Lupa por la vida is a project of documentation and construction of a collective memory
Venezuelan police and military were more deadly than COVID-19 in 2020. A total of 2,853 people were victims of the lethality of the security organs of the Venezuelan State, serious human rights violations that could constitute crimes against humanity.
Most of the victims were young people in slums and working-class neighborhoods, aged 18 to 30 years old, which indicates a pattern of discrimination that puts the lives of young people at risk.
This fact, together with the exclusion of this age sector from access to other rights such as education and work, accounts for the growing forced migration of young people seeking protection in other States. In a country that has lost its demographic bonus, this pattern of executions deepens the complex humanitarian emergency that the country is experiencing.
Not even the so-called “forced” lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic decreed by the national executive branch stopped the actions of the police and military forces.
This data is the result of a joint work carried out by the Venezuelan Program for Education Action in Human Rights (Provea) and the Gumilla Research Center.
In 2019, Provea and the Jesuit organization Gumilla Center began monitoring police and military institutional violence, and the consolidation of this project has allowed us to formally present this initiative under the name of Lupa por la Vida, a construction of collective memory on the issue of extrajudicial executions.
A state policy that promotes impunity
Monitoring has made it possible to determine that the thousands of victims of institutional violence in Venezuela are the consequence of a State policy that combines the encouragement provided by the high-rank authorities for the commission of abuses and the structural impunity given the bias of the justice toward a pro-government political project.
Security officers act with full freedom given the certainty that their conduct will not be investigated or punished because they have the backing of governors, ministers, and other high-ranking public officials.
In the few cases that get to be investigated, the institutions act with discrimination.
On August 21, 2020, officers of the Bolivarian National Police assigned to the Special Action Forces (FAES) assassinated Andrés Eloy Nieves Zacarías and Víctor Manuel Torres, workers of the Guacamaya TV station in the state of Zulia, a media outlet known for supporting the government of Nicolás Maduro.
To the relief of the victims’ families, the Public Ministry acted quickly and arrested the 6 agents allegedly involved in the crime four days later.
Two months earlier, on early June 11, the FAES murdered five people in the El Limón neighborhood in Caracas. The victims were identified as Arquímedes Ramón Martínez, Andri Narváez, Roger Blanco, Pedro Pablo Salcedo, and Wilmer Yáñez, the latter a bodyguard of Minister Iris Valera, who denounced the situation and demanded an investigation. 48 hours after the events, the alleged perpetrators were detained. In both cases there is a common element: the victims were linked to the ruling political project, and although they were victims of police violence, their families had access to justice. This defines a discriminatory pattern where justice is discretionary and depends on the victims’ ties to the faction in power.
In Venezuela, the majority of the population does not have political patronage and, therefore, is excluded from having the right to an investigation and punish those who may be responsible for extrajudicial executions.
For them, for now, only impunity is guaranteed. The version of “alleged confrontation” is almost always raised and, consequently, the Public Ministry does not advance an investigation, thus violating due process.
In most cases of murders perpetrated by the public force, the testimony of relatives provides sufficient elements to presume the commission of extrajudicial executions.
In fact, our investigation confirmed the use of staged confrontations, which is known in Latin America as false positives, which consist in the set-up of a crime scene to make believe that the victims used weapons against the police or the military when in reality the victims were arrested and killed.
The term execution is understood as all those actions in which a security agent, on or off duty, shoots the victim intending to cause their death. And they are extrajudicial in that they occur in a country where the death penalty does not exist, and the security agent, in violation of the due process that a fair trial would imply, resolves to take justice into his own hands and execute the person.
The data collected reflects that this constitutes the pattern that historically concentrates the highest number of deaths due to violation of the right to life. This is already relevant since it suggests that the action of the State security forces is aimed at causing death.
This pattern has become so complex that it is possible to identify the victims (1) who are killed due to personal problems with officers of the public security forces (making room for the sub-pattern of abuse of power), and those (2) killed during the deployment of operations and/or actions systematically carried out to “end” the lives of young people under the umbrella term of “social prophylaxis”, where the official version is usually the confrontation with authority, giving place to a narrative according to which the victims were dangerous criminals.
States with the most cases in 2020
The states most severely affected by institutional violence from police and the military forces were Zulia, Aragua, Bolívar, Lara, Carabobo, and Miranda, according to the number of deaths.
In 2020, the state of Zulia registered the highest number of deaths with 667, followed by Aragua with (297), Bolívar (269), and Lara (193). In many of the cases, the victims’ relatives or neighbors denied the confrontation version.
One of the cases that most impacted public opinion in Carabobo was the murder of Daniel Alexander López Ramírez (28), a community doctor, director of a primary care center in Guacara. He was assassinated during a joint operation carried out in that city.
The official version indicated that López Ramírez was a member of a criminal group and died after confronting a group of police officers who were raiding a house located in the Tesoro del Indio neighborhood, Guacara municipality, in search of alleged criminals.
The information was denied by López’s relatives, who indicated that the doctor was in that place because he had been kidnapped by members of a criminal gang to treat the wounds of one of them. López’s family assured that the doctor did not confront the police commission.
The greatest number of deaths during police and military operations was reported in May. 379 people were killed in the context of the quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic, in which the movement of people on public roads was much lower, but violent operations against the population did not stop. Between March and June alone, full into the lockdown, the police and military assassinated 1,091 people.
Exploring the levels of the lethality of the police and military forces
The Bolivarian National Police (PNB), mainly through its elite body the Special Action Forces (Faes), became the deadliest police force. In 2020, the body was responsible for 672 murders, which represents 23.55% of the total.
Following closely, the Bureau for Scientific, Criminal and Forensic Investigations (CICPC) accounted for 593 cases or 17.52% of the total. In the last two years, the responsibility of this body for the hundreds of alleged executions in the country has gone unnoticed in the public debate. Most fingers have pointed out to the FAES, perceived as the security body that most violates the right to life even though it has acted in fewer states of the country.
State police were responsible for 721 alleged executions, equivalent to 25.71%. The number of deaths attributable to state police in Zulia (262), Aragua (104), and Carabobo (101) stands out.
The Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB) was responsible for 359 deaths, the vast majority of which took place during operations of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB). There was a significant increase in the number of cases attributable to the FANB. Provea could identify 55 alleged executions with the participation of the FANB in 2019. The 2020 figure is in line with the increasingly growing process of militarization of public security.
For their part, municipal police forces were responsible for 134 alleged executions. Municipal police officers, who are defined as mainly preventive police, participate more frequently in operations that result in the death of alleged criminals.
In the specific case of the FAES, a special investigation by the newspaper TalCual finds that they used the same procedures, followed the same objectives, and were the object of complaints from the victims’ relatives and neighbors similar to those of 2019.
On the other hand, their main areas of operations are the poor neighborhoods in the cities and towns of Venezuela and some rural areas.
Also, the media reported the complaints of 103 people, relatives or neighbors who assured that the victims had been arrested but later turned up dead.
Regarding the number of executions attributable to this elite body of the PNB, the figure stood at 635 deaths, or 22.26% of all deaths, mostly young men aged 28.39 years on average, taking into account that it was possible to know the age of only 228 of the dead. In the 462 alleged confrontations, 3 FAES agents were killed.
Where is the police reform?
In a study carried out in 2006 by the National Commission for Police Reform, it was pointed out that an indicator of police lethality is the disproportion between officers and civilian casualties.
That is to say, deaths and injuries are reported on the side of citizens but no deaths are reported within the ranks of the public force organs during the so-called “confrontations”.
According to the Commission, this “suggests the concealment of executions under this the version of confrontations.” Human rights organizations such as Provea have repeatedly warned that the sustained increase in the number of victims of violations of the right to life under the pattern of extrajudicial executions finds a partial explanation in the increase in the violent and lethal actions of the police forces, which often becomes an indicator of “police efficiency” under an “iron fist” perspective.
The strengthening of militaristic stances and “iron fist” practices weaken the concept of public security and obstruct the necessary democratic consensus to advance in the adoption of public policies that help overcome the high rates of violence and crime in the country.
As Pope Francis pointed out, these extrajudicial executions “are deliberate homicides committed by state agents, which are often passed off as a result of confrontations with alleged criminals or presented as unintended consequences of the reasonable, necessary and appropriate use of force in the protection of citizens”.
The doctrine of national security over the rights of citizens
The government insists on amplifying the vision of the external and internal enemy – typical of the national security doctrine- and on reinforcing the warmongering logic and the stigmatization and criminalization of different social actors to justify the excessive use of force by police and military officers, and consolidate the police and military State that supposes the primacy of the interests of the State over the rights of citizens.
This militarization of citizen security entails serious risks for individual guarantees since it implies the military occupation of the national territory for the “defense” against an “internal enemy” that turns out to be the citizen himself, regardless of whether it is peasants, alleged criminals, workers, political leaders, human rights activists, or anyone else.
According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, “the authoritarian governments and military dictatorships that acted in the Hemisphere during the last decades in defiance of international obligations to respect human rights, left as a legacy a permanent cycle of violence.”
The concept of citizen security, from a democratic and human rights observing point of view, implies the overcoming of the authoritarian and militaristic vision that marked the performance of a good part of the Latin American States during the last century and whose policies- for a long time – were protected by the national security doctrine.
Continuing the path of authoritarianism will further erode the rule of law and generate more human rights violations and suffering for citizens.
It is urgent to stop the drip massacre that takes place in Venezuela every day and to investigate and punish all the perpetrators and masterminds of human rights abuses in the context of police and/or military operations.
In a future report, we will present the balance of the first two months of 2021, in which the projections indicate that the systematic pattern of extrajudicial executions has been maintained across the country, with a special mention of the operation carried out in the La Vega parish of Caracas, at the beginning of January, in which 23 deaths at the hands of the police forces were registered.
As an institutional structure favorable to impunity is established in the country, the action of independent investigation mechanisms that contribute to holding human rights violators accountable becomes increasingly important and necessary.
In the same way, the work being carried out by the UN Fact-Finding Mission established, the exhortation of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the dissolution of the FAES, and the first pronouncement of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who considers that there are grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed in Venezuela, brings hope for the achievement of justice.
The authorities continue to fail to comply with the recommendations of international human rights organizations; they persist in maintaining a security policy that does not respect the right to life and other human rights, the crimes are not investigated and perpetrators are not punished, including the chains of command of those responsible for thousands of alleged executions.
Police and military forces acting outside the Constitution and the law generate greater suffering in the Venezuelan population, increase insecurity, and sponsor an increase in violence.
Provea – Gumilla Center
Translated by José Rafael Medina
