This grieving group of women organized to force the Venezuelan State to answer for the extrajudicial executions of their sons, husbands, and brothers – and, hopefully, put a stop to this horrific practice.
By Caracas Chronicles – Kaoru Yonekura
Jun 8, 2022
“Tell me,” said the prosecutor to Carmen Arroyo once more, and she, again, replied: “No! You tell me!”
Carmen is still waiting for someone to tell her that there’s at least a warrant for the arrest of any of the twenty officers involved in the murder of her son, Christian Charris. Yexemary Medina went to the Prosecutor’s Office hoping to at least hear that “tell me” from the new prosecutor assigned to the murder case of her son, Douglas Escalante; but the prosecutor didn’t see her. Ivonne Parra went to the Prosecutor’s Office to leave a written testimony saying that the man accused of killing her son, Guillermo Rueda, was still free. Miyanllela Fernández went too, believing she would be told when the events of La Vega massacre, where her son Richard Briceño was murdered, would be reconstructed. Maritza Molina went in to see if, after a ten-year investigation, she would at least hear a rumor about who killed her son, Billi Mascobedo.
Lina Rivera went to the Prosecutor’s Office to waste another day: “If they go back and forth with one case, just imagine… I lost five people: my son, Jesús Rivera; my brother, Daniel Rivera; two nephews, Jordan and Josué Rivera; and my son-in-law, Kevin Figueroa.”
These mothers came together last year and formed the Madres Poderosas (Powerful Mothers) committee of victims.
“There’s also Rosa Pérez, Genyill Chacón’s mother, who’s abroad; Sharon Duque, Jesús and Pablo’s poderosa sister; and Samuel González, the poderoso father of José Enrique González, who’s in Barrancas del Orinoco,” Ivonne explains. “There’s only a few of us, but ever since we got together, we’re stronger, because we understand and support each other.”
They’re also becoming more visible because of a periodic protest they hold every Monday, or twice a week, or every two weeks, in front of the Prosecutor’s Office in downtown Caracas.
“Because we’re all united!” says Ivonne. “If we have to go to the courthouse, we also go together. We look for a way to go in together as well. We tell each other what we’re doing and what needs to be done while we walk from one prosecutor’s office to the other, or on the Parque Carabobo and La Candelaria Square…if one can’t afford the bus fare, someone will pay for them…”
Maritza adds: “We help each other sharing our experience, and we prepare, we learn about the laws, how the justice system works here and how to put together a well written request justifying what we’re asking and how to file it… One needs legal preparation, because people get killed here like mosquitoes.”
Most importantly, they make sure none of them is alone.
Or at least they try, because they do feel alone since their sons are no longer with them, and they have become statistics on the extrajudicial execution list: Cristian, Guillermo, Jesús, Daniel, Jordan, Josué, and Kevin were murdered by the special operations corps FAES. Douglas, by detective unit CICPC. Richard by the National Police, and Billi, no one knows. Those boys weren’t even criminals, and they weren’t involved in weird stuff, nor were they killed in shootouts with security forces. Carmen says: “On top of them being killed, they criminalize them: they make up these ugly police files, when they didn’t even have a record in SIPOL (the Police Investigation and Information System) or the courthouse.”
These men’s deaths aren’t isolated murders. According to lawyer Rafael Gordon, of NGO Defiende Venezuela, “when you connect them, you’ll see that these people were murdered by the Venezuelan State with a modus operandi in which, for example, the law enforcement unit came in, shot them, altered the scene, and then they obstructed justice. These cases have patterns, and in the almost two thousand documented cases the systematic aspect has become very clear. In other words, it becomes clear that there was an organized plan, an order, and executions. Executions performed by State police agencies. So these events can be considered as a murder crime according to the Rome Statute.”
In other words, if these homicides are looked at as isolated cases, they are subject to the statute of limitations. But if they’re understood as systematic murders, per the relevant process, they could be considered crimes against humanity that do not prescribe.
“This is why we must act legally!” Lina says emphatically. “It’s the first thing we have to do. Fear doesn’t cut it, denouncing does… Ever since I filed the request for an investigation, things have calmed down where I live… This can’t happen again, because we have small children who will grow up. I know the risk of them killing my other son, but if the mothers don’t speak up, how is this going to stop?”
We already know about the string of dead men the institutional violence from the police and army in Venezuela left behind.
According to the Lupa por la Vida project by NGOs Provea and Centro Gumilla, between January 2015 and June 2021, 7,810 people were murdered by law enforcement agents, most of them young men in poor neighborhoods.
Not a spontaneous practice, by the way, as it is the evolution of Venezuelan police culture from years before. Raúl Cubas, co-founder and Provea activist explains:
“In the ‘80s, extrajudicial executions were still the result of the police culture of the Gómez and Pérez Jiménez years, and also the Ley de Vagos y Maleantes (Vagrancy Law) was still in force. Executions were police violence, a form of social control. It was a generalized practice, but it wasn’t systematic, meaning that there were many cases, but there was no evidence of them being part of a policy to curb crime. This changed after Chávez’s death and Maduro’z arrival to power. What happened? Maduro quashed all planning and the changes done by the Comisión Nacional para la Reforma Policial (National Commission for Police Reform; CONAREPOL) to modify the police’s performance profile.”
In 2013, the CICPC murdered the son of Aracelys Sánchez, Darwilson Sequera. She recalls that “so many people were being killed for no reason, that when I went to the Prosecutor’s Office, the prosecutor laughed at me and didn’t even give me a protection order for my family.”
According to Aracelys, a mother and a grandmother were also there that day, and they were going through the same situation and proposed to Aracelys to join them and do something: “And so we did. We went looking for the boys in the news, in the morgue… and we were together in the funerals and burials.” This is how the Organización de Familiares Víctimas de Violaciones de Derechos Humanos (Organization of Families of Victims of Human Rights Violations; ORFAVIDEH) was created – of which Aracelys is the coordinator.
Ever since then, the mothers of ORFAVIDEH protest and denounce: “Often times the mothers, the women, take the reins because we know that men are at a higher risk, both sons and husbands, because police take harsher action, mostly, against the household’s male figure,” says Aracelys.
In 2014, this change in police action was evidenced with the increase of extrajudicial executions all over Venezuela, especially in low-income neighborhoods. It was also shown, furthermore, that these crimes are a state policy that is still being enforced today.
In 2017, Guillermo was murdered inside his home, in a disproportionate action, with a coup de grace and a couple of shots on the wall to simulate a shootout, without any evidence of him being involved in a crime, with no defense, without even letting him scream out that he was innocent and, as if these violations to the police rules and Guillermo’s human rights weren’t enough, they planted a gun in his hand. His mother, Ivonne, was dragged out of her house, in a cruel, inhumane, and degrading manner. But Ivonne saw and heard everything.
In the first six months of 2019, according to Provea, at least 300 alleged extrajudicial executions were registered in Venezuela. Lara was the state with the highest number of executions; 164 in the first semester, and in August of that same year, it climbed up to 217. The families of four of those murdered belong to the Alianza de Familiares de Víctimas de Venezuela (Victims’ Families Alliance of Venezuela; Alfavic Venezuela): Fanny Castillo, the grandmother of Luis Alejandro Pérez; Evangelina Suárez, mother of Luis Enrique Ramos; Lidia Torbello, mother of Eduardo Luis Ramos; and Naymar Escalona, cousin of Cristian Ramos.
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Read More: Caracas Chronicles – Powerful mothers fight extrajudicial executions in Venezuela
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