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Law enforcement killed 44 people in Venezuela in January alone

The tragic trend continues: even a routine stop by law enforcement has become a lethal affair for civilians.

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By Glorimar Fernandez.

The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence determined that in 2020 state security forces were responsible for the deaths of 4,231 people, more than a third of the total and more than adjudicated to criminals (4,153). Meanwhile, Provea registers 27,000 murders in Venezuela under the figure resistance to authority during the last decade.

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“Resistance to authority” is the name law enforcement uses to justify deaths resulting from police action. But, Venezuela eliminated the death penalty in the mid-19th Century, and resistance to authority is a misdemeanor punishable by brief incarceration.

Now, January 2021 culminated with the murder of 44 people at the hands of State security forces during different police procedures carried out in Caracas, Carabobo, Lara, Miranda, and Aragua accorded to data from El Pitazo.

Cops are no longer serving the community, one specialist says. They act as an army of occupation bent on destroying even the shadow of resistance instead.

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The national coordinator of the OVV, Gloria Perdomo, explained to El Pitazo is urgently needed a revision of the security policies to the police agencies.

“They understand their actions as combat. They use a warlike logic to act, carry out incursions to face a battle for territory because it is not that they go after certain people but are suspecting of carrying out incursions to populations that seem to be qualified as enemies,” she said. They attack the whole barrio, not just the hoodlums.

The specialist in the phenomenon of violence in Venezuela referred to the murder of 23 people in La Vega, which started on Friday, January 8, and extended during that weekend.

El Pitazo covered the January 8 events and interviewed several of the relatives of the murdered men. They spoke of men killed who worked for Maduro regime law enforcement. Of minors shot in the back while. Of close-range kill shots and of working men being arrested by masked officials and then reappearing dead.

On January 11, the testimony of the mother of one of the victims killed in La Vega was published. She detailed that officers of the Special Action Forces (Faes) took his son, Wilfredo Naranjo, out of his house alive, and a few days later, they found his body in the morgue of Bello Monte, which had been shot at close range in the chest.

The declarations from the sister, Carlos Hernández, a 17-years-old murdered in La Vega, was also compiled. She said that the boy was buying a piece of cheese just when the police entered Independencia street. Carlos got scared and tried to run home but was reached by a bullet in the back.

Edwin Rivas, 25, a worker at the Concepcion Palacios Maternity Hospital, was also killed in the Faes raid in La Vega in early January. Relatives, who decided to remain anonymous, said that, in La Vega, neighbors are afraid to comment on the January events. They classified that situation as a massacre.


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