Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

VENEZUELA: Death Squads Making a Comeback

By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jan 16 2004 (IPS) - A map of Venezuela would be covered with red pins if all of the recent murders were marked. A wave of extrajudicial executions of alleged criminals indicates the re-emergence of death squad activity and there are daily reports of assailants killed in gun battles with the police.

In one of the latest incidents, heavily armed men, dressed in dark clothes and wearing ski masks, stormed a home in a deeply impoverished neighbourhood of the central-west agro-industrial city of Barquisimeto.

The eight victims were taken to a dark street and shot to death with machine guns. Several were given a coup de grace, shot in the head as they lay on the ground, according to the police investigations following the killings last weekend.

Col. Jesús Figuera, of the National Guard and chief of the regional police, said the murders were a “settling of accounts” between two gangs. He also said that the assailants wore jackets bearing the logo of the national investigative police.

But local residents and lawmakers take a different view of the facts.

“There died Vladimir Ríos, an honourable worker, and the boys Marcos Crespo, age 12, and Nelson Pimentel, age 6,” said legislative deputy Luis Florido, of the opposition Justice First, a party of the centre-right.

Another opposition lawmaker, Guillermo Palacios, said the crime “could be the work of a death squad from Lara state,” whose capital is Barquisimeto. Witnesses told reporters that the attackers dressed like a commando from the regional police.

“It’s a structural problem, one that occurs throughout the year, but perhaps in the early days of January it achieves greater visibility due to the journalistic routine of taking an inventory of crimes with the new calendar year,” Carlos Correa, coordinator of Provea, a non-governmental human rights group, told IPS.

In this country of 25 million people, 11,037 homicides were reported last year, the equivalent of 44 for every 100,000 people, says criminal expert and former police chief Iván Simonovis. In 2002, there were 9,617 murders, or 42 per 100,000 inhabitants.

The rise in crime encourages a sort of “social legitimacy” for extrajudicial executions and lynchings, warns Correa. “Often the community feels that ‘justice is being done’ and approves of the disproportionate use of force.”

Also creating fertile ground for crime is impunity. “Twenty-five percent of the crimes (260,000 a year in Venezuela) are solved by the police, but sentences are handed down in just three percent of the cases,” says the Provea activist.

When judges and prosecutors showed up Wednesday at the Barquisimeto police headquarters to inspect weapons as part of the investigation of last weekend’s massacre, the officers stopped them from entering, and even posted sharpshooters on the roof.

“Criminal accomplices!”, “Go out and patrol the streets!” shouted some of the justice officials at the police in response to the show of force.

There is a long trail of cases of killings by the police. In three cities of the eastern state of Anzoátegui, so far this year police have shot nine assailants to death in clashes.

“We are faced with heavily armed criminals. In 2003, 15 of our agents lost their lives in combat,” said local police chief Alberto Morales.

But Noel Azócar, the regional representative of the People’s Defender (Ombudsman), maintains that “at least one out of three who die from police bullets in reality have been assassinated,” not shot in self-defence.

In the northern state of Aragua, an industrial centre west of Caracas, three bodies were found Wednesday with signs of having been executed. Also on Wednesday, in Guarenas and Ocumare, in Miranda state, east of the capital, five individuals were killed in gun battles with the security forces.

Meanwhile, the police in the state of Táchira, bordering Colombia, this week dug up four bodies from a clandestine grave. The four had been shot, and investigators suspect that the killers could be members of a death squad financed by drug traffickers.

In Guayana, in southeastern Venezuela, “So far this month, every day an alleged criminal has been killed by the police,” says Luis Tábata, spokesman for the non-governmental group Lucha por la Vida (Fight for Life).

In the northeastern state of Monagas, a parliamentary commission launched an investigation into a series of murders attributed to a death squad, which according to denunciations by the victims’ family members is made up of police from the region.

If the claims of such involvement prove true, it would mean a resurgence of the para-police groups that achieved notoriety in 2001, particularly when a death squad massacred 68 people in the state of Portuguesa, in the southwestern Venezuelan plains, according to governor Antonia Muñoz at the time.

Furthermore, the existence of death squads in the northwestern state of Falcón is under investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an independent body of the Organisation of American States.

From October 2002 to September 2003, Provea received 156 reports of “violation of right to life” blamed on Venezuelan security forces. More than half of the cases were attributed to state police, 23 percent to municipal police and the rest to other security bodies.

There are 95 police agencies in Venezuela, 71 of which are municipal, with the rest under the jurisdiction of the states. There are also judicial, political and National Guard forces with nationwide jurisdiction.

The debate on a national police law, which would unify commands and efforts, has gotten bogged down in parliament, caught up in the political clash between the Hugo Chávez government and the opposition that seeks to remove him from office through a recall referendum.

But the drama of violence, revived by the death squads, transcends political affiliations. The state governments of Lara, Táchira, Falcón and Aragua are supporters of Chávez, while those of Anzoátegui, Monagas and Miranda back the opposition, and the government of Guayana state has chosen the “independent” route.