Venezuelans right now are experiencing an iron-fisted crackdown by their authoritarian regime’s security forces.
If it's not the national intelligence cops known as the SEBIN coming after them, it's the special "strategic and tactical actions" unit called the DAET roaring through neighborhoods on motorcycles rounding them up.
If it's not the National Guard cracking their heads, it's the regime's civilian street enforcer thugs who call themselves los colectivos.
In the past three weeks, Venezuela's socialist government boasts, some 2,400 Venezuelans have been arrested — and 27 killed — for protesting what the vast majority of citizens and much of the international community call dictatorial President Nicolás Maduro's brazen theft of the July 28 presidential election.
“People in Venezuela, they’re very afraid of having anything on their phone right now that can get them in trouble or arrested," says "Silvia," a Venezuelan expat in Broward County.
She asked WLRN not to use her real name because she wants to protect the identity of a family friend in Venezuela who is one of the hundreds recently arrested for treason and terrorism — because she had messages on her phone denouncing Maduro and his claim that he won the election.
READ MORE: Maduro stole Venezuela's election. Can only the military get it back?
Evidence shows he lost to opposition challenger Edmundo González by a landslide — an estimated 65% to 30%, according to more than 80% of precinct vote tallies secured by the opposition —and Venezuelans like Silvia say Maduro is trying fiercely now to make that reality disappear.
“The police go into restaurants and bakeries and they ask everyone to put their phones down," Silvia says friends and relatives in Venezuela are reporting to her.
"They start checking one by one to make sure no one is saying anything against the government on social media.”
And Silvia warns the arrests resulting from that witch hunt feature a troubling new facet. Government opponents like her family friend aren’t just being arrested — police are in many cases are abducting them and demanding ransoms from their families for their release, especially if they have relatives or friends abroad with cash on hand.
In the case of the family friend, Silvia says her jailers have demanded almost $10,000 — a fortune in a country suffering one of the worst economic collapses and humanitarian crises in modern South American history.
Human rights activists in Venezuela WLRN spoke with confirmed the reports that security forces are turning arrests into ransom kidnappings — not just for personal enrichment but to ramp up intimidation.
“It is very frightening," says Silvia, "and at the same time it’s not surprising.”
Maduro’s critics say it’s just one more way his dictatorship hopes to terrorize Venezuelans, if not expat families like Silvia’s, into swallowing his massive election fraud. In one operation named “Tun-Tun,” or “Knock-Knock,” police are spray-painting ominous 'X's on homes where someone has been arrested.
Those, like Silvia's family friend, who are charged with terrorism are facing as many as 30 years in prison. Even so, Maduro this week called for more severe punishments for what he calls his “fascist” opponents spreading “hate” against him.
"This is a massive repression and human rights crisis," says Alfredo Romero, president of the Venezuelan human rights nonprofit Foro Penal.
"We face a mafia state, a very perverse but sophisticated criminal structure — and we've reached the peak of what civility, diplomacy and politics allow."David Smolansky
Speaking from Caracas. Romero pointed out that before the July 28, Venezuela had about 300 political prisoners behind bars — but that number grew more than fivefold in just a matter of days after the election. (Foro Penal's own count of post-election arrests is so far about 1,500, but says that's because it hasn't yet been able to confirm some detentions the regime claims it's made.)
As for the dissident deaths, Romero adds, "we're going to be reporting the highest number of people killed in protests in one day in the history of Venezuela — at least the history I know of as a human rights defender here."
A U.N. fact-finding mission this week called on Maduro to end the frenzy of "grave human rights violations" that are currently occurring.
The U.N.'s International Criminal Court in the Hague says it is also investigating. Last week in Miami, Luis Almagro, secretary-general of the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., urged the court to issue charges against Maduro and his regime — whose security forces in recent years have already been accused by the U.N. of crimes against humanity.
Protest pressure
Others fear this all simply confirms Venezuela’s dictatorship is an outlaw operation — Maduro himself is wanted in the U.S. for drug trafficking — that will prove even harder to dislodge from power than those in Nicaragua and Cuba. Cuba, in fact, has reportedly sent more of its own intelligence cops into Venezuela since the election to assist Maduro's enforcers.
It's one big reason more than 40% of Venezuelans in a Meganálisis poll this week say they're now considering leaving the country — and that about 600,000 could leave before the end of the summer. Almost a quarter of Venezuela's population, almost 8 million people, have already fled in the past decade.
"Venezuela is of course a mafia state," says David Smolansky, who was the opposition mayor of the Caracas borough of El Hatillo until the regime forced him into exile in 2017.
"It's incompetent at everything — it's ruined the economy and the oil industry, it's incapable of building infrastructure — but it's become very sophisticated in repression.
"So we are facing a very perverse but sophisticated criminal structure," says Smolansky, who now represents the Venezuelan opposition's presidential campaign in Washington, D.C.
"And we've reached the peak of what civility, diplomacy and politics allow. So now we're at a point where we ask: What else can we do?"
Smolansky says the answer to that question is, at least for Venezuelans and expats, to keep exerting protest pressure.
Venezuelans there and around the world — called out by the country's enormously popular opposition leader María Corina Machado, whom Maduro barred from running against him — plan to hold mass demonstrations on Saturday, Aug. 17. The event in Miami will be held at at Bayfront Park at 4 pm.
"Despite this regime repression," Smolansky insists, "Venezuelan are much more united today in their opposition to the regime — look at how we united behind a single candidate that won the largest margin of victory in any presidential election in Venezuela history — and they still have the upper hand in terms of showing the world why Maduro has to go."
Expats like Helena Poleo, a Miami communications consultant and political analyst, agree that a large, continuous protest movement can eventually work because this time there is more visible and solid proof of Maduro’s fraud and abuse to point to than in the past.
“He is cornered internationally — he is cornered even at home," says Poleo, "because it is very clear more than 60% of the voting Venezuelans don’t want him in power.”
Meanwhile, Poleo, who hails from a family of exiled Venezuelan journalists, says expats here are urging Venezuelans there to erase information they send or receive on their phones concerning the crisis.
“Because we know that they’re taking away phones, they’re monitoring social media accounts and they’re putting people in prison," Poleo says, "we have been asking people to send us the information for us to disseminate, and then [they should immediately] delete it.”
It’s good advice — if only because right now Venezuelan democracy needs more people on the streets, and fewer behind bars.
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