Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights, a blog hosted by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), is a unique resource for journalists, policymakers, scholars, activists and others interested in understanding Venezuelan politics and human rights.
The contributors call it as they see it, providing insights on Venezuela’s politics that go beyond the polarized pro-Chávez/anti-Chávez debate. The views expressed in the posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect WOLA’s institutional positions.
THE BLOGGERS:
David Smilde, curator of the blog, is a WOLA Senior Fellow and the Charles A. and Leo M. Favrot Professor of Human Relations at Tulane University. He has lived in or worked on Venezuela since 1992. He is co-editor of Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics and Culture under Chávez (Duke 2011).
Hugo Pérez Hernáiz is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Central de Venezuela.
Rebecca Hanson is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Georgia doing doctoral research on police reform and citizen participation in Venezuela.
Timothy Gill is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University. His research focuses on US foreign policy towards Venezuela and foreign funding for non-governmental organizations.
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Venezuela is one of the most violent countries in the world, with a homicide
rate of at leaset 59 for every 100,000 people. In an attempt to stop the dramatic
increase in crime and violence, in July
2015 the Maduro government launched Operación Liberación del Pueblo (OLP).
In this article, I gather together the perspectives of a variety of
people from low income communities who experience first-hand both criminal
violence and violence from the OLP.
In the State of Miranda, close to Barlovento, in a community
called Mamporal, Carlos Parra (38) tells me how crime and violence is part of
their daily lives. “In this area, lots of bad guys come to hide, and we have always
been, as people say, at the mercy of God.” In November, another tragedy was added
to the long list of misfortunes this community has experienced–the discovery
of twelve
cadavers, presumably killed by the Operación Liberación del Pueblo.
The event shook the population, generating a profound sense
of dis-ease towards the government’s misguided security policies. Residents now
worry not only about criminals and delinquents, but about the police’s
unpredictable shows of force.
Questions added to Datanálisis Omnibus poll, fieldwork May 18-25, 2016, N = 1000, error +/- 3%
David Smilde
One of the most disturbing policies the Maduro
government has adopted during its three years has been the Operación Liberación
del Pueblo. It amounts to militarized incursions into neighborhoods supposedly infiltrated
by gangs and “paramilitaries” to detain criminals and “disassemble” (desmantelar) their networks. After the
operation, the number of “delinquents” killed is announced as well as the
number of people detained for investigation.
(See our coverage over the past year here, here, here, and here).
In April Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Venezuelan human
rights group Provea made
public a report arguing that the OLP had caused 245 deaths in 2015, supposedly in confrontations. However, the best information suggests only 3 security agents were killed in
the same operations. 14,000 individuals were detained in the process of OLP
raids for further questioning. However, only 100 of them were ever charged for
crimes. OLP actions were also involved in forced evictions and forced
deportations that violated Venezuelan and international law.
There is no evidence that these types of
military operations reduce crime in any way and there is good reason to think they do
not. The best information suggests that the murder rate actually increased or
stagnated from 2014 to 2015 after two years of decline (watch video
of Andres Antillano’s recent analysis, especially starting at 7:00).
On April 4th Human Rights Watch and PROVEA released
a report on Venezuela’s most recent security initiative, Operation Liberation
and Protection of the People (hereafter referred to as OLP). The report is entitled
“Power without Limits: Police and Military Raids in Popular and Immigrant
Communities in Venezuela.”
Its findings are based on interviews with victims of abuse,
their family members, and witnesses. Interviews were conducted by both PROVEA
and Human Rights Watch. The full report can be accessed
here.
The report documents the deployment
of the OLP, which was launched
in July 2015 in popular sectors throughout the country. Like the
DIBISE and the Secure Homeland
Plan before it, the OLP sends military and police officers into poor areas
to conduct raids and arrests.
Though the operation is meant to reduce crime and violence,
it is precisely these militarized approaches that have
been shown to contribute to increasing violence throughout the region.
Indeed, PROVEA presents evidence of thousands of instances of abuse,
executions, arbitrary detentions, and illegal deportation. These actions
delegitimize the state and justify
armed responses to crime.
Though PROVEA has reported accusations to the Attorney
General multiple times, it is unclear if denunciations of officers carrying out
OLP raids will be investigated. In the Attorney General’s annual
report, she stated that 251 security officers have been charged with human
rights abuses this year. However, these were not directly linked to the OLP.
Following are some of the key findings of the report.
In July the
Venezuelan government launched its newest anti-crime initiative: “Operation
Liberation and Protection of the People” (hereafter referred to as OLP). The
operations sends heavily-armed police and military forces to reclaim the State’s monopoly of
violence over poor areas supposedly under the control of armed non-state actors.
President Maduro said that the OLP will continue until “criminal
gangs and paramilitary practices infiltrated into the country by the right are eliminated.”
“What we have seen
in the past weeks is nothing compared to what we will see in weeks to come.
More than 20,000 National Guard officials will graduate next week and they will
immediately see action in the OLP. I ask for national unity around the OLP.
Enough of these criminals, paramilitaries, assassins, and sicarios!” said Maduro.
The launching of the OLP was not accompanied by the
publication of any official resolution stating its definition, purpose or aims.
It was only announced by the Minister of Interior in a press conference the day after the operation in Cota 905
started.
It has so far
produced hundreds of arrests. There are no official figures on the total of
deaths in all the OLP operation around the country, however press reports show at
least eighteen civilians have died (see here, and here). These deaths supposedly took place in the
course of armed confrontations, however we found no reports of security force
casualties. Several eyewitness accounts speak of families being forcefully evicted from
their homes and abused by security forces.
While President
Maduro has called the OLP “the perfect instrument for peace”
human rights groups suggest it looks more like the highly repressive Plan Unión from the 1980’s.