Venezuelans’ freedoms have deteriorated so much in the week since the Maduro regime stole the election in front of the world’s eyes that many of those who speak to me these days ask me for something they have never asked me before: to remain anonymous. “If you are going to use what I tell you, don’t use my name,” they tell me. And what they tell me is terrifying: intimidation, persecution and repression at levels that bring to mind the protests of April 2017. Maduro recently boasted of having imprisoned two thousand citizens and threatened to open two new prisons; now we know of a strategy called Operation Tun Tun: that is what Venezuelans call the mass arrests that have filled the existing prisons in recent days, and that have plunged them into fear.
As I am told, the term is not new: Diosdado Cabello had already used it to refer to the arrests of “terrorists” (the quotation marks must be used) in 2017. Now Maduro has begun to use it in those caged-beast speeches that reveal two things, one a consequence of the other: first, the weakness of the regime; second, its dangerousness. A journalist I spoke to told me that her family has begun to erase traces of their opinions, and not only on social media, but even in text messages. People have already been detained at police checkpoints after the authorities force them to hand over their unlocked phones and find something in their records that they don’t like. The same thing is happening with social media: Venezuelans are deleting photos, chats, videos, everything that could give them an excuse for these repressive laws that, under the multipurpose mask of “inciting hatred,” serve to silence anyone who allows themselves to criticize.
Another journalist – a close friend who asks to remain anonymous – tells me about the new repressive tactic of the ruling Chavismo: the arbitrary cancellation of passports. “It can happen at any moment, without warning or process,” she tells me. “And we have to go to a website every day to see if we still have a passport or not. It is a very effective strategy, because it does not cause an international scandal and there are no deaths in the streets. But those who are outside the country then know that they can no longer enter, because they run the risk of being detained at the airport. And those who are inside the country know that they cannot leave. In Venezuela, losing that possibility is losing much more than the right to travel.” For these journalists, Maduro’s Venezuela is a prison in which they have been tried in advance and sentenced without the possibility of appeal, and every day the inventory of men and women from small or local media who are imprisoned for reporting on what the regime does not like grows.
My informants tell me of colleagues who move from one apartment to another every two or three days, to mislead the intelligence services. The Press and Society Institute speaks of 79 violations of press freedom since Sunday of the elections: four journalists – two cameramen, a reporter and a photographer – have been imprisoned for covering the protests. Deysi Peña, who had published her photos of the protests in Miranda state on social media, is in prison and accused of terrorist crimes; Yousner Alvarado, from Noticia digital, was arrested in Barinas and is accused of the same abstract and unprovable crimes that the regime uses for everything. “Incitement to hatred” and “terrorism”: these are the charges that the regime uses to imprison citizens who are opponents or critics, no matter if they are journalists or not. And those who use a camera to film the terrorism carried out by the Chavista police are terrorists. and those who denounce the incitement to hatred that the regime spews out every day are inciting hatred.
“Terrorists”: that is what Diosdado Cabello has called those who try to report what has been happening since Sunday 28th in his regime of repression. Special correspondents of the foreign press have been detained, interrogated for hours and deported from the airport of arrival. That is what happened to Vanessa de la Torre, from Caracol radio: a media outlet that Maduro has not stopped attacking for several months, when Ricardo Calderón published an extraordinary report on the hunt for opponents that the Venezuelan regime conducts beyond its own borders. In his laughable paranoia, straight out of the banana republic manual, Cabello has accused the persecuted journalists of being CIA agents. His words have appeared in the media everywhere: “Take good care of your agents (journalists), do not send them out there alone, on the street. Because if you find them by chance, they will be caught by chance.” (If you have trouble understanding the phrase, don’t worry: that is how Cabello speaks.)
And so I return to the beginning of this article: to that true regime of terror that Chavismo has called Operation Tun Tun. My contacts explain to me that the reference comes from a Christmas carol in which someone knocks at the door. This is how the song begins:
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RECEIVE IT
Tun tun. Who is it? People of peace.
Open the door for us, it’s already Christmas.
Maduro has turned the Christmas carol into something else. The knocking is not that of the people of peace, but that of the forces of repression who break into houses and take people prisoner, and the doors are not opened because it is Christmas, but are knocked down like in the times of Pinochet and Videla. We saw it in the now sadly famous video of María Oropeza, coordinator of María Corina Machado’s party in the state of Portuguesa. Apparently, Oropeza managed to broadcast live the irruption – yes, the knocking – of the agents of the regime in her house, without a court order or anything like that. Oropeza is one of the 1,200 people arrested by Chavismo in the most traumatic wave of repression that Latin America has experienced in recent times. It is only logical: if the opposition has all the evidence that it has won the elections and Chavismo has none, violent repression is the only way to maintain power.
Now, as I write, I read that Maduro has begun to suspend social networks. Yesterday it was Twitter or X or whatever it is called; we will have to see what comes next, but the rhetorical war against the others has already begun. The alliance of three leftist governments – Mexico, Brazil and Colombia – demands and demands again that Chavismo show the minutes, and I don’t know who benefits from pretending that the Maduro regime has cared about this demand. However, this type of pressure is the only way to reach a peaceful negotiation; and peaceful negotiation is the only way to offer the regime a plausible way out. But what happens in the meantime? In the meantime, the regime gains time to accommodate itself to the fraud. In the meantime, people who were not afraid before are beginning to be. And many voices tell me, through tears, what I have believed for days: that nothing is going to happen here.
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