Isaac was flying a kite in the neighborhood of Coche, Caracas, when a commission from the Bureau for Scientific, Criminal and Forensic Investigations (CICPC) arrived in the place and started shooting.
His relatives say that the 14-year-old boy began to run after hearing the shots but was hit by a bullet.
The members of the CICPC took him away, badly wounded, and his body was found later at the Bello Monte morgue.
Isaac Mata died on April 17, 2020. His relatives accuse the CICPC of having murdered and portrayed him as a criminal.
Isaac’s aunt told the media that the officers referred to the young man as a criminal. She also pointed out that the young man’s body bore marks from having been handcuffed.
Isaac was in his first year of high school at the Pedro Emilio Coll School in Coche. He lived in a slum in the area with his parents and a younger brother.
In 2021, an operation carried out by the Special Actions Forces (FAES) left the unofficial toll of 23 deaths in La Vega parish, also in Caracas.
12 of the deceased were identified, and three were minors. One of them is 16 year-old Carlos Alfredo Hernández Hurtado. His relatives told Crónica Uno that early on Friday, January 8, the boy left his house to buy cheese, and then he would meet a friend from the area. When he was walking down Independencia Street, he was shot.
Another teenager killed during the operation was 17-year-old Jonathan Useche, who was taken blindfolded from his home by FAES officers. Jonathan Efraín Durán González, 17 years old, was also registered among the victims.
The taboo of racism
The alleged extrajudicial killings of these four young Venezuelan boys match the profile of the usual victims of the FAES: young people living in poor neighborhoods, as indicated by the Venezuelan Program for Education and Action in Human Rights, Provea.
Faced with this situation, the question is why are young boys in slums being killed?
Keymer Ávila, UCV professor and one of the most important researchers on the abuses of the security forces in Venezuela, says that young people under 30 represent at least more than half of the country’s population and that racial prejudices and criminalization result in fatalities.
Ávila told Radio Fe y Alegría Noticias that “the literature on criminology explains that young people are the most active and exposed population from a social and work perspective, and if race and class prejudices are added to this, the result is fatality and a permanent tendency to become the subject of stigmatization and criminalization.”
In an interview offered to the Nueva Sociedad Journal in 2020, Keymer Ávila assured that racism in Venezuela is a problem that is neither admitted nor assumed. It is almost taboo.
For the specialist, racism in Venezuela is more a symbolic, cultural, and latent form of racism, which is sometimes portrayed as something funny, entertaining, or merely aesthetical, along with a series of prejudices; as well as subtle and indirect forms of oppression, discrimination, stigmatization, and exclusion.
“This ranges from the non-recognition or concealment of one’s own African or indigenous ancestry to self-discrimination. It was defined by Esther Pineda as ‘endoracism’, which refers to the racism exercised by those who are themselves victims of racist discrimination. That is why it is so difficult to assume. It does not reach the institutionalized and extreme levels of the United States, but it undoubtedly feeds a substrate that later legitimizes other forms of violence against these groups,” explained Ávila to the Nueva Sociedad Journal.
According to Ávila, who is also part of the Network of Activism and Research for Coexistence (REACIN), violence against the most economically vulnerable is not particular to Venezuela, it is a problem in the whole region.
According to the latest UN Global Study on Homicide, young men are especially at risk. The homicide rate for men aged 18 to 19 is estimated at 46 per 100,000 population, a much higher rate than in other regions of the world.
To get an idea of the dimensions of the problem, the world average is 6 per 100,000 population.
Venezuela ranks among the countries with the highest rates of homicide and deaths at the hands of the security forces, at 45.6 per 100,000 population according to figures for 2020 from the Venezuelan Observatory on Violence. As a consequence, the magnitude of the drip massacre that decimates the young population in poor neighborhoods is even greater.
The death penalty does not exist in Venezuela
On the other hand, Ávila emphasizes that we must not lose sight of the fact that, given the opacity of official data, the information that comes from the cases registered by the media is essential.
“However, we must bear in mind that underreporting is rife; during all these years of work, the cases that we have managed to document do not exceed 30% of the total number of incidents or cases that reach the criminal system. On many occasions, there is an overrepresentation of the states in the center of the country, and those in the periphery remain invisible, hence the importance of social organization, grassroots resistance, and the media, ”Ávila told Radio Fe y Alegría Noticias.
Regarding criminal and police records or the innocence of the victims, Keymer Ávila is blunt: “This debate has no place and is extremely dangerous, because the death penalty —which is in the process of extinction worldwide – does not exist in the domestic law, and if it does exist it should not be administered at the discretion of the police and military in the street, without any type of controls or accountability”.
Professor Ávila adds that whoever holds a criminal record has already paid for his crime before the State and society, and should be offered opportunities for integration, instead of being sentenced to exclusion, recidivism, or death.
“Anyone who is in debt with justice or is requested by it must be prosecuted under the law and the corresponding legal sanctions,” said Ávila.
He argues that not all those who are killed by the police are criminals, they just happen to match the stereotype that social, class and race prejudices have built: young, brown, and poor.
According to the Venezuelan Constitution, and even if they are the worst of criminals, people should not be executed, they must be legally prosecuted.
“As members of society, we must not allow the State security forces to behave like criminals, nor tolerate or justify their criminal acts. Whenever that happens, when we begin to make exceptions regarding rights, the exception becomes the norm, and we all lose under that scenario ”, reflects the UCV professor.
Weakening institutions
Venezuela has had 43 Ministers of Interior from 1958 to date. Assessing their work, Keymer Ávila identified a continuity in the precarization and deterioration of Venezuelan institutions that is linked to the killings committed by the State security forces.
“In general terms —beyond the particular situation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020— the trend since 2013 points toward the increase in deaths at the hands of the security forces, which has shown very high peaks in 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2019, ” Ávila said.
But beyond the figures reflecting at least 5,000 deaths at the hands of the security forces in Venezuela every year, an average of 15 young people killed every day according to the latest official information, the most worrying aspect for Ávila is the percentage that these deaths represent within the total number of homicides in the country.
“In 2010 they accounted for just 4% of all homicides; eight years later it reached 33%, that is, one in three homicides in the country is due to the intervention of the State itself. The data for 2019 and 2020 indicate that this percentage continues to increase”, assured the expert.
In a country without the death penalty, the media and non-governmental organizations continue to register hundreds of deaths in alleged extrajudicial killings.
Isaac Mata’s story is repeated by the dozens in the reports by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, with some changes, such as the officers knocking on the door and taking the residents to the street while staying inside with the boy. Then gunshots are heard along with the screams of a helpless mother that echo off the tin roofs.
This is also reflected in the statistics for 2020. A report by the Lupa por la Vida initiative, an alliance between PROVEA, Centro Gumilla, and Radio Fe y Alegría Noticias, found that nearly 3,000 people were killed by police and military forces during the 12 months of a year characterized by the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic.
All this happens while journalists write works like this one and you read the stories of the victims of alleged extrajudicial killings.
Translated by José Rafael Medina
