Hundreds of people gathered outside a detention center known as Zone 7 in the Venezuelan capital Caracas several days ago, huddled around lists of prisoners and clutching plastic bags filled with food they had prepared for the inmates inside.
Eager for information about their detained loved ones, many told remarkably similar stories of sons, daughters and siblings arrested while riding motorbikes, returning home from work, leaving a bakery or stopping by a relative’s house in the days following Venezuela’s disputed presidential election.
They described both widespread and targeted arrests. And no one had been told what criminal charges their relatives faced.
The Venezuelan government has mounted a furious crackdown on anyone questioning the declared results of the vote, unleashing a wave of repression that rights groups say is unlike anything the country has seen in decades.
“I have been documenting human rights violations in Venezuela for many years and I have seen patterns of repression before,” said Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, president of the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy and research organization. “I don’t think I have ever seen this ferocity.”
The country’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, claimed victory in the July 28 election, but the government has yet to provide any vote count to back up his claim. The opposition, meanwhile, has made public the results, which show its candidate has won by a landslide.
Now, according to experts, Maduro, having been apparently repudiated by the majority of his voters, is determined to punish those he considers disloyal.
Maria Vazquez, 62, a street vendor in Caracas, said her son grabbed a flag and “took part in a cacerolazo” but she didn’t think he would be convicted for that. Vazquez supports the government and urged her son not to protest. “It’s worrying.”
The Venezuelan government says it has arrested more than 2,000 people for participating in protests against the election results.
According to interviews with family members and human rights activists who documented the arrests, they occurred both in indiscriminate raids amid protests and later in targeted home arrests when the government launched what it called “Operation Tun Tun.”
The rise in arrests is especially alarming, according to rights groups, because some arrests came after the president urged his supporters to report their neighbors through a government app that was supposed to be used to report problems such as downed power lines.
“Maximum punishment! Justice!” Maduro said at a rally last Saturday. “This time there will be no forgiveness!”
The result has been an aggressive crackdown on dissent aimed at silencing anyone who dares to question the election results, human rights activists said.
At least two human rights lawyers are in jail, including one who was arrested when he went to request information about other detainees. Another activist was taken from Maiquetía airport when she tried to leave the country.
When authorities showed up at the home of Maria Oropeza, an opposition party leader in Portuguesa, southwest of Caracas, she broadcast it live. “I think you should first show me if you have a search warrant, right?” she is heard telling a police officer. “Because this is my home, private property.”
Jordan Sifuentes, mayor of the Mejía municipality, the only opposition mayor in the northeastern Venezuelan state of Sucre, has been detained for a week on unknown charges. The mayor of the Lagunillas municipality in Zulia state, José Mosquera, was detained for six days after being accused of posting an anti-government tweet, something he had denied.
In recent days, human rights activists and journalists have learned that the government has revoked their passports, leaving them stranded in Venezuela.
People are leaving their homes without their phones, fearing that authorities will stop them on the street and check their messages for objectionable content. A man in Zulia was arrested after police found a meme critical of the election on his phone, according to his family.
Gonzalo Himiob, vice president of Foro Penal, a human rights organization that has been monitoring arrests since the election, said he found it difficult to put into words the intensity and indiscriminate nature of this wave of arrests.
Although the government says there are more than 2,000 people detained, Himiob said human rights organizations have only been able to document about 1,300 people detained.
Himiob said that although Maduro had mentioned 2,000 detainees, it did not seem to be true and that he thought it seemed more like an instruction. “He wants to reach that figure.”
On July 28, Maduro faced a little-known diplomat named Edmundo González, a deputy for a more popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who had been barred by the government from running in the elections.
About six hours after polls closed, the National Electoral Council announced that Maduro had won another six-year term. Nearly two weeks later, the government has yet to release any electoral data to prove it.
Counts collected by opposition observers on election night show Gonzalez won by millions of votes.
Spontaneous protests broke out the day after the clash, some of which led to clashes between protesters, security forces and armed civilian groups supporting the government. At least two dozen people were killed, according to human rights groups. Hundreds of people were arrested.
But arrests continued days after the protests, sometimes through anonymous tipsters who reported them on VenApp, an app the government had originally introduced to report public problems.
The app has been removed from Google Play and the App Store, but remains available to those who have already downloaded it, according to Amnesty International.
The use of civilian supporters to inform on neighbors has echoes of what has happened in Cuba, where the communist government has long deployed a wide network of community informants.
“Operation Tun Tun is just beginning,” Douglas Rico, director of the Scientific, Criminal and Criminal Investigation Corps, posted on Instagram. “Report if you have been the target of a physical or virtual hate campaign through social media.”
The government appeared to be employing a “pluralist” approach to crushing dissent, said the research organization’s Jimenez, using all methods at its disposal, including technology, security forces, intelligence services, armed civilians and the military.
Jimenez said the range of tools the government is using is something that has not been seen in previous cycles of repression in the country.
Maduro insisted that those detained had participated in a far-right fascist coup to overthrow him. People were paid to burn down polling stations and tear down statues of former President Hugo Chavez, he said, adding that they had confessed to their crimes.
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Those detained will be charged with inciting hatred and terrorism, the government said, and activists said they had been referred to a specialized terrorism court in Caracas. Some of those detained were caught committing acts of vandalism, such as toppling government statues, but many others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, civil rights lawyers said.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday, the family of opposition party leader Américo De Grazia, 64, announced on Instagram that he had been missing for more than 24 hours.
His daughter, Maria De Grazia, 30, said that after receiving threats on social media, her father, a former mayor and lawmaker, left his home in Upata and traveled 724 kilometers to Caracas. After five days there, he suddenly disappeared.
The family learned he was in jail, but said they had not been told why.
De Grazia, who lives in exile in Houston, said they had not gone to the home with a search warrant. She added that if it had not been for a relative who searched exhaustively, they would still not know where he was.
The government was clinging to power, he said, arresting everyone from student leaders to well-known politicians to ordinary citizens. Opposition activists stood little chance against such an organized apparatus.
De Grazia said the situation was like going to war “armed with a plastic fork.”
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