Maduro terrorizes Venezuela
Aug. 8, 2024
Venezuela’s government has doubled down on efforts to quash dissent, in the aftermath of an election whose official results are widely considered fraudulent. Nicolás Maduro's government set up a phone app and a military phone line for people to make anonymous complaints about opposition protesters, reports AFP.
Maduro hinself said that more than 2,200 people have been arrested for links to the protests, and that opposition leaders Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia and Maria Corina Machado belonged "behind bars."
Rights group Foro Penal has verified the detention of 1,229 people. Verifying the cases has been made difficult by the reluctance of family members of the detained or killed to come forward, reports the Washington Post.
The spree of detentions is unprecedented: In just 10 days, security forces have rounded up nearly the same number of people as they did over five months in 2017, Provea told the Associated Press. They are meant to terrify Venezuelans into submission, Rafael Uzcategui, co-director of rights NGO Laboratorio de Paz, told the Guardian.
Amnesty International told the BBC they had “well-founded reasons to believe [the detained people's] lives and integrity are at risk”.
The repression, much of it seemingly random and arbitrary, is having a chilling effect, Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, told the Associated Press. “It’s not just discouraging protests. People are scared to go on the streets period,” he said. “There’s a sense that police have a quota to fill and anyone can be stopped and carted away as a suspected subversive.”
Legal challenges against opposition leaders are mounting: González was ruled in contempt of court, and now faces imprisonment. (Reuters, see yesterday’s briefs.)
It is still early to say there is a negotiation process with the government, though opposition leader María Corina Machado said joint diplomatic efforts by Brazil, Colombia and Mexico could help pull Maduro to the table. “But what does exist on our part is an absolute willingness to start a negotiation process for the transition,” she told Connectas in an interview.
On Brazil’s strategy, Oliver Stuenkel writes in Americas Quarterly: “Brazil—just like other large powers in the Global South, such as India or Indonesia—often opts for an ambiguous stance to keep all doors open. This is often described as “pragmatism” by its supporters and decried as hypocritical or morally questionable by critics.”
More Venezuela
The Catholic Church repudiated repression by the Venezuelan government. (El País)
“The governments that support Maduro share common traits, including
systematic human rights violations, censorship, and a refusal to hold free and
fair elections. However, their alliance is not ideological,” writes opposition leader Leopoldo López for the Wilson Center. “Rather, it is undergirded by a common purpose, to keep one another in power at all costs.”
After Venezuela’s election, “many voters said they knew this was going to happen,” Argentine journalist Lucía Cholakian told The Dial. “They did not expect anything from the government but still it felt like their last shot at change. I was speaking mostly with working class people whose children are living abroad or who have chronic illnesses and don’t have access to health care or have access to the medicine that they need. This is a society that is very traumatized and broken in many ways. And I think people have a feeling now that nothing is going to make this better …”
Migration
Maduro’s increasing repression is likely to “trigger a flood of refugees that will cause havoc in neighboring countries as they try to move towards the U.S. border,” reports the Miami Herald.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has eroded his country’s institutions for managing migration since taking office in 2022, “leaving the country ill-equipped to handle” the expected wave of Venezuelan migration after the election, write Shannon K. O'Neil and Will Freeman for Council on Foreign Relations.
Panamanian border police in Panama said they have arrested 15 people who allegedly ran a smuggling ring to move Chinese migrants through the Darién Gap, reports the Associated Press.
“Forensic authorities in the Dominican Republic worked Wednesday to identify the remains of at least 14 mostly decomposed bodies found on an abandoned vessel 10 nautical miles of its northern coast,” reports the Associated Press.
Colombia
Petro called for a national agreement to advance with social reforms. (El País)
He reaches the midway mark of his mandate weakened by corruption scandals involving close aides and family members, reports El País.
Two years into Petro’s mandate, there have been less murders of social leaders in Colombia, compared to his predecessor’s first years. But there have been more massacres, reports Indepaz. (Silla Vacía)
Regional
A U.S. judge dismissed much of Mexico’s unprecedented $10 billion lawsuit seeking to hold U.S. gun manufacturers responsible for facilitating the trafficking of firearms to violent drug cartels in Mexico, reports Reuters.
Brazil
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest was nearly halved over the past year, compared to the previous year, according to government satellite data released yesterday. It’s the largest reduction since 2016, when officials began using the current method of measurement, reports the Associated Press.
Brazil’s government deployed more security officers to the Mato Grosso do Sul state after violent clashes over land between Indigenous peoples and farmers over the weekend. The Ministry of Indigenous Peoples said it had received reports of farmers attacking Guarani Kaiowa people in the Douradina municipality Saturday, injuring at least eight people, reports the Associated Press.
Peru
The Peruvian Indigenous Mashco Piro group recently used bows and arrows to attack loggers suspected of encroaching on their territory in the Amazon, according to a regional Indigenous organization — Associated Press
Bolivia
Bolivian President Luis Arce said national referenda would be held on the removal of fuel subsidies and on the constitutionality of presidential reelections. It is the first time the government is offering “a concrete path out of the country’s economic morass and political limbo,” reports the Associated Press.
Dominican Republic
The case of a Black U.S. citizen who was physically assaulted by a Dominican official while trying to cross the border with Haiti is an example of the deep-seated racism encountered by persons of darker complexions in the DR, where they are often assumed to be Haitian, reports the Miami Herald.
Argentina
Argentine President Javier Milei slammed the “progressive hypocrisy" of the "scam that they called 'gender policies'" after former president Alberto Fernández was accused of domestic violence by his wife. (Buenos Aires Times, Página 12)
The presidential spokesman said the accusations only demonstrate the futility of the previous government’s efforts to expand women’s rights. (El País)
The scandal will add fuel to the government’s vicious attacks against feminists, writes Ingrid Beck in Letra P, but those who previously supported him politically are among his most vehement critics in light of the accusations. “Let's be clear: the only person accused of gender-based violence is the former president. Let's not let it all fall to the feminists once again.”
Politicians from across the political spectrum expressed solidarity with Fernández’s wife, Fabiola Yáñez, and rejected gender violence. (Página 12)
Thousands of people protested against the Milei administration’s austerity measures in Argentina, gathered on the day of St. Cayetano, patron saint of bread and work, reports the Associated Press. (El País)
Regional Relations
The United States is imposing sanctions on Paraguayan tobacco company Tabacalera del Este, accusing it of giving financial support to ex-President Horacio Cartes, who was sanctioned last year by the White House for corruption.. (Reuters, Associated Press)