The UN will release on Tuesday a devastating report on the practices of the Government of Nicolás Maduro after the elections of July 28, in which the electoral body declared the current Chavista president the winner without showing the voting records, making it more than evident that the victory went to the opposition candidate, Edmundo González. In an executive report that this newspaper has had in advance, the mission in Venezuela of the international organization states that the Venezuelan State intensified its “hardest and most violent” modality, in a “conscious and planned” way. “Actions aimed at demobilizing the organized political opposition; inhibiting the dissemination of independent information and opinions critical of the Government and preventing peaceful citizen protest. The brutality of the repression continues to generate a climate of generalized fear in the population,” reads the report.
UN officials believe that this marks “a milestone in the deterioration of the rule of law.” The public powers abandoned any semblance of independence and openly submitted to the Maduro government, as occurred with the National Electoral Council (CNE), which has violated all its internal procedures by not publishing the minutes. Its president is Elvis Amoroso, a personal friend of Maduro and the first lady, Cilia Flores; his statements have left no room for doubt, he has insisted on criminalizing anti-Chavez supporters and openly showing himself aligned with the government. The same has happened with the Prosecutor’s Office, which has arrested more than 2,000 people who have not been brought to trial and who cannot defend themselves because there are no files, beyond the fact that they are charged with a vague accusation of “terrorism.”
“The mission has reasonable grounds to believe that some of the human rights violations investigated during this period represent a continuation of the same line of conduct that the mission characterized in previous reports as crimes against humanity. These violations were not the result of isolated or random events, but rather are part of a series of events committed in implementation of a coordinated plan to silence, discourage and suffocate the opposition to the Government of President Maduro,” says the UN.
The UN text analyses the period between 1 September 2023, when the Government, the opposition and the United States were still negotiating an election date, until 31 August of this year, more than 30 days after the elections. There has been a form of selective repression to try to silence the political opposition. In this sense, we saw that they were targeting Vente Venezuela – María Corina Machado’s party – and key figures for the campaign, such as the communications officer, the pollster: all these people who ended up taking refuge in the Argentine embassy. The objective was to remove all support for Maria Corina. They also did not allow Corina Yoris to run. Then they harassed Edmundo González. And in some cases they arrested all those people who provided logistical support during the campaign: the truck from which they spoke, hotels, restaurants…,” says Argentine Patricia Tappatá from Geneva, an expert from the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, created by the UN Human Rights Council.
Tappatá notes that there is a continuous violation of due process by Chavismo. “All arrests are carried out without an arrest warrant, the force that detained them is not identified, it is not said where the detained people are taken. According to Venezuelan legislation, within 48 hours the people have to be presented at a hearing. After July 28, almost all arrests are arbitrary, there is no information about where the detainee is taken, people cannot appoint a lawyer. The Venezuelan government pushes the limits of what is permitted,” she adds. The researcher also documents in this report a large number of cases of sexual violence against detainees, both women and men.
The Independent Fact-Finding Mission has been investigating since 2019, the year that then-UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet visited the country, spoke with Maduro and the victims, and set up an office with her team in the country. Like the International Criminal Court, the mission has concluded that there is evidence to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed in Venezuela. Its experts documented patterns of short-term enforced disappearances, torture, ill-treatment and sexual violence against Chavista political prisoners, and also established that the judiciary is part of the Venezuelan state’s repressive machinery.
Weeks ago, when the Supreme Court of Justice – in the hands of Chavismo – presented the result of the supposed technical appraisal carried out on the documentation submitted by the CNE to validate Maduro’s questioned victory, the mission warned on social media about the lack of independence of both institutions. “Nicolás Maduro exercises undue interference in the decisions of the TSJ through direct messages to magistrates and public statements by the president and Diosdado Cabello,” they said.
Despite attempts to block the continuation of the mission’s work, which is controlled by the UN Human Rights Council, it has renewed its mandate twice, in 2020 and 2022. This week it is putting the continuation of its mandate to a vote again. In February of this year, Maduro expelled the 13 officials from the UN High Commissioner’s office who were doing complementary work in monitoring the situation in Venezuela that served the mission. They were given 72 hours to leave and were accused of being a “law firm” of “particular groups” and “the coup plotters,” as the opposition is often referred to.
In those days, Chavismo had crossed a red line with the arrest, just as she was about to board a plane in Maiquetía, of Rocío San Miguel, a prominent activist and defense specialist who has been implicated in the umpteenth conspiracy denounced by the Government. These were the first signs of the hardening of the repression that would come later. Two months after that, during a visit to the country by the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, Maduro invited the mission to return, something that in practice has not happened.
