accompanied by the Committee of Relatives of the Victims (COFAVIC), organized themselves to wait for her in the auditorium. There, they would hold the private meeting, which would start one of the seven meetings scheduled on her agenda to listen to the affected people, relatives and representatives of human rights organizations.
At 5:40 in the afternoon Bachelet was already sitting in front of a table, to attend the stories of murders, torture, arbitrary detentions and disappearances that have occurred in recent years in Venezuela, and that meet the same pattern: disproportionate use of force and the shootings of lethal weapons by police officers and in some cases groups of armed civilians.
When she arrived, she told them that her goal was to obtain concrete results from this visit. She announced that she had managed to get two members of her team to stay to deepen the work in Venezuela. Narrated, as enthusiastic, that in his first 24 hours of visiting in Venezuela had managed to advance the trades to install a local office of the Office of the High Commissioner to attend in a more profound and timely manner the situation of Venezuela. This would be confirmed later in the following meetings with human rights organizations and would be part of the news she offered in his closing statement, before taking the plane to Geneva.
In the auditorium of the UNIMET, Bachelet showed her words of solidarity to the relatives and the victims before the pattern of extrajudicial executions committed, mainly, by one of the police wings of Venezuela, which has been grouped in the so-called Special Actions Forces (FAES), an organism that one of the victims defined as an “Extermination corps”.
“We know it, we have written it in different reports, and we are with you,” Bachelet told them, in her soft but firm voice. She told them that she was there to listen to them and delve into the stories, many of them already known to her and her team, because for more than 10 months they have been preparing a report on human rights violations in Venezuela, which will be published in the next weeks.
With her bag on the floor and next to her legs, she took the position of the listener. She grabbed a paper and a pen. From time to time she would clasp her hands in front of her face with her elbows on the table and, with three members of her team, she would watch closely.
A 34-year-old man traveled 468 kilometers from Carora, the second city of Lara state, to reach the meeting. He took the microphone and took a deep breath before beginning his mourning testimony. After attending national courts for five months, he was at that moment standing diagonally to Michelle Bachelet to tell her that his brother had been killed, allegedly by the FAES, in one of the peaceful demonstrations held in January 23rd.
According to COFAVIC’s records, his brother was a 29-year-old shoemaker and was killed by officials who arrived at their home with hoods and who said they were “obeying orders from the executive,” but they did not present a warrant or a search warrant. The documentation carried by this organization details that the boy was pointed out while he was being accused of having sent audios of a protest that had occurred in that city the previous day. Upon entering the house, the officials threatened their parents and his wife; the children who were there were locked up with other policemen and pointed them at guns so they would stop crying.
Five months later, his brother has assumed the voice of his complaint. Dressed in jeans and a long shirt, he traveled to Caracas and, with a broken voice, between short breaths, reconstructed the murder scene. At that moment, the high commissioner interrupted him. She dropped her pen, got up from the chair and walked to embrace the man of Carora. She squeezed him and accompanied him in tears. The silence deepened, and then, with tears in his eyes, she returned to her post while the larense touched his chest to describe where two shots came to his brother.
“Us, the victims have rights”, read on the banner of another young man from Lara state also present in the room. He told Bachelet how he had survived a massacre that occurred in this same entity. “We cannot continue with this killings,” he told the UN visitor, while asking her to intercede to “eliminate” the security corps that threaten the lives of people of low income and popular localities, without discriminating if they are farmers or even children.
“We live with fear”, dared to say a mother who also told her that the children of her neighborhood run and hide terrified “when they hear a siren”.
Stories like these are hidden in the experiences of the victims and their families, who have suffered in the middle of the 9,530 extrajudicial executions that took place in Venezuela between 2012 and 2018, according to the data of COFAVIC, one of the oldest human rights organizations In Venezuela. His team of lawyers has documented that most of the victims are young people from popular sectors.
The meeting had space to reconstruct scenes of arbitrary detentions, torture and judicial proceedings such as those that have built the case against the journalist Luis Carlos Díaz, who in three minutes also told his story to the high commissioner.
Two hours later, Bachelet was still at UNIMET, in another auditorium. She was closing another session in which 29 representatives of human rights organizations took the floor and, in pills, she summarized long violations and patterns due to a shortage of medicines, deficiencies in hospital care, restrictions on women’s rights due to a shortage of contraceptives or increase in maternal mortality rates. They also told him how childhood has been affected by hunger, school dropouts and cognitive delays that arise as a consequence of malnutrition. She heard testimonies from people living with HIV and hearing loss, patterns of repression, prohibitions on the right to peaceful protest and contractions of freedom of expression and digital rights.
“What happens in Venezuela deeply hurts me.” “It breaks my heart what people are suffering for” These were the words that, with a slow accent and a Chilean intonation, Michelle Bachelet expressed after listening to the testimonies of the crisis that is spreading in Venezuela.
It was 8 o’clock on the night of June 20. She was still sitting, and the room was full. Her work day was long and still other groups of victims and relatives of political prisoners were waiting to tell her their stories.
Before taking her departure flight, the next day, the high commissioner offered a press conference. There, she told reporters that in her short visit she had the opportunity to hear “the voices of the protesters who fight for the protection of their rights, of those who seek reparation for the damage they have suffered.”
From Maiquetía, she insisted that the stories she collected are “heartbreaking and show the distrust they have in the State authorities.” The highest authority in Human Rights of the UN left Venezuela with the commitment to “continue transmitting these demands and advocate for justice and reparation for them, whoever the perpetrators are. I am aware that there are thousands of other victims and their families whom I was not able to meet, but let me tell you something: Your struggle for justice is important, not only for what you have suffered, but for what it means to all Venezuelans.”
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I write this story as an observer and not as a journalist. I had the support of COFAVIC, IPYS Venezuela and Civilis Human Rights.
