CARACAS, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Before dawn on January 8, several dozen police They spread out through the streets of Barrio Kennedy, an impoverished area located on a hillside surrounding the violent capital of Venezuela.
Some officers were shot at by criminals. They returned fire, wounding five young men. All five were taken to the hospital, but ended up dying due to the severity of their injuries.
That was, at least, the official version detailed the next day in a statement from the elite unit that carried out the operation, the Special Actions Forces of the National Police of Venezuela.
The command's version differs from that of five witnesses gathered by Reuters. Testimonies claim that the police killed one of the victims, but not in a shootout on the street, but inside his house.
The official version is also contradicted by a video in which the victim appears, images to which Reuters had access and which are reported here for the first time. The material was obtained by investigators from the National Assembly, controlled by the Venezuelan opposition.
The 82-second recording shows a shirtless and unarmed man in a storage room inside his home, being questioned by police about the theft of a car nearby, while pleading for his life.
"Brother," says José Arévalo, 29, a store worker who served time for theft in the middle of this decade and has avoided further trouble since. "Don't go killing me."
"If you cooperate, you'll leave," responds an unidentified agent, in a black uniform and balaclava. "If not, you're going to die."
The video was recorded in the last minutes of Arévalo's life, his girlfriend told Reuters.
According to him, the couple was at home with their two children when about 15 uniformed officers and an unidentified person in civilian clothes burst in.
They took her out of the house with the children. Speaking on condition of anonymity, Arévalo's girlfriend said she believes the video was filmed by one of those people, all strangers to her, once she was outside the house.
From the street he heard how Arévalo was beaten, he said. Minutes later, he heard gunshots. He saw the officers carry Arévalo out of the house, apparently dead and fully clothed.
Then, police He riddled the walls of the house with bullets, making it appear that a shooting had occurred. Just before leaving, a carton of eggs and his children's bicycle were stolen, he said.
"If my son had committed a crime, they had to take him to court and charge him," said Zuleica Pérez, Arévalo's mother and in charge of later identifying the body in the morgue. "Instead, they decided to execute him."
The girlfriend's story was corroborated by four other witnesses who were at the scene. The case is one of 20 that Reuters documented across the country in which witnesses have described extrajudicial executions at the hands of the Special Action Forces, or FAES, as it is known by its Spanish acronym.
FAES Chief Commissioner José Domínguez declined to speak about Arévalo's death and the other cases mentioned in this story. Neither the Home Office nor the Information Ministry responded to requests for comment on the detailed descriptions of the findings in this article.
The FAES group has been accused by the political opposition, the United Nations and working-class Venezuelans of carrying out extrajudicial executions on behalf of the president's government. Nicolas Maduro.
In July, a UN report denounced the "executions" of the FAES squad and called on Maduro to dissolve the group. The report does not detail specific cases of abuse or identify any of the people killed.
Maduro called the report "partial" and in a nationally televised speech defiantly shouted: "Long live the FAES!"
For months, Reuters, other media outlets, international agencies and human rights groups have reported on allegations surrounding the FAES group.
Now, after a four-month investigation, Reuters contrasts the accounts of dozens of witnesses, relatives of the dead and official documents related to the deaths with the squad's claims that its officers fired only after being attacked.
The investigation provides the most extensive account to date of the methods used by that special force to eliminate any threat that the Maduro government perceives.
This portrait of the FAES group, a force of about 1,500 agents, complements previous reports in which Reuters examined other forceful mechanisms used by Maduro to control his impoverished population: from a large cadre of high-ranking military loyalists to a special intelligence service. created with the help of security advisors imported from Cuba.
The FAES group is a tool designed by Maduro himself.
He created it in July 2017, when faced with an increase in violent crime due to the collapse of Venezuela's oil economy. The force was touted by authorities as a means to stem the wave of crime.
Instead, according to opposition politicians and former Maduro supporters, the FAES squad became a means of social control in the country's poor neighborhoods, shaken by a food crisis and unemployment, where criminal networks could provoke unrest and threaten the government hegemony.
The goal, in the words of a former member of Maduro's government, is to instill fear and prevent the streets of Venezuela from spawning a new political opposition.
"Maduro uses it when he needs a body that is completely at his command and that carries out any abuse, any barbarity or abuse," said Zair Mundaray, a former assistant to the Attorney General's Office, who left Venezuela after distancing himself from Maduro two years ago.
Arévalo's death shares many similar characteristics with other murders attributed to the FAES group. In all the cases reviewed, the police force followed a pattern, issuing a statement saying that an armed robber resisted authority and was killed in a shootout.
In each case, the official narrative was refuted by witness statements, crime scene photographs, or official death certificates.
Reuters investigated six deaths in Caracas, two in the neighboring state of Miranda, eight in the western entity of Lara and four in the state of Guárico, in the center of the country.
This story chronicles five of those deaths, and an accompanying graphic details six others. In those 11 cases and the other nine reviewed by Reuters, evidence suggests that FAES group officials:
•They struck him they tortured people before their death.
•They prepared or modified the site where the incident occurred, often to simulate that the killed people had previously attacked the police officers.
•They looted the houses involved in these events or took objects belonging to the deceased people.
In all cases, death certificates show the victims were fatally shot in the torso, injuries that doctors, morgue workers and current and retired police officers told Reuters are more consistent with executions than intense gunfights.
The wounds are "precise and in the same place," said the director of a trauma unit at a hospital where many people involved in clashes with the FAES group have been taken. The doctor, like many others consulted for this story, asked not to be identified.
Foreign forensic experts consulted by Reuters also expressed concern about the details and documentation surrounding the deaths, particularly photographs of gunshot wounds on 10 of the victims' bodies.
Derrick Pounder, a forensic pathologist from Cardiff, Wales, who has investigated torture and extrajudicial killings for groups like the United Nations and Amnesty International, said: "The number of gunshot wounds to the midline of the lower chest and upper abdomen is worrying, given that the deaths are said to have occurred in the dynamic context of shootings."
People familiar with the FAES squad's methods say that force relies on a nationwide network of neighborhood informants, often loyal to the ruling party, to select targets and plan operations.
He frequently persecutes poor men and youths with minor criminal records - marijuana possession and theft are two records mentioned in this story - or petty troublemakers who annoy local leaders.
The FAES group subsequently issues statements claiming to have eliminated "antisocial" or "highly dangerous" people.
"The community itself knows who is the one who steals, knows who is the one who sells drugs, knows who is the one who extorts," said María Silva, state leader in Lara of the Tupamaro Revolutionary Movement, a leftist militant organization that supports Maduro and provides local intelligence to authorities. "And by identifying them, they neutralize themselves."
The Venezuelan government does not publish official figures of deaths at the hands of the FAES group. Internal government data reviewed by Reuters shows that 5,280 people lost their lives to the entire country's police after "resisting authority" last year, a 160% increase since 2016, the year before the creation of the squadron.
Other data show higher figures. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a non-governmental organization based in Caracas that has links with universities throughout the country, counted 7,523 deaths under these circumstances last year.
The FAES group faces little external scrutiny. Dozens of witnesses, as well as current and retired police officers, told Reuters that forensic investigators allied with the FAES often approved the force's death reports, without full analysis, and backed their claims that officers acted in self-defense. .
In each case reviewed by Reuters, members of a victim's family said the only documentation provided by authorities was a death certificate and a brief report alleging their relative had died due to "resistance to authority."
"The documents cannot be taken at face value," said Nizam Peerwani, chief coroner for Tarrant County, Texas, and an adviser to Physicians for Human Rights, a group with which he has worked in conflict zones such as Rwanda, Bosnia , Afghanistan and Iraq. "Without autopsy reports, medical reports, X-rays, photos of internal injuries and other documentation, there is no way to corroborate what they are saying."
Human rights groups and families of the deceased have called for an investigation into the task force. But so far only a handful of court cases, all inconclusive, have investigated the allegations against FAES officers.
A homicide detective, who is not part of FAES but is involved in its work, told Reuters that the group is largely untouchable. The special force's case files related to violence, like the people subjected to it, "are sleeping eternal sleep," he said.
A history of violence
Crime has been growing in Venezuela since Hugo Chávez, Maduro's predecessor and mentor, became president in 1999. High oil prices fueled economic growth for much of the following decade, but changes imposed by Chávez allowed an increase in violence, critics say.
To promote his "socialist revolution," Chávez placed allies in courts and police positions who politicized the judiciary and law enforcement. The result, former police officers say, was a loss of professionalism. Many crimes were not investigated. Lawbreakers became emboldened.
By the time Chávez died in 2013, the homicide rate had quadrupled, becoming one of the highest on the planet: almost 80 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, or almost 20 times the figure recorded in the United States. United at that time.
Oil prices plummeted the following year. Venezuela's economy collapsed and crime skyrocketed even more.
Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader, eager to reassert his control, declared the fight against crime a priority.
"Let's stop the violence!" he said during political events. He ordered security forces, including the Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigation Corps (CICPC), to eliminate crime in poor neighborhoods.
The CICPC, once the country's main crime-fighting unit, soon began to receive criticism.
Foreshadowing the violence that would later accompany the FAES group's raids, the CICPC was singled out by human rights activists and the United Nations for excessive use of force.
But it was never as active as the FAES squadron would become. In fact, the CICPC was not even entirely loyal, as it included some veteran officers who opposed the Maduro government.
In June 2017, amid violent anti-Maduro protests, a CICPC officer named Óscar Pérez commandeered a police helicopter and fired grenades at government buildings. Pérez survived the episode and went into hiding.
The following month, the government announced the formation of the FAES group in a ceremony in Caracas. The special force - hand-picked by officials who support the government - would combat "terrorist gangs encouraged by the criminal right," according to Maduro. The opponents, he added, had turned Venezuela into "a theater of war."
The FAES group soon began to persecute the CICPC member. In January 2018, task force officers found Perez and killed him.
After that, active and retired officers of the CICPC and the National Police told Reuters that the body became little more than a forensic team, mainly serving the FAES group. CICPC officials did not return calls seeking comment.
The FAES squad began with about 640 officers, but later more than doubled its strength. Some are selected from existing precincts, others come directly from police academies. Recruits also come from "colectivos," or pro-government paramilitary groups known for harassing political opponents.
Rapid growth, his aggressive mandate and spotty training are a dangerous mix, critics say. "They are thrown onto the streets to work, without basic knowledge, and many times innocent people fall," said William Tovar, head of the main association of retirees of the National Police.
Members of the force have also earned a reputation for looting.
Like all public officials in Venezuela, FAES officers earn minuscule salaries, currently equivalent to around $12 a month, including $6 in food bonuses, which are continually eroded by hyperinflation. A family in Lara state showed Reuters a list of 20 items they said officers stole after killing their son, including a modem, an air conditioner and six rolls of toilet paper.
In its statement about the death in April, the FAES group did not mention entering the victim's home and said it shot the man in a garden after he opened fire on officers.
A senior commander of the FAES force said the group seeks to work responsibly. But he noted that sometimes some officers go too far as individuals. "There are no saints," said the commander.
"They are criminals"
José Arévalo grew up in Kennedy, the neighborhood where FAES group agents shot him. In the middle of this decade, he spent three years in prison for robbery, according to a court document. His family does not dispute that sentence. "When he made his mistake, he owned it, and he paid," said Pérez, his mother.
After his release in 2017, he worked briefly in Colombia, but returned last year and began working in an uncle's gold trade. Neighbors said he was popular and kind-hearted, helping elderly people carry gas cylinders in the neighborhood. But some of his friends still had criminal ties, his family said.
Last December, Arévalo posed for a photo with two of them on a rooftop. In his lap was a gun. He told his family that the gun was not his. Days later, his mother told Reuters that the family received a warning from an anonymous person: Arévalo had to be careful who he hung out with.
The morning of his death, FAES officers broke down the door and dragged Arévalo naked from the bedroom, his girlfriend said. They ordered her to give them her boyfriend's clothes and then forced everyone, except Arévalo, to leave the house.
In the video, an officer tells Arévalo - who was wearing only shorts - that they were looking for a car thief. He told him that the description of the thief did not match Arévalo, but he wanted information. "Stay still, we're not going to do anything to you," the officer told him.
The police officer ordered him to put on his shirt. The young man told them again that he knew nothing about the robbery. The video ends abruptly.
Peerwani, the Texas forensic consultant, told Reuters that clothing can be used to conceal smoke, gunpowder and other ballistic evidence that indicates a close-range shot. "There is no evidence, but there is a deductive conclusion," he said. "Why would a security officer make them put on a shirt and shoot them later?"
The girlfriend said she had been outside for about five minutes when the shots rang out. The next day, the FAES group published its statement, saying that it had killed Arévalo and the other four because they kept Kennedy "whipped." Reuters could not determine under what circumstances the others died.
Along with its statement, the FAES squad published the photo of Arévalo with the gun. He said the officers shot him in a part of the neighborhood that is half a kilometer away from the house. "Neutralized," he wrote in red letters over Arévalo's face.
Two weeks after the Kennedy raid, Juan Guaidó, leader of the opposition and head of the National Assembly, declared himself legitimate president of Venezuela. His attempt to remove Maduro from power, which has so far failed, convulsed the country. In Lara state, a hotbed of opposition, protests broke out.
On January 25, a dozen FAES group vehicles left Barquisimeto, the state capital, where the government had deployed hundreds of force officers last year. The convoy headed to El Tocuyo, a town where protesters had burned tires near the residence of the mayor, a Maduro supporter. Local authorities said opponents tried to set fire to the house.
In the middle of the afternoon, nine witnesses said that about 30 FAES officers raided Judith Cortez's home. Unemployed and with a disabled husband, Cortez lived with her sons, Anderson Torres, 18, and Jose Alfredo Torres, 27. The older boy had been arrested for marijuana possession a few years ago, the mother said, and the younger boy spent a night in prison in 2017 for joining a crowd that looted food in a market.
While Anderson was outside, sitting on a beer case drawing, FAES officers tore down the fence, Cortez told Reuters. They took her out of the house, took her two kilometers away and left her next to a bridge.
The agents grabbed Anderson, Jose Alfredo and Cristian Ramos, an 18-year-old friend and neighbor, according to a witness who remained near the home. They forced the men to kneel behind a shed and put their shirts over their heads, the witness said.
An officer, the witness added, beat them for about an hour with a metal pipe. "You are criminals," the officer shouted, according to the witness. Then another officer pulled out his gun and shot the three. Death certificates and photos of their bodies reviewed by Reuters confirm that gunshot wounds to the torso were the cause of death for each.
After the shooting, according to family and neighbors, officers stayed at the home into the evening. They fired dozens of additional shots with various weapons, marking a tree and an exterior wall of the house. They laughed and ate food from Cortez's refrigerator, these people said.
An officer walked to Ramos' house around 7 p.m. and asked Cristian's mother, Lucía Escalona, for a glass of water. "Madam, does this water have no poison?" the officer asked, Escalona told Reuters.
"I don't understand why they murdered my son," he added.
In a statement, the CICPC said police killed the three men because they had shot at officers. Kleyder Ferreiro, security secretary of Lara state, told reporters that the deceased were part of an "organized crime gang" and had been involved in burning tires.
Relatives of the three men denied the accusations. Ferreiro is no longer with the state government and declined to speak to Reuters about the incident. Gisela Rodríguez, the mayor whose house had been the target of the protests, did not respond to calls or messages seeking comment.
After the deaths, protests diminished in El Tocuyo. "It's like the whole city died," said Omar Escalona, Ramos' uncle.
At the end of July, a video circulated on social media showing a dozen unidentified young people shooting guns into the air in Altagracia de Orituco, a city of 50,000 inhabitants in Guárico state. The video, purportedly featuring members of a drug gang known as the "Tren del Llano," was widely seen as a challenge by the gang to authorities.
Reuters was unable to determine who authored the video.
On August 2, the FAES group posted a video on Instagram of heavily armed officers patrolling the city, saying the squad had launched a mission to bring "peace, tranquility and security" to the area.
Over the next eight days, the FAES group said it killed 18 suspected criminals who resisted arrest.
A CICPC officer, who saw the crime scenes and is familiar with El Tren del Llano, said he did not believe those killed had anything to do with the gang. The force officers - he added - removed the bodies before he and other CICPC colleagues arrived. The operation, which surprised even the local police, was a "media show" by the FAES group, the officer told Reuters.
The families of three of those killed, along with other witnesses, told Reuters that FAES group agents chose their targets on the street, without provocation, and then killed them several kilometers away.
Relatives denied that the three men were members of the gang. Reuters could not independently confirm whether they actually had any connection to the group or why they ended up being targeted by police.
One of the three men was Jor-Rafer Nares, 25, a mechanic who repaired trucks used by nearby farms to transport their crops. Nares was walking through the small town of San Rafael, south of Altagracia, on August 5 around 6 p.m. According to his mother, who was nearby, and another witness, a black van belonging to the FAES group approached and the officers ordered him to enter. The mother and the witness asked to remain anonymous.
Several hours later, Nares' mother said, she went to a local police station to ask about her son's whereabouts. An officer told him: "The FAES headquarters here is the morgue." He suggested that he go there to find out.
There, the mother said, she found the body.
He saw two gunshot wounds in his son's chest, another in the head, and deep bruises on his ribs and arms. His keys, debit card and a few dollars he was carrying were missing, he said. The head wound is visible in a photo taken at the morgue and reviewed by Reuters, the CICPC officer and a doctor.
A statement from the FAES force the next day said officers shot Nares after he fired at them in a rural area 6 kilometers north of where police allegedly approached him. The site described in the statement is the area where the Llano Train video was filmed.
Along with the statement, the FAES group included a photo of a blood stain and a shotgun on the ground. However, the gun was missing a trigger. The CICPC officer and another police officer told Reuters that the gun could not have been fired.
A death certificate reviewed by Reuters said Nares died at 9 p.m., three hours after witnesses said he got into the FAES group vehicle. The certificate lists the shots to his chest, but not the gunshot wound to his head.
Israel Nares, his father, did not see his son on the day of his death. Like many other relatives of the deceased, he believes that there is a lack of accountability regarding the FAES and its operations.
"There is an institutional and complicit silence here," he told Reuters.
(Additional reporting by Shaylim Valderrama in Caracas and Keren Torres in Barquisimeto; photo essay by Ivan Alvarado; editing by Vivian Sequera, Juana Casas and Carlos Serrano)
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