A protester scuffles with police during demonstrations against the official election results declaring President Nicolas Maduro’s reelection, the day after the vote in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, July 29, 2024. Credit: AP/Matias Delacroix
“There will be no mercy,” Maduro said on state TV.
But complicating efforts to crush dissent is the changing face of the government’s opponents.
While demonstrations have been far smaller and tamer than past bouts of unrest, they’re now more spontaneous, often leaderless and made up of youth — some barely teenagers — from Caracas’ hillside slums who have traditionally been a rock solid base of support for the government.
Is the repression succeeding?
The swiftness of the government’s clampdown is staggering. In just 10 days, security forces have rounded up nearly the same number of people as they did over five months in 2017, according to Provea, a local human rights watchdog.
“Operation Knock-Knock is a prime tool of state terrorism,” said Oscar Murillo, the head of Provea, referring to the middle-of-the-night detentions touted as a scare tactic by officials.
In the low-income Caracas neighborhood of Catia, once a ruling party stronghold, residents are even deleting videos of the demonstrations from their smartphones for fear the government is tracking social media posts to identify critics.
The sudden silence is a sharp break from the hopeful mood preceding the election when emboldened opposition supporters confronted security forces at anti-Maduro rallies. They served food, lent their vehicles and opened their businesses to opposition leaders knowing they would suffer retaliation from the police or see their businesses shut down.
What is Venezuela’s human rights record?
Even before the current wave of unrest, Venezuela’s human rights record was under intense scrutiny. Maduro is himself the target of an investigation by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity allegedly committed in the past.
Maduro’s tactics have been likened to those used in Central and South America in the 1970s by military dictatorships that forcibly disappeared opponents and sometimes innocent bystanders. Many were killed, and in Argentina, some even drugged and dropped from airplanes into the ocean, with no trace of ever having been detained.
Maduro’s alleged abuses have little in common with those “Dirty War” campaigns carried out by state security forces.
But the goal of instilling fear is the same, said Santiago Canton, an Argentine lawyer and secretary general of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, a watchdog group.
“What happened 50 years ago is unlikely to occur again,” said Canton. “But social media is a multiplier factor that didn’t exist before so you can be more selective with the use of force and achieve the same results.”
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Publish date : 2024-08-07 13:28:00
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