Venezuela: Extrajudicial Killings in Poor Areas

[Bacchus4.0]

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/18/venezuela-extrajudicial-killings-poor-areas

Since the creation of the unit Special Actions Force of Venezuela (Fuerza de Acciones Especiales, FAES) as a branch of the Bolivarian National Police in 2017, police with the unit have engaged in serious human rights violations with impunity. Its abusive policing practices in low-income communities are consistent with a pattern Human Rights Watch and Provea, a Venezuelan human rights group, found in 2016 of widespread allegations of abuses by security forces of ordinary citizens during what was known as the “Operation to Liberate and Protect the People” (Operación de Liberación y Protección del Pueblo, OLP).

“In the midst of an economic and humanitarian crisis that is hitting the poor the hardest, Venezuelan authorities are resorting to egregious abuses in low-income communities that no longer support the Maduro regime,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “In a country where the justice system is used to prosecute opponents instead of to investigate crimes, Venezuelan security forces are taking justice into their own hands, killing or arbitrarily arresting people they say have committed crimes, without showing any evidence.”

In June and July 2019, Human Rights Watch interviewed witnesses or family members of nine victims of violations by FAES in Caracas and a state in the interior, as well as lawyers, activists, and journalists covering alleged killings by the unit. Human Rights Watch also reviewed death certificates in four cases that were consistent with the sources’ accounts and reports by local human rights organizations and independent media outlets. The methods used by the Special Actions Force and the circumstances of the killings in the cases Human Rights Watch documented are consistent with the pattern identified by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and local human rights groups.

Police and security forces have killed nearly 18,000 people in Venezuela in instances of alleged “resistance to authority” since 2016. Interior Minister Néstor Reverol reported in December 2017 that there were 5,995 such cases in 2016 and 4,998 in 2017. Venezuelan security forces killed nearly 7,000 people in incidents they claimed were cases of “resistance to authority” in 2018 and the first five months of 2019, according to the government figures.