By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jul 21 1996 (IPS)

Human rights violations in Venezuela have increased in the past two years of the Rafael Caldera administration, according to Amnesty International secretary- general Pierre Sane.

“Torture is on the increase, by police officers who act as impune owners of the law, the conditions in the prisons are disasterous and there is a lack of political will to confront these crimes,” said Sane, durimng a visit here last week. “As in other regional nations, (there is) a breach between governmental rhetoric and the reality, and action” to improve the human rights situation “is lacking from the government, the legal authorities and the parliament.”

In meetings with reporters, members of parliament and human rights activists, Sane called for “a law to sanction the crimes of torture, and improve the prisons, as the conditions of a society can be measured by that of its prisons.”

According to the AI Venezuela reprsentative, Morris Tidball, “the human rights situation is much worse than two years ago, including the working conditions of those who try to defend them and the official responses they receive.”

The AI mission headed by Sane tried to meet with Caldera, but this was not possible and the government assigned Presidential Secretary Asdrubal Aguiar to receive the document listing the main concerns of the human rights organisation.

The list included the impunity of the police force, the extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, torture, the vagrancy law, prison conditions and the human rights violations in rural and frontier zones.

Apart from being “let down” by not meeting with the President, AI was also “intensely concerned by the official arguments provided by the government, who see the defenders of human rights on a par with defenders of criminals.”

Government representatives, such as Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Burelli, have said the human rights organisations, when defending criminals, often forget that these people had “in many cases robbed the rights of a whole neighbourhood.”

The document said “the security forces have been encouraged by an atmosphere of impunity, swollen by the continuous human rights violations which they commit, mainly against the dispossessed and marginal sectors.”

Example of this “include human rights campaigners, (arrested for) their peaceful activities,” in Caracas in 1995 and 1996, and several grass roots activists were tortured. Meanwhile, “dozens of people meet their deaths each month as the result of police operations ostensibly aimed at fighting crime.”

In June, national television showed a video film of the police

arresting some prisoners who appear alive and well, though they were found dead some hours later, registered in the records as having been killed in a “confrontation.”

However, unlike in the majority of cases, the police officers involved here were arrested and will be tried for murder.

As for prison conditions, the AI report observed “with alarm that, even though the government has recognised the problem it has not improved the extreme hardship, include the severe overcrowding, deficient sanitary conditions and the lack of security.”

Tidball said the sick bay of the Reten de Catia, the worst prison in Caracas, even had prisoners “dying of tuberculosis without any medical help at all, without water and with an overloaded sewage system.”

“One 32 year old tuberculosis victim, who asked me not to give his name, is dying without any treatment. He has been in prison six years awaiting sentence, he was arrested for theft, and the worst sentence he could receive would be eight years – even worse, he might be innocent,” said Tidball.

“This is a clear case of criminal negligence on the part of the government authorities,” he said, “of the public prosecutor’s office and the justice administration.”

AI has also repeatedly “called the attention of the Venezuelan authorities to the generalised use of torture,” and the “lack of effective safeguards on people in detention,” said the document.

The vagrancy law, meanwhile, is objected to by many human rights organisations as it allows citizens to be detained indefinitely at the discretion of the administrative authorities with no recourse to justice.

In the rural areas, especially along the frontier with Colombia, the military operations against irregular troops often penetrate across the border and attacks are made on rural workers “and those responsible seem to have benefitted from absolute impunity.”

“The human rights situation in Venezuela demands the urgent adoption of effective measures to assure a substantial improvement,” concluded the document.

Whilst Sane was in the country he recruited members of parliament from various parties to the AI network of parliamentarians.

He also visited the marginal neighbourhood of Antimano in southeast Caracas, where he spoke with the local people of police excesses and the problem of the lynching of criminals by the local community, with 20 such cases in the last two years.

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