The dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro has responded with extreme violence to protests questioning the fraud in the July 28 presidential election in Venezuela. More than 2,400 people have been arrested and at least 27 have been killed in the Chavista repression, and many families are living the drama of not knowing the conditions in which their relatives are being held.
The situation is even more dramatic for the families of the more than 700 detainees taken to the supposedly maximum security prisons of Tocuyito, in the state of Carabobo, and Tocorón, in the state of Aragua.
“We have 2,000 prisoners captured and from there they will go to Tocorón and Tocuyito, maximum punishment, justice. This time there will be no forgiveness, this time what there will be is Tocorón,” said Maduro during a Chavista march in Caracas in early August.
Although the Tocorón and Tocuyito prisons are considered maximum security, in September and October of last year the police and armed forces had to carry out operations to regain control of the two units, which were then taken over by gangs.
The Aragua Train, Venezuela’s largest criminal group, controlled Tocorón. Despite the official discourse of fighting the gang, analysts and the opposition believe that Maduro protected the group and even used it to kidnap and kill a former Venezuelan soldier in Chile in March of this year.
Furthermore, experts stated that the lack of information about the operations in the two prisons raises doubts as to whether there was actually “success” in the work to regain control of both.
Adding to this uncertainty, family members have been prevented from visiting protesters who are being held in both locations. The Venezuelan Prison Observatory (OVP) said many families only learned of the ban when they arrived at the facilities to bring food, according to a report by Agence France-Presse.
These detainees are also being denied access to the lawyers they have chosen to represent them, the OVP reported. In many cases, relatives have traveled hundreds of kilometers to prisons – only to have their hopes of seeing their loved ones dashed by prison officials.
Of the more than one hundred minors arrested during the repression of post-election protests, 76 were released last weekend, according to the NGO Justiça, Encontro e Perdão.
Of those still in prison, some are in Tocuyito and Tocorón. Reports to the website Efecto Cocuyo highlighted the desperation of family members: the aunt of one of the five teenagers detained in Tocuyito asked for him to be transferred to a center appropriate for his age.
“We don’t know how our son is, they just tell us he’s in good health, but we haven’t seen him,” said the woman.
The father of a detainee in the same prison said that the facility’s staff do not even allow the delivery of food or hygiene items.
“They told us they were doing work in the spaces [do presídio] and that they could not receive visitors or deliveries,” he said. “It is as if we had been thrown into nothingness, without knowing what to do with everything we brought. And our children are being kidnapped.”
Last Tuesday (3), seven prisoners were taken to Tocorón without any information being provided to their families, among them, the lawyer of the NGO Foro Penal in Carabobo, Kennedy Tejeda, who had been detained on August 2 when he tried to contact people arrested during the demonstrations.
“As of the date of publication of this urgent appeal, neither Foro Penal nor his family have had contact with Kennedy Tejeda and he has been denied access to his lawyers,” the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint program of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT), reported in a statement this Friday (6).
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