RIGHTS-VENEZUELA: Continued Reports of Torture by Security Forces

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Feb 5 2004 (IPS) - Members of the Venezuelan National Guard were accused of seizing a 14-year-old boy in a rural hamlet, hanging him naked from a tree, beating him with a stick, placing a pistol in his mouth and threatening to cut off his testicles if he did not provide the names of those helping kidnappers.

The young campesino or peasant farmer in the southeastern region of Guayana was one of 12 victims tortured by the National Guard (militarised police) in six hamlets in the area between Dec. 29 and Jan. 4 as the agents searched for the kidnappers of two businessmen, according to complaints filed with the regional branch of the public prosecutor’s office by family members of the victims.

Antonio Urribarrí, with the Office of the People’s Defender in the northwestern state of Zulia, demanded an investigation of special National Guard commandos that he accused of torturing people suspected of taking part in kidnappings, ”and leaving them in a deplorable physical state,” over the past few weeks.

Accusations that the security forces in Venezuela torture alleged suspects are not new, nor are allegations that they frequently commit extrajudicial executions.

The Programme for Education on Human Rights (PROVEA), a prominent local rights group, received complaints of 165 extrajudicial executions reportedly committed by the security forces between October 2002 and September 2003.

Torture ”is a practice that has existed in Venezuela for years, but it is unfortunately not addressed by specific legislation, which ties the hands of prosecutors and paves the way for impunity,” Laura Roldán, with the Justice and Peace Support Network, told IPS.

That is true ”even though the 1961 constitution prohibited torture, the new 1999 constitution (promoted by President Hugo Chávez) maintained that ban, and Venezuela has ratified the United Nations convention against torture as well as other international human rights treaties,” she said.

A report that the Office of the People’s Defender (ombudsman) handed over to the U.N. Committee Against Torture in November 2002 detailed techniques commonly used by the security forces, such as the application of electric shock to the genital area, and beatings of suspects or prisoners whose heads are covered with plastic bags.

Reports of similar practices have been heard in Venezuela from political detainees and common prisoners since the mid-20th century, under military regimes as well as democratically elected governments.

The Justice and Peace Support Network documented 143 cases of torture between 1999 and 2003, and provided assistance to the victims. ”But no officer or official has been tried and sentenced on charges of torture. In fact, we are not even aware of any concrete sentence handed down during the 19 years that our organisation has been active,” said Roldán.

From October 2002 to September 2003, PROVEA documented a total of 15 cases of torture involving 30 victims, compared to 10 cases involving 17 victims in the preceding year.

In the state of Aragua – a largely industrial zone southwest of Caracas where the rule of law is especially weak – death squads known locally as ”extermination groups” reportedly torture their victims before killing them.

Human rights groups documented a case that occurred in Aragua a year ago, when police raided the Díaz family home with no explanation. When Robert Díaz, a 21-year-old former navy cadet, objected, he was shot several times.

The police dragged him out to their car, and drove away. Robert’s father Octavio, 58, and his brother David, 23, immediately set out for the hospital to look for him. But on the way, they reportedly found the police officers torturing Robert in a drainage ditch on the side of the road, and all three were killed by the police.

Robert’s girlfriend filed a lawsuit based on the results of the autopsy, which found signs of torture as well as mud in his nostrils and mouth that indicated he suffocated in a ditch. After receiving death threats, she was murdered in mid-2003.

As in other cases of torture and extrajudicial killings, the police have attempted to depict the Díaz men as suspects who resisted arrest and defied authority.

But none of the Díaz men had police records, and Octavio, a car mechanic, was an upright citizen, according to the family’s neighbours.

Official reports of killings at the hands of police typically include euphemistic terms like ”shootout”, ”resisting arrest” or ”the settling of scores” between rival gangs.

Human rights groups say the cases of police brutality are part of a ”social cleansing” policy that is largely tolerated by a society fed up with some of the highest crime rates in Latin America.

Death squads are reportedly active in 10 of Venezuela’s 23 states, in nearly all of which there have been complaints that they carry out their activities in the shadow of the regional police forces.

Six police officers in Aragua were arrested in the Díaz case, but none have been tried.

Occasionally, the superiors of agents implicated in torture cases or extrajudicial killings announce or adopt disciplinary measures, as in the case of the National Guard in Zulia and Guayana.

”We abide by the Penal Procedural Code, and are open to any investigation,” Lieutenant-Colonel Heberto Rossell, chief of the National Guard commandos, said in Zulia.

In Guayana, his counterpart León Bermúdez promised to ”take measures” against agents involved in cases of torture.

In Venezuela ”there is a kind of social legitimacy” for extrajudicial executions, lynchings, and excesses committed by the security forces, which is one of the consequences of the general rise in crime, and the soaring of the homicide rate in particular, said PROVEA coordinator Carlos Correa.

Venezuela’s murder rate is one of the highest in Latin America, and continues to climb.

In 2003, there were 11,037 murders reported in this South American country of 25 million, representing a homicide rate of 44 per 100,000 population, says criminologist and former police chief Iván Simonovis. The 2002 total was 9,617, or 42 per 100,000 population, according to official statistics.

Roldán said the current political polarisation between pro- and anti-Chávez factions, which splits parliament basically in half, has made it nearly impossible to make any progress towards securing passage of a specific law to crack down on torture.

”Unfortunately, the country’s political leaders are looking the other way,” she complained.