RIGHTS-VENEZUELA: When Terror Wears a Uniform

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jul 11 2005 (IPS) - The six university students were driving home after a math exam when an armed man wearing a hood demanded that they pull over on a street in the Venezuelan capital. Fearing that they were about to be robbed, they refused to stop.

But they were tracked down, and although they showed their university ID cards and begged for mercy, their attackers – who were police officers – tied them up, beat them and finally shot them, killing the three young men and injuring the three young women.

Charged for the murders in Kennedy, a poor neighbourhood in southwest Caracas, are Military Intelligence Office (DIM) agents including Major José Peña and Lieutenant Jorge Escalona, four judicial police detectives, and one municipal police officer.

The agents, several of whom hold the rank of inspector, had set up a kind of improvised checkpoint to search for the murderers of Eduin Toussaint, a young DIM agent killed in that area two days before when he was attacked by delinquents who were trying to steal his gun.

According to the survivors and other witnesses, the car carrying the six Santa María University students was intercepted along the road that winds through the neighbourhood by a plainclothes hooded agent. After the frightened students continued driving, the police opened fire on their car, injuring one of the young women.

When the students pulled over farther down the road to ask for help for the young woman who had been shot, the police surrounded them, killing the three young men – Leonardo González, Edgar Quintero and Erick Montenegro – and injuring the three young women.

The three women riding in the small car survived their bullet wounds, and it was their testimony and that of relatives, neighbours and several police officers that brought to light the tragic events of Jun. 27.

The agents who carried out the killings altered the scene of the crime to make it look like the students had been killed in a shootout. The police dropped guns on the ground and in the car, and picked up spent shells, going so far as to use a hammer to remove several from nearby walls.

After the young women were taken to the hospital, a police commission investigation found that the crime scene had been altered by the team of security agents, and the media, the attorney-general’s office and the government discovered what had really occurred in the supposed "shootout".

"This kind of procedure has long been used in Venezuela to convert homicides into firefights. It is common practice," said Interior and Justice Minister Jesse Chacón in a press conference in which he described how the police altered the scene of the crime to simulate a gun battle.

"We have no way to repair the damages caused to these families by the murders of the young men. We can only investigate to make sure the truth comes out, bring the culprits to justice, and take measures aimed at preventing a repeat of this incident," said Chacón, who announced that six police chiefs had been sacked.

President Hugo Chávez said "we can’t have licensed killers out there murdering people in the streets. It is understood that an armed police officer can make a mistake, but that’s not what happened here. They planted weapons to simulate an armed confrontation. That is painful and causes indignation. The police must be cleaned up."

Referring to extrajudicial killings of suspects or innocent civilians in incidents made to look like firefights, Chávez wondered "how many times this has occurred in Venezuela."

Chacón remarked that "we may have problems with the judicial police and the DIM, but it is impossible to describe the situation in the state police forces" – a reference to the provincial forces in the country’s 23 states.

According to Provea, a local human rights group, of the 12,000 murders committed annually in this country of 25 million, at least 18 percent – 2,300 cases – are the product of supposed gun battles between the police and suspects or criminals.

"What happened in Kennedy is a systematic pattern followed by the police and state security bodies," Carlos Correa, the head of Provea, told IPS. "The police do not act in accordance with the security procedures characteristic of a democratic state."

Military intelligence and judicial police agents "should not be manning checkpoints, or wearing hoods. It would appear that instead of justice, what they were seeking was vengeance because a police officer had been killed earlier," said Correa.

In the midst of his pain, Isauro González, Leonardo’s father, told journalists that "in Venezuela there is no death penalty, but the police frequently impose their own."

Correa pointed out that "if you study the official number of armed confrontations between the police and criminals, there are 45 civilians killed for each police officer who is slain."

The ombudsman’s office reported that in 2004 a total of 269 people fell victim to police violence, mainly at the hands of the provincial police forces.

And when the police commit an extrajudicial killing, the scene of the murder is often altered, and the victim’s body is frequently moved to a different place, the ombudsman’s office added.

Fernando Fernández, with the Venezuelan branch of the rights watchdog Amnesty International, has called for the creation of a police conduct code. For its part, the government wants to create a national police force, to which the municipal and state forces would be subordinate.

Police abuse "forms part of a culture. We are going to take measures, but results cannot be expected overnight," said Minister Chacon.