Venezuela commits crimes against humanity – News Block

The UN Human Rights Council sent an International Independent Fact Finding Mission to Venezuela and has just issued a report. It’s incredibly damning:

While acknowledging the nature of the crisis and tensions in the country, and the State’s responsibilities to maintain public order, the Mission found flagrant violations by the Government, state agents, and groups working with them. It identified highly coordinated patterns of violations and crimes in accordance with State policies, and part of a generalized and systematic course of conduct, thus constituting crimes against humanity.

There is a state policy of extrajudicial executions and torture. He says this started in 2014, which coincides with the aftermath of Hugo Chávez’s death and Nicolás Maduro’s desperate efforts to stay in power. State violence is all it has. The National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) normalized torture, which included “stress positions, suffocation, beatings, electric shocks, cuts and mutilations, death threats, and psychological torture.”

The document itself is over 400 pages long and has many footnotes to prove all the violations of international law. It includes a very detailed timeline of political crises that were accompanied by increased use of state violence. At this point, the government is targeting almost everyone, not just high-profile opposition leaders:

Intelligence agencies have also targeted other profiles of people who question official narratives. This includes selected public officials, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, NGO workers, journalists, bloggers, and social media users.630 In 2020, a number of health workers, social media workers, and social media users were detained631. In July 2020, the Minister of the Interior, Néstor Reverol, announced that Venezuelans who had left the country and are returning would be charged under the Organic Law against Organized Crime and the Financing of Terrorism, allegedly for introducing Covid-19. in the country.

Individuals associated with these actors, including family members, friends and colleagues or NGO workers and human rights defenders, were also targeted. The questions that the authorities asked these people while they were detained and interrogated seem to suggest that they were detained to incriminate, extract information or put pressure on the main targets. This includes organizations that may have provided funding to opposition movements or received international funding. The measures used against the persons associated with the primary targets often equaled or exceeded the severity of those inflicted on the primary targets.

They even analyze what detention buildings look like on the inside.

At this point, international organizations can only collect information, which will eventually be used in some way for accountability once democracy is restored to the country. This is a meticulously documented dictatorship.