Ongoing human rights abuses under Venezuela’s Maduro regime

Experts and nongovernmental groups (NGOs) are raising alarms about the Nicolás Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela’s pervasive, grave, and organized abuses of human rights. “In terms of the numbers for politically motivated repression in Venezuela, 2024 was unprecedented,” a recent study by the pro bono legal aid group Foro Penal in Venezuela stated.

At least a thousand people, including women, minors, and foreign nationalities, are political prisoners in Venezuela, according to Foro Penal. According to the NGO, Venezuela has seen 18,059 arrests for political reasons since 2014. Approximately 9,000 people continue to be arbitrarily subject to laws that limit their freedom.

Opponents have been abducted, imprisoned, and in certain situations, let to perish by the Maduro dictatorship. General Raúl Baduel, a former defense minister and regime critic who passed away in 2021, is the most obvious example. He was imprisoned and neglected during COVID and died as a result, according to Luis Fleischman, a professor of Sociology and Political Science at Palm Beach State University in Florida, who spoke to Diálogo about the man.

Fleischman stated that anti-regime protests had been brutally suppressed. “Maduro’s style of governance is increasingly characterized by the number of individuals murdered and injured by paramilitary and regime-aligned groups. The only way to maintain this illegal administration is by force.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), repression in Venezuela intensified up to the July 28, 2024 elections and reached “brutal levels” when the government declared, without proof, that Maduro had been reelected. The NGO stated in a study that “the authorities responded with brutal repression, including killings, arrests, and other repressive tactics, when thousands of protesters took to the streets.”

According to HRW, it has received reliable allegations of 23 protester and bystander deaths and has found evidence linking the security forces and armed organizations known as “collectivos,” which support the dictatorship, to several of these killings.

The use of enforced disappearance as a tactic to quell resistance grew after the July elections. They have often been brief, enforced disappearances. However, in other instances, at least forty-three persons are still forcefully missing […], totally uncommunicado, and their whereabouts is unknown,” Foro Penal stated.

The European Union, the United States, the Organization of American States (OAS), the United Nations, and a number of nations in Europe and Latin America have asked Maduro to follow the people’s choice and make the election results public.

The OAS’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued a warning regarding the terrorist attacks carried out by the Maduro administration in an effort to maintain the dictatorship. The IACHR details “the serious and systematic human rights violations” carried out by the Chavista leader to stop the opposition, led by Edmundo González Urrutia and María Corina Machado, from starting Venezuela’s democratic transition in its report, Grave Human Rights Violations in the Electoral Context, which was released on January 7.

The dossier claims that in order to illegitimately maintain its hold on power, the dictatorship “implemented a coordinated repressive strategy” prior to, during, and following the July 28 presidential election.

State terrorism, according to the IACHR, was used to instill fear in the populace, deter the opposition from engaging in politics, and obstruct the growth of an election process that is free, fair, competitive, and transparent. According to the study, “the co-optation of the various branches of government, which has occurred over the last two decades, is the only reason these events could occur, unchecked.”

The OAS further notes that the Maduro dictatorship arbitrarily arrested opponents and human rights advocates by using the authority of organizations like the Supreme Court of Justice, the Comptroller General of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and the security forces.

According to the IACHR study, approximately 5 million Venezuelans were impacted by limits on press freedom, denial of the right to vote abroad, and acts of harassment, persecution, and disqualification against opponents or those deemed to be such.

These days, arbitrary detentions happen often. Opposition members, journalists, and NGO executives are among the many political detainees, Fleischman added. The expert claims that repression and poor domestic situation management, such as food shortages and declining health and sanitary facilities, are the main causes of emigration. The expert came to the conclusion that “illegal mining, which violates indigenous rights and exploits and tortures the indigenous workers in these mines, is another great abuse of rights that evokes the era of slavery.”