Civil Society, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-VENEZUELA: No Change in Patterns of Police Brutality and Impunity

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Aug 20 2007 (IPS) - Eloísa Caro, a 26-year-old domestic worker, was blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten about the face, verbally abused and nearly suffocated with a plastic bag last year when she was summoned by the judicial police in the Venezuelan capital to give a statement on a robbery in the house where she worked.

Vicente R., 16, had returned home one morning after his school was closed for the day because of a protest over the death of a bus driver in his poor Caracas neighbourhood of La Vega. All of a sudden, Metropolitan Police agents burst into his house, beat him, put a bag over his head, fired their guns next to his ears, threatened to kill him, and forced him to confess to killing the driver.

There have been no change in the pattern of police brutality and abuses of basic guarantees like the right to life and personal integrity and the inviolability of the home documented in Venezuela in the 1980s and 1990s by the non-governmental Justice and Peace Support Network, according to the non-governmental organisation’s latest report, published this month.

“We documented 300 cases of police and military abuses and provided legal advice and assistance to the victims or their families between 2000 and 2005, in what could be the tip of an iceberg in terms of human rights violations,” Dr. Fiorella Perrone, who led the investigation, told IPS.

Although the study only ran through 2005, in a continuation of the reports issued by the Network from 1985 to 2000, Perrone said the data indicated that the situation remains unchanged today.

Of the 300 cases documented, 149 involved violations of the right to life, 11 of which also included forced disappearance, in which the victims were deprived of freedom and their families were not given any information on their whereabouts.

According to Provea, another local human rights organisation, 169 civilians were killed by members of the security forces between October 2005 and September 2006. Of that total, 88 percent were victims of extrajudicial killings, in a country that boasts of being the first modern-day nation to abolish the death penalty, in 1863.

In 74 cases contained in the Justice and Peace Support Network study, the summary executions were officially reported as the result of a firefight between members of the security forces and criminal suspects.

A report by Venezuela’s attorney-general’s office found that “the statistics referring to the alleged crime of homicide in police confrontations between 2000 and 2005 far exceed the number of cases reported by non-governmental organisations: the victims total 6,377, with a total of 6,110 police officers involved.”

Some 12,500 murders a year are registered in Venezuela, a country of 27 million, for a rate of 47 per 100,000 population – only surpassed in the region by El Salvador (51 per 100,000), and followed by Guatemala (44), Colombia (40) and Mexico (29), according to statistics provided at the Regional Conference on Armed Violence, held in May in Guatemala.

The second-largest category of rights abuses documented by the Justice and Peace Support Network is that of violations of personal integrity. Of the 118 such cases reported by the Network, 97 involved torture, like the cases of Vicente and Caro.

Caro’s case was described by another report by the Network specifically addressing the problem of torture.

Many cases involve both torture and extrajudicial killings. In a case reported by Provea, Miguel Piña was implicated in a bank robbery in the northwestern Venezuelan state of Yaracuy in 2005. A few hours after judicial police agents arrested him at home, his wife received a phone call informing her that Piña had been killed in a traffic accident.

But in her complaint, his wife said his body showed signs of torture, such as holes in his head, cigarette burns on his skin, and bruises on his arms and hands.

Another frequent problem, abuse of authority, is so widespread that in a survey carried out by the Interior Ministry last year on police reforms, 30 percent of the respondents belonging to different police forces admitted it was a problem.

The Metropolitan Police of Caracas, the biggest force in the country, with 8,000 members, heads the Network’s list of violations, accounting for 15.3 percent of the cases, followed by the judicial police (the Scientific, Penal and Criminalistic Investigations Corps), with 12 percent.

Next on the list are the army and the National Guard, a branch of the military, with 8.7 and 8.0 percent, respectively, and then the police forces of the country’s 23 states, which are listed on an individual basis, but whose total combined percentage would represent over 35 percent of the cases.

After extrajudicial police killings and torture, the largest categories of abuses are arbitrary arrests in the street or homes, illegal house searches, indiscriminate shootings and official negligence or errors.

“Underlying the torture, house searches and extrajudicial killings is the problem of the criminalisation of poverty,” said Perrone.

“Ninety-seven percent of the people we help are poor, and it’s very rare for the police to carry out a violent raid of homes in middle-class neighbourhoods like they do in poor areas, where they basically burst in,” she added.

She said the authorities see poor people living in slums as potential criminals, and argued that human rights violations are a repressive policy in response to social conflicts, rather than isolated incidents that result from “excesses” or abuses committed by individual agents.

Another aspect of the problem is impunity, says the Network. Of the 300 cases covered by the report, only 15 were prosecuted, and firm sentences were handed down in just two.

“These figures point to serious shortcomings in a justice system in which crimes are not solved,” says the study.

One of the big problems is the excessively slow pace of justice in Venezuela.

Another, says the Network, are the “mechanisms of impunity” in the security forces, “the most notorious of which (present in 14 percent of the cases studied) is the incrimination of victims of police and military abuses to make them look like criminals.”

Perrone also complained about the role that the media play in perpetuating the climate of impunity, when they “misinform about human rights violations, fail to investigate complaints, cover up for the perpetrators, divert the public’s attention, keep silent or distort events.”

The Network’s recommendations to the government include “the formulation of a national human rights plan, coordinated with state bodies and social institutions, to implement and enforce the advances made by the constitution of 1999, which provides ample guarantees of human rights.”

Also needed, according to Perrone, is a specific law to prevent and punish torture, strategies for awareness-raising and rehabilitation of victims, the demilitarisation of police forces, greater funding and more resources for the police, and effective penalties for police officers, prosecutors and judges found guilty of human rights abuses, whether as a result of negligence, excessive prosecutorial delay, or corruption.