For the third consecutive time, private media and Venezuelan Non-Governmental Organizations took a leading role in the documentation, verification and dissemination of cases of human rights violations that served as input for the conclusions of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela which mentioned Nicolás Maduro, Diosdado Cabello and other leaders of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) as having orchestrated the torture, attacks and massacres of Venezuelan civilians and political dissidents since 2014.
“The Mission’s investigations show that the acts of violence documented were not conducted by random and unconnected individuals acting alone within Sebin (Bolivarian National Intelligence Service) and Dgcim (General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence). Instead, Dgcim and Sebin were part of a machinery designed and deployed to execute the government’s plan to repress dissent and cement its own grip on power. This plan was orchestrated at the highest political level, led by President Nicolás Maduro and supported by other senior authorities,” declared Martha Valiñas, chair of the Mission during the presentation of the report.
In its third report on the human rights situation in Venezuela, published on September 20, 2022, the UN Fact-Finding Mission presented an update on its investigation into the systematic violation of human rights in the country.
This time the role of rigorous journalism in the documentation of two specific topics stands out: the stories of the victims of torture and other crimes committed by authorities and officials of the Venezuelan State and the action of armed groups and the violation of the Human Rights of indigenous populations in the Orinoco Mining Arc.
In the report, the Mission regretted once again that, three years into its mandate, the Venezuelan government still has not permitted its members to visit the country.
The UN also denounced that it was not granted any contact with the Venezuelan public administration, which did not respond “to any of the ten letters that the Mission sent between September 2021 and September 2022.”
Faced with the lack of cooperation from the Maduro government, the UN contrasted 246 interviews during this cycle with reports from the Venezuelan media and national and regional NGOs.
“The independent media and NGOs, as a reference for the generation of first-hand information in Venezuela, provided vital input to the Mission,” said Andrés Cañizález, journalist, academic and director of the Medinalisis, an NGO that works for the defense of freedom of expression.
“[We must bear in mind] the limitations of the case, given that the repercussion of the report is limited to a certain part of the population, a specific sector of Venezuelan society that can access information or have a moderately stable electricity and internet service,” he added.
A mine of human rights violations
The three reports released by the UN Mission on September 20 mention the works of private media 216 times.
The reports referred to 9 investigative works carried out by the Venezuelan news site runrun.es between 2016 and 2022, mainly on the violation of human rights and State corruption in the Orinoco Mining Arc, a project of territorial intervention by extractive industries in southern Venezuela sponsored by the government of Nicolás Maduro since 2016.
Through different journalistic works, runrun.es has been reporting cases of corporate corruption and invasion of indigenous territories since the beginning of the Orinoco Mining Arc project.
A joint investigation with the Connectas platform documented the smuggling of gold smuggling by State and foreign companies and armed criminal groups.
The illegal exchange of precious metals in the Orinoco Mining Arc has been the cause of multiple confrontations between the State security forces and the guerrillas; Meanwhile, the indigenous populations of northern Bolívar state found themselves in the crossfire.
The report states that the incursion of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) “led to clashes with sindicatos in the mines. (…) Armed clashes between State security forces and armed criminal groups continued as part of the Manos de Metal (Metal Hands) operation announced by Tareck El Aissami on 8 June 2018. According to the official announcement, this operation was aimed at “attacking smuggling mafias involved in metal extraction”. Arrest warrants were issued against the heads of several sindicatos, in total 28 alleged high-profile leaders involved in illegal gold trafficking
The Venezuelan news site runrun.es continued to document clashes between officials of the Venezuelan National Guard and extrajudicial executions in the area.
Massacres in the jungle
Thanks to the collection of testimonies, it was possible to verify that the murders of miners in the state of Bolívar have been constant since 2015.
Investigations by runrun.es confirmed that at least 11 people were extrajudicially executed in incidents connected with mining in the area before the Tumeremo Massacre of March 2016, when at least 17 civilians were murdered in an armed confrontation.
Runrun.es recounted the experiences of the residents of the Sifontes municipality in Bolívar state. Some claimed that the executions were recurring. Through interviews with witnesses to the massacres and former Venezuelan officials, the third UN report confirmed that the crimes were forsaken by the Venezuelan State.
Similarly, the February 2018 coverage of the executions in Cicapra, a town in Bolívar state, helped to contrast the interviews consulted by the UN Mission and verify that the operation was not a confrontation but an unrecorded military order that killed 18 civilians.
Local resistance
In the framework of these confrontations, it was also documented how the indigenous leaders of the region have faced the coercive relations with the Venezuelan State in order to maintain their integrity.
The testimonies collected by both the media and the UN Mission establish that the State has maintained a constant violation of the rights of the Venezuelan indigenous population since at least 2001.
The report states that “¨[t]he creation of indigenous security groups is also due to the lack of response by the authorities in the face of abuses of power and human rights violations by State security forces. Pemon community leaders frequently filed complaints with various authorities, such as the military commanders of the REDI and ZODI and the Ministry of Mining. However, most of these complaints received no response.”
The UN Mission also mentioned the case of the murder of Zoraida Rodríguez, 46, and the attack against members of the Pemón Territorial Guard of Santa Elena de Uairén by Venezuelan military forces on February 22. That day, the journalistic project Monitor de Víctimas reported that the security forces had prevented the entry of humanitarian aid granted by the Pemón Territorial Guard on the border with Brazil. The military opened fire on civilians.
The UN Mission reported that the reconstruction of military attacks against indigenous communities on the border with Brazil was made almost exclusively by interviews compiled by the research group and independent press reports.
Paragraph 357 of the report reads: “With regard to the Ikabarú massacre, the Mission investigated this incident through a comparative study of open-source information. Not being able to enter Venezuelan territory, and the case having occurred in a remote area of the country, the Mission encountered significant challenges in interviewing persons who had first-hand experiences of the violent incident. However, the Mission found multiple open sources of information that referred to the events in the community of Ikabarú, describing the crimes which occurred in the framework of violent operations to gain territorial control in mining areas in Gran Sabana municipality.”
The recording of the testimonies of the victims by the Venezuelan press, as well as the description of the events, made it easier for the UN to reconstruct the murder of 8 people in the Pemón community of Ikabarú, located in the state of Bolívar, and to establish the bases of an extrajudicial execution carried out by the Venezuelan State with the aim of annexing the territory to the Orinoco Mining Arc despite not belonging to the project.
From an industrial zone to a torture zone
One outstanding point in the three documents that make up the third report of the UN Mission is the systematic documentation of torture and repression centers operated by the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (Dgcim).
The UN Mission was able to locate 17 torture centers in Caracas and Miranda, whose headquarters are located in Boleíta Norte (Sucre municipality, Miranda). Due to the restrictions on access to information imposed by the Venezuelan State, the UN reconstructed a timeline of the activities of the Dgcim that converted a commercial building into a police center where human rights violations are committed.
A report by Runrun.es made use of different testimonies to show how the members of the Dgcim occupied an industrial and residential area in Caracas in 2019 without the knowledge of the residents.
The UN was able to verify that the political and civil prisoners of the Venezuelan State were dispatched from the Boleíta facilities to different “security houses” where they were subjected to torture before returning to the headquarters to continue in arbitrary detention.
Fighting censorship
In 2021 alone, 11 of the 20 Venezuelan private media outlets mentioned in the third UN report were blocked by local internet providers at the request of the Venezuelan State, according to the Venezuelan Press and Society Institute (IPYS) and the NGO VE Sin Filtro.
According to data provided by VE Sin Filtro, internet censorship against the media has grown exponentially after 2014.
Marianela Balbi, executive director at IPYS, said: “Independent media in Venezuela have become a direct reference to the realities to which the Fact-Finding Mission has not been able to have access because it has not been authorized to enter the country. Day by day, the independent media is dismantling the official narrative, which the government propaganda apparatus insists on imposing on public opinion through public, parastatal and pro-government media and a disinformation machinery that seeks to intoxicate public debate on social media.
“For these reasons, journalists and human rights defenders have become the target of attacks from the security services and public institutions. Behind the serious allegations of the UN report is the sustained, rigorous and courageous action of the independent media and NGOs in Venezuela”, she added.
Andrés Cañizález affirmed that, due to the narrowing of the media ecosystem in recent years, the internal impact of the Venezuelan independent press is limited; but, in the long term, documentation plays a vital role for the international community and justice processes before multilateral institutions.
“My perception is that we lack a public opinion as established by modern democracies, where the opinion of the population is discerned through polls and the national press. This phenomenon is very limited in Venezuela”, Cañizalez explained. “I believe that, in the short term, these reports will have a limited impact as long as Chavismo remains in power and the current state of affairs since it will keep having control over the narrative of what is being discussed in the country. But I believe that in the medium and long term these reports are going to be vital inputs for public discussion and the re-establishment of the justice system and the rule of law in Venezuela.”
Both Andrés Cañizález and Marianela Balbi agreed that the documentation of human rights violations in Venezuela is essential to build a collective memory and to “be accountable to the government” in the future.
The third report by the UN Mission cites 46 national and international private media outlets, including El Correo del Caroní, Efecto Cocuyo, Crónica Uno, Tal Cual, El Pitazo and armando.info, among others. All these media have suffered blockages of their websites since 2017.
The UN Mission also compiled the complaints, analyses and documentation work of national and international non-governmental organizations. The Venezuelan NGOs that had a prominent participation in the report were SOS Orinoco, the Center for Reflection and Social Action (CERLAS), the Center for Human Rights of the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), Provea and the Commission for Human Rights and Citizenship (CODEHCIU), among others.
“Faced with the inaction of the authorities and public institutions, the media is the first witness and narrator of our contemporary history so that the shadow of impunity does not continue to prevail. But of course, this happens in a democratic and open society, and this is not the case for Venezuela,” Balbi concluded.
Translated by José Rafael Medina
