Venezuela has the highest police lethality rate in Latin America and, perhaps, the world. Between January 2016 and October 2019, 19,000 cases of deaths at the hands of the Police were registered, according to unofficial data from the Ministry of Interior, Justice and Peace.
Monitor de Víctimas (Victims Monitor), a journalistic platform that keeps track of homicides and deaths at the hands of the Police in five states of the country, documented the cases of 2,033 victims of alleged extrajudicial executions between 2017 and 2022, who left at least 1,520 boys, girls and adolescents in orphanhood.
The figures are shocking, but little is known about the damage caused to these collateral victims of extrajudicial executions, considered by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as a systematic practice of the Venezuelan State.
This investigation seeks to make visible the hidden stories of 26 orphans of police lethality in Caracas, Lara, Táchira, Zulia and Sucre, including the effects on their mental health, economic situation and schooling.
Some nights, Jennifer Blanco*, 14, wakes up terrified. But her fear is not triggered by nightmares, weird noises, or fright. “I start to look around, I reach my hand to my siblings to make sure they are breathing, I don’t know why I do that. Only when I see that everything is fine, I go to bed again”, she confesses.
Although she cannot predict these episodes, she does know their origin: they began shortly after the murder of his father, Amilcar Blanco*, who was allegedly executed by officers of the Special Action Forces (FAES) of Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Police (PNB) in 2019.
Blanco was killed after participating in the protests against the government of Nicolás Maduro, in January of that year. According to data collected by Monitor de Víctimas —a journalistic platform that has compiled a detailed record of homicides and cases of police lethality in Caracas and four other Venezuelan states since 2017—, a police commission entered its house in a town in the state of Lara, 300 miles west of from Caracas, drove out his children and other relatives and stayed alone with him.
The 29-year-old man died from two shots to the chest, a constant pattern in almost all cases of extrajudicial execution in Venezuela. Before their superiors, the officers presented the death as a case of resistance to authority, a police category often used by Venezuelan security agencies to refer to extrajudicial executions. The victim left five orphaned children. Jennifer is the oldest of them.
Between 2017 and 2022, Monitor de Víctimas documented that 1,328 children and adolescents were orphaned as a result of deaths caused by alleged extrajudicial executions or resistance to authority, in Caracas alone. In the state of Lara state —where Jennifer and her four siblings live—, 143 minors were orphaned for the same causes between 2020 and 2022 (the period for which records are available). 14 similar cases were documented in the state of Táchira between 2021 and 2022; 27 in Zulia, during 2022 alone, and 17 in the eastern state of Sucre, also in 2022.
In total, the cases of 1,529 children who were left without their father or mother by the action of the security forces were documented in these five states. These figures are not exhaustive, but they put into perspective one of the most serious consequences of police violence.
Between January 2016 and October 2019, 19,801 cases of resistance to authority were reported in Venezuela, according to a leak of official data from the Observatory on Citizen Security of the Ministry of Interior Relations, Justice and Peace to which the researchers had access.
“The authorities classify the killings resulting from security operations as “resistance to authority”. The number of these deaths is unusually high. In 2018, the Government registered 5,287 such killings, while the NGO “Observatorio Venezolano de la Violencia” (OVV) reported at least 7,523 killings under this category. (…) [The] Information analysed by OHCHR suggests many of these killings may constitute extrajudicial executions,” concluded a 2019 report by the Office of the then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Michelle Bachelet.
The same year as the murder of Jennifer’s father, a comparative study on police lethality in Venezuela and five other Latin American countries put into perspective the serious situation of police lethality in the South American country.
“[T]he incidence of civilian deaths is extremely high in Venezuela, followed by El Salvador. In Venezuela, the absolute number of people killed by the State is even higher than in Brazil, despite the fact that its population is nearly seven times smaller in absolute terms. The rate of civilians killed exceeds 15 (…) for every 100,000 inhabitants, a figure that is higher than the homicide rate in the vast majority of countries in the world”, highlights a research carried out by academics from the region in the Monitor of Use of Lethal Force.
In 2020, the NGO Venezuelan Observatory on Violence published the results of a survey on police lethality, which concluded that “Venezuela registered a very high rate of police lethality in the period 2015-2019, possibly the highest on the continent. Higher than the figure for Brazil and much higher than that of the United States”.
According to testimonies from Amilcar Blanco’s relatives collected by the media at the time of his alleged execution, the police entered the victim’s house without a search warrant, beat his parents, threatened his sister and pointed at the kids with their guns When the family tried to complain, one of the officers replied: “report me if you want, but I am the law.”
Although the works of academic research, records from civil society organizations, and official data leaks provide a general picture of the large number of cases of extrajudicial executions in Venezuela, there is no access to official information on violence, and the reports often omit the details of the victims or information about their family environment.
Our investigation is based on data collected by Monitor de Víctimas and reveals how children and adolescents end up being the most fragile and vulnerable link in a chain of mourners of police lethality in Venezuela.
This special report made a selection of cases of police lethality between 2017 and 2022 in Caracas and the states of Lara, Táchira, Zulia and Sucre where the death of the victim left at least one child under the age of 18 in a situation of orphanhood. Subsequently, more than 30 in-person interviews were conducted with the children, adolescents and their mothers and caregivers and the use of two questionnaires that inquired about their physical, nutritional and emotional situation, schooling, mental health, family problems, and recreation habits.
Through the stories of nine victims of police violence, which left 26 orphaned children in five states of the country, a team of journalists describes how the lives of the minors and their families were transformed and began to experience psychological trauma -such as Jennifer’s night terrors- and shortcomings in the field of nutrition, schooling, household economy and affection after the alleged executions of her parents.
The stories, accompanied by the opinions of psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists consulted for this work, explore three aspects of the problem: mental health, economic hardship and education.
The mental health of orphaned children
For Jennifer, night terrors were not the only consequence of her father’s violent absence. For a few months, the tragedy led her to suffer once again from Pica – an eating disorder that made her eat dirt, paper and wood – which she had gotten rid of years ago.
Jennifer’s siblings have not emerged unscathed from the trauma, either. Fernando*, 13, has vision, hearing and learning problems; while Leonardo*, 5, is anemic and panics out at any sound that resembles gunfire.
None of their conditions have been adequately treated. Having filed a complaint before the Public Ministry, the family lacks the resources and the State lacks the institutions to offer, at least, timely psychological support to the orphans of police violence. Several of the interviewed caregivers affirmed that, in the few public health centers with a psychology unit, appointments can take a year.
Abel Saraiba, psychologist and deputy coordinator of Cecodap —a Venezuelan organization dedicated to the promotion and defense of the human rights of children and adolescents—, explains that minors who have gone through this type of trauma often experience problems when following instructions. The impact is even greater if the child or adolescent witnesses the homicide, which may trigger symptoms of anxiety and high levels of irritability.
“In the case of young children, the scenes that they witnessed are recurrently enacted in their play. Sometimes, this worries the family, who wants the child to stop playing with that. However, this is one mechanism to explain what happened. In teenagers, we will frequently find revenge desires. In some cases, we have seen children or adolescents who dream of becoming police officers to avenge the death of their loved one,” Saraiba explained.
Delving into the mental health of the orphaned children revealed that the death of their parents triggered sleep disorders, phobias, loss of appetite, anger and desires for revenge. Despite this, they received little to no psychological care.
Economic hardships
Three of Jennifer’s five siblings do not live with their mother. Since August 2021, they have been cared for by their aunt and their grandmother. The children’s mother migrated to Chile in search of a job to support her family. Among the nine cases studied for this report, two other families experienced the same situation of having been forced to leave their children behind.
Andrés Fuentes* became a victim of an alleged extrajudicial execution at the hands of the FAES when he was 25 years old. His three children are not with their mother either. Andrés’ income as a barber, in a slum of eastern Caracas, supported a family made up of his partner and their three children.
After the death of Andrés in 2018, the responsibility of providing for the family fell on his wife, who migrated to Peru three years later to find a job that would cover the children’s expenses. Her kids live in the Venezuelan capital in the care of their grandparents, who also had to go back to work to put food on their table.
According to Carlos Meléndez, sociologist and coordinator of the Venezuelan Observatory on Violence in the state of Lara, deaths due to police lethality usually have serious economic effects on the victims’ families because, in many cases, they were the breadwinners or made significant contributions to the household economy.
“In this context, mothers and wives become the head of a household with reduced income while the kids see their precarious socioeconomic conditions deepen (…) We have identified cases of children who stopped attending school and were left in a situation of greater vulnerability without school protection. Other children had to find work in precarious conditions,” Meléndez warned.
The investigation revealed that the salaries of the heads of the family are insufficient to cover basic food expenses in a country where 112 monthly minimum wages -roughly equal to 4.50 US dollars as of June 2023- were needed to buy a basic food basket for one family, estimated at 511 US dollars by the Center for Documentation and Social Analysis of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers (Cendas-FVM).
Most families lack the resources to cover healthcare. The families of the victims lack the means to pay for private medical consultations in a country where the public health system has a rating of 20.9 out of 100, according to the 2021 Global Health Security Index, which measures the health security capabilities of 195 countries around the world. Ranked 186th on the list, Venezuela has the lowest score in the continent.
Education at risk
Monitor de Víctimas also documented the story of brothers Luis* and Roger Sierra*, aged 10 and 12, who dropped out of school to go to the streets of Maracaibo to beg, collect scrap metal and scavenge for food after their stepfather Alonso Castillo*, who was the breadwinner for the family, was killed by regional police in an alleged extrajudicial execution.
The children’s mother must stay at home to care for her two youngest children, while she waits for whatever Luis and Roger can bring. She stopped sending them to school, days after Castillo was killed, in February 2022. During his funeral, a group of thieves from the area entered their home and stole food, clothing and even kitchen utensils. It was at that moment that the boys were left without their school uniform.
Luis and Roger are not the only children left out of the educational system for having to look for work or even for lacking a uniform or school supplies. In the case of 15-year-old Gerardo Sánchez, the alleged extrajudicial execution of his stepfather, who used to help him with his schoolwork, affected his performance at school to the extent that he had to repeat the same academic year three times. He eventually had to continue his studies in an institution for adults.
For the 2021-2022 school period, the National Survey on Living Conditions (Encovi) estimated that 1.5 million girls, boys and adolescents remained outside the Venezuelan educational system. The survey prepared by Andrés Bello Catholic University found that at least 3% of adolescents dropped out of school because they had to work. A further 6% did it because they did not have uniforms or school supplies, such as notebooks, books, pencils or bags. These two factors keep Luis and Roger far from school.
In other cases, the affected children and adolescents experienced a drop in their school performance to the point that they had to repeat an academic year and fall behind their peers. This is the case of Gerardo*, a 15-year-old boy who lives in a slum in western Caracas. In November 2017, her stepfather, Alejandro Ribas*, was allegedly executed by FAES officials.
The Encovi survey indicates that, during 2022, at least 18% of children aged 7 to 11 were lagging at school. The figure rose to 31% among adolescents.
From social punishment to vulnerability
According to sociologist Carlos Meléndez, the children of the victims of police lethality suffer “prolonged victimization” because, after having lost one of their caregivers as a result of a traumatic event, they are subjected “to ostracism and social punishment” within their own community. Added to this is the belief among “some media and society that police violence is the solution to the problem of violence in the country”.
“These children socialize in that context and generate a series of negative emotions against their surroundings (…) that sets them apart and excludes them, just as happens with their mothers,” the specialist explains.
Mirla Pérez, social researcher and member of the Alejandro Moreno People’s Research Center, highlighted that the implementation of a political project in Venezuela has generated economic difficulties and legal uncertainties that leave children and adolescents in an even greater situation of vulnerability and defenselessness.
“In the design of Western society, The States come to the aid of the family whenever it fails. That is when the protection and welfare provided by the State comes into play to guarantee life when the basic element of society, which is the family, cannot”, she emphasized.
Pérez, who is also a consultant in the area of criminal and citizen violence, family and social responsibility, warned that children bear the greatest effects of police lethality and its consequences during their lives.
“In democracy and a State that guarantees legal protection, [the institutions] must acknowledge, subsidize and alleviate this situation by providing psychological care and economic support. This is the duty of a State that really cares for citizens,” she added.
“Seeing today’s weaknesses, we can foresee that an entire generation will be in danger due to precarious living conditions and the absence of legal protection that breed many vulnerabilities and limitations among citizens,” she concluded.
*The names of the victims, minors and caregivers who were part of this special report were modified to preserve their safety.
