Ana Carolina Guaita Barreto, portal reporter The Watermelona critic of Chavez, has disappeared after being detained outside her home on August 20, in the city of Maiquetía, on the central coast of Venezuela. Her last trace was reported by journalist and former deputy Vladimir Villegas on his X account on Thursday: “She is detained at the headquarters of the Security Directorate of the Governorate of La Guaira.”
According to Villegas, the Secretary of Citizen Security of the Governorate, Andrés Goncalves, would have made a particular request to Ana Carolina’s mother, a social activist and leader of the opposition party Copei, to obtain her release: “I will free your daughter if you turn yourself in.”
Following the complaint on social media, the journalist has disappeared again. Her brother, Carlos Guaita, has recorded and released a video to denounce that they do not know her situation: “We do not know where they are holding her, we do not know why they are detaining her; if they are detaining her for being a journalist or for being the daughter of well-known political leaders of the state.” [La Guaira]. We do not know which court or which judge issued an order.”
Guaita’s parents were part of the political campaign of former candidate Edmundo González Urrutia who, according to copies of the voting records compiled by the opposition, won the elections on July 28. This Friday, Villegas told EL PAÍS that their whereabouts are unknown and he denounced an increase in persecution: “As a journalist, politician and social activist, I have never experienced a time when so many press workers were detained. There is a criminalization of the exercise of journalism, including brutal censorship. Forced disappearances are a recurring situation in Venezuela. There is also the figure of a family member being detained if they cannot find the person they are looking for, and if that person turns themselves in, they return their relative.”
During the Nicolás Maduro regime, reprisals against relatives of those persecuted for political reasons have become a common practice. The United Nations report on Venezuela, published in September 2021, states that, in some documented cases, security or intelligence police agents have allegedly kidnapped or detained family members of opponents as a kind of decoy, or what is known as ‘sippenhaft’, a collective punishment tactic used by the Nazis. Following demonstrations over suspicions of fraud by the National Electoral Council (CNE), arbitrary arrests have increased in the country. The NGO Foro Penal has reported 1,674 imprisonments in the electoral context, of which only eight people have been released.
The Chavista regime has stepped up its offensive against independent journalism amid the post-election crisis in Venezuela. The Institute for Press and Society (IPYS) has verified eleven arrests of media workers in the South American country this year, eight of which have occurred after the July 28 elections.
The arrests represent a further escalation of harassment against the already beleaguered independent press in the country. Venezuela is one of the few Latin American nations considered to be in a “serious situation” regarding the free exercise of the press, according to a classification made by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The international NGO has counted at least 70 attacks on press freedom since the elections. “Journalists, both national and foreign, face a climate of hostility and repression, marked by arbitrary arrests, threats, physical attacks, censorship and restrictions on access to information,” said RSF in a report.
On Friday, the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression (RELE) of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) condemned the arbitrary detentions of journalists and the systematic persecution of media outlets and dissidents after the vote. “The RELE calls on the international community to reject the censorship measures and repressive practices exercised as part of the pattern that seeks to generate terror in the Venezuelan population; it also calls on them to demand the immediate release of those arbitrarily detained by the regime,” it urged in a statement.
Censorship on social media
Maduro has tried to silence complaints of repression by censoring and boycotting social media. On August 8, the president announced a 10-day blockade of X (formerly Twitter), owned by billionaire Elon Musk, which he accuses of “inciting hatred.” However, more than two weeks have passed since that measure and the platform remains suspended in Venezuela, where it can only be accessed using a VPN. According to the Minister of Communication, Freddy Ñáñez, they are waiting for representatives of the social network to present documents about its operations in the country.
He has also attacked other social networks such as TikTok and Instagram, which he says are tools of the opposition. Maduro has asked not to use the messaging application WhatsApp, belonging to the US company Meta, for allegedly providing data to opposition leaders María Corina Machado and former candidate Edmundo González Urrutia.
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