The Political Prisoners We All forget
Their faces have not appeared in any public manifestation portrayed in any banner, or brochures, or in social media. Their names were sentenced by someone with "revolutionary authority" that involved them in a case without conclusive evidence, even with assumptions that even though they were dismantled, that was worth little or nothing to reverse the aim, i.e. to criminalize the protest, frighten the protesters, leave someone behind bars. The official discourse that is determined to ensure that there are only political prisoners in Venezuela does not fit to them. These are ordinary Venezuelans who have ended up as political prisoners, particularly as forgotten political prisoners.
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He was
identified as alias "El Zeta", leader of the "terrorist cell KMKZ", alleged
activist of one of the most important parties of the Venezuelan opposition
(Primero Justicia) and one of the main attackers of the Francisco de Miranda air
base, in Caracas, in one of the days of protests against the Nicolás Maduro
regime from April to July 2017. "He is attracted to explosives. He used
pyrotechnic devices to attack officials of the security forces and the armed
forces. When captured, he was seized 5 nipples, 20 rockets and a pound of
gunpowder," said the police file.
Everything
was summed up in a 45-second presentation, as powerful as its presenter,
broadcasted on the state channel Venezolana de Televisión (VTV), in the program
"Con el mazo dando" run by the number two of Chavismo, Diosdado Cabello
Rondón. Alexander Sierra, the young labeled, was sentenced in that transmission,
despite the irregularities that according to his lawyers, surrounded the
case.
Sierra was
arrested on Saturday, June 24, 2017 at 5:30 PM, when he was leaving a restaurant
in Altamira, east of Caracas, with several friends, where they were celebrating
the birthday of a friend. A few meters from the premises, they were intercepted
by four SUVs. Several armed men, dressed in civilian clothes and without
identification get off the SUVs. One of them pointed at Alexander Sierra in the
chest. He dropped his bag on the floor, where he kept his chef's shirt, his cell
phone, headphones and personal items, and held his hands
up.
He was not
carrying pipe bombs, rockets or gunpowder, his lawyers say. He was not arrested
during a "Tun Tun Operation," as suggested in the televised video, a raid-type
operation named like that by Cabello, carried out during anti-government
protests in order to "search for terrorists" at their own
homes.
Sierra was
missing for 46 hours until he was found on Monday, June 26, in the afternoon, at
the Helicoide, one of the headquarters of the Bolivarian National Intelligence
Service (Sebin), the Venezuelan political police. On the eve, the officials at
the entrance of the tenebrous building always denied that he was there. That is
another reason why its defenders and relatives say that Sierra’s case follows
the pattern of other famous cases of political prisoners: an arbitrary
detention, which did not follow judicial procedures. A clear example of forced
disappearance, considered a crime under international law.
In those
hours of uncertainty, Alexander Sierra was repeatedly beaten to force him to
give names and give false testimony. The result of those beatings and others
that followed is a dislocated shoulder and a fracture in one hand for remaining
three days hanging from a
tube.

A few days after Alexander's arrest, another young man with similar characteristics arrived at the Sebin-Helicoide, which was presumed to be the person they were looking for because he was taken to the El Dorado prison. They suspect that Alexander’s arrest was a mistake.
"My son was
not killed because he is an artist and many people know him. The news that the
Sebin had taken him and was missing spread in the social media," says his
mother, Nancy Sierra. She always refers to Alexander as "Líryko," his actual
nickname, derived from his role as a rapper, which he combines with his
profession as a chef and theater actor. The 23-year-old also has an associate’s
degree in Graphic Design and was studying English when he was
arrested.
"Líryko"
was presented on June 27 before the military courts for allegedly attacking a
military base, owning military garments in his backpack along with pipe bombs,
rockets and gunpowder, being a terrorist, a "financier of the guarimbas" (street
barricades) and a “Primero Justicia” activist. "All that was completely false,
none of us is a member of any political party. He did not cause such damage, and
that day, he was not marching. He was wearing his 'I am a Liberator' t-shirt and
had gone to several marches. We do not agree with the regime that they want to
impose, and we did not only go to the marches this year, we also went to the
marches before," says his
mother.
His
attorney, Elenis Rodríguez, took the case as part of the non-governmental
organization Fundeci and managed to prove that he could not be charged for those
accusations. On the day of the preliminary hearing in military courts (scheduled
for August 9), Alexander Sierra's file only included disturbing peace and
resisting arrest charges, but that day, his attorney could not represent him.
Elenis Rodríguez was sworn on July 21, together with 32 other lawyers as judge
of the Supreme Court of Justice, by the National Assembly, in one of the last
actions of the Venezuelan parliament to try to stop the election of the
so-called National Constituent Assembly. Eight days after, Rodríguez asked for
asylum from the Chilean embassy in Caracas to avoid being judged for "treason
against the fatherland and usurpation."
Lawyer
Alejandra Tosta took over the case of Alexander Sierra since Rodríguez was
nominated as a judge. On August 9, she managed to get the military judge to
agree to send the file to an ordinary court. But since then, the case seems to
be in lethargy. The file took three months to reach civil jurisdiction. Nancy's
insistence materialized only on November 8. She could not expedite a simple
transfer of a folder from Fuerte Tiuna to the Palace of Justice, a 12-kilometer
journey that can take no more than 30 minutes on a motorcycle. "A court official
told me that the Plan República (Republic Plan) had not been able to take the
file. What does Plan República have to do with a file?" Nancy asks herself about
what seems to be nonsense. Was the military operation that protects the
elections in Venezuela, according to that employee, responsible for the judicial
delay?
Alexander
Sierra is one of those political prisoners who fell into oblivion. They are just
one more name in a list that gets shorter and longer based on the needs of the
Bolivarian regime. They do not capture the attention of the media and as time
passes, no one remembers them.
A few weeks
after his arrest, another young man who looks alike was taken to Helicoide for
the same reason (attack on La Carlota military air base). Alexander Sierra’s
mother and attorneys agree that he was arbitrarily detained because he looks
like someone suspected of attacking a military installation and is dark, with
curly Afro-type hair, and has one of his arms tattooed almost completely. He has
been in the Sebin for six months. It is said that the other young man, with
similar characteristics for his hair and tattoos, who was the person the
authorities were looking for, was sent the El Dorado prison, in the state of
Bolívar, in the south of the country. Alexander’s arrest was a mistake, the
mother suspects.
The
opportunity to be free before Christmas vanished the week of December 15. On
Tuesday 12, they informed Alexander that he would be transferred to the Palace
of Justice for his second hearing. It never happened. A senior official informed
detainees that Sebin had suspended transfers to courts until
February.
Political Approach
From the
protests of 2014 to December 15, 2017, the Venezuelan Penal Forum organization
has counted 12,007 political prisoners, 4,609 of which have received full
freedom while the other 61.6% remain criminalized —274 are incarcerated and
7,124 have been released with precautionary measures.
This list
of people who continue behind bars includes all those who meet the criteria that
classifies a detainee as a political prisoner —based on parameters and
definitions internationally validated by the OAS, the European Parliament and
the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights— whether they are defended
by Criminal Forum lawyers or not, says its director, Gonzalo
Himiob.
According
to this organization, there are three categories to identify a political
prisoner:
(a) when it is a political or social leader who is arrested or
convicted for individually representing a political threat to the Government;
(b) when the person is part of a social group target of intimidation (human
rights defenders, communicators, judges, military, social and political
activists, students); and (c) people who are used by the government to sustain a
campaign or a specific political narrative of power, with respect to certain
situations of national importance (they are not political or social leaders, nor
do they represent a key group). The most forgotten would be in this last
category, those who end up abandoned by the attorneys, the system, their family
or the society.
Himiob
clarifies that when the Criminal Forum does not take the defense of a political
prisoner it can happen that they cannot handle the information on that
particular case, and therefore, do not include it in the list they manage. "Not
because we do not want to, but because we do not have information at hand," he
adds.
Therefore,
there may be more detainees for political reasons than those indicated by this
organization, several of them unknown or relegated, and in some cases,
identified by human rights organizations. The cases of Magaly, Leybis, Héctor,
Yeison and Alexander are an
example.
No Pediatrician or Teacher
Magaly
Izarra is the only pediatrician in the town of Santo Domingo, in the state of
Mérida (Venezuelan Andes, west of the country). Leybis Uzcátegui is a teacher
with a postgraduate degree in Educational Management and coordinator of the only
high school in that town. Both were held for 60 days in the dungeons of the
scientific police (Cicpc) of the state, and another 30 days in the Penitentiary
Center of Los Andes without having the preliminary hearing that they are
entitled to by law, without having gone to trial and without receiving any
sentence.
Both were
arrested after a complaint filed by the mayor of Santo Domingo, Idania Quintero,
of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, for participating in a protest in
the town against the National Constituent Assembly (ANC). They were charged with
seven crimes: obstruction of public road, association to commit a crime,
instigation of hatred, slight injuries to people in the community, injuries and
robbery to the sentry (military officer), and terrorist
financing.

The political repression in Santo Domingo, Mérida moorland, has included aggressions of colectivos (pro-government armed gangs), and the persecution of protesters by the former mayor of the Psuv
On July 21,
the doctor and the teacher participated, along with several people, in a
peaceful protest that even had police protection. For minutes, they stood in the
middle of the road with placards against the elections of the ANC, and then
returned to the sidewalk.
There were
no more than 20 people; there were no confrontations until Mayor Quintero
appeared with about 50 people. The witnesses say that they took away their
banners and whistles with a hostile attitude, threw stones at them and ran them
out of the place. At least two of the members of the official delegation were
armed. They even asked the police who were in charge of the protest to take
everyone into custody, but the official did not comply with the order, recalls
Omar Cardona, a relative of the doctor and the teacher.
In the
midst of the struggles, one of the mayor's companions wounded a 21-year-old
young man in the lower back with a knife. Magaly Izarra helped him while they
waited to transfer him to the hospital. The rest of the protesters ran to a
nearby house to take refuge from the attacks. Once inside, the people
accompanying the mayor, who are part of the colectivos, the clash forces
of the chavista regime, began to throw stones at the house and detonate
mortars.
What
happened next was almost an uprising of the people of Santo Domingo. When the
information of what was happening spread, around 200 people came out to defend
the demonstrators and managed to get the group led by the mayor to retreat to
the mayor's office. Hence, the people who were inside the house were able to
leave, including Leybis, who went home.
People
gathered in front of the mayor's office to protest for what had happened.
Someone called the National Guard to help them. Suddenly, several officers
appeared on the scene, aggressive, but not very well equipped, according to
witnesses. As soon as the repression began, they ran out of ammunition and
vehicles. The crowd chased the guard and captured one of them and beat him hard,
stripped him and let him go. The confrontation ceased. Neither Magaly (56 years
old) nor Leybis (52 years old) were in the events that took place in front of
the Mayor's office or in the beating of the guard. Magaly accompanied the young
man to the hospital in Mérida, 2 hours from Santo Domingo, because he was badly
injured.
A month
after these events, the Corp for Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations
(CICPC), raided the homes of some of the protesters and served notices. Magaly
and Leybis were in the group and traveled to Mérida to complete the process.
They have been arrested since
then.

The only pediatrician in Santo Domingo (Mérida) was arrested along with Leybis Uzcátegui, a teacher, coordinator of the only high school in the town. They spent 3 months in prison, are still criminalized and the trial was deferred until April 2018
In
mid-October, they were transferred to the Penitentiary Center of Los Andes. They
were received at the prison with blows and savage aggressions, to the point that
they asked their daughters and relatives not to visit them. Both were identified
by the mayor of Santo Domingo as aggressors of the National Guard, along with
the other men arrested, even though the victim herself declared that they did
not participate in his beating.
The
families of Leybis and de Magaly chose a private lawyer to defend them. At the
end of November, they left the penitentiary center but with precautionary
measures; release on monthly recognizance and prohibition to leave the state of
Mérida. They are still waiting for the trial because it was postponed until
April 20, 2018. Meanwhile, the doctor tries to resume her activities after the
town of Santo Domingo had no pediatrician for four months.
Twenty-seven years
In February
2014, when the first protests against President Nicolás Maduro occurred, there
were two deaths in the state of Lara (center-west of Venezuela). Héctor Cusati
Martínez was identified as responsible for the death of Alexis Martínez (58
years old), brother of the then Psuv Deputy to the National Assembly, Francisco
Martínez.
Alexis
Martínez died on Hernán Garmendia Avenue in Barquisimeto, capital of the
province, when he was shot in the chest while removing debris and barricades
that were placed on the road by demonstrators. I was not alone. Alexis Martinez
arrived to that avenue along with other people that the protesters identified as
colectivos, just after some tanks of the National Guard came to end the
protest of the neighbors.
"As the man
who died was from the Government, they came looking for a culprit," says Amada
Martínez, mother of Héctor Cusati, three years after the
event.
Héctor
Cusati was a private escort and had a legal firearm bearing. Based on the
investigations of the scientific police, the bullet that killed Martinez matched
the shells of Cusati’s gun. Saved for that coincidence, it could not be proved
in the course of the investigations that Héctor Cusati fired his gun against
Martínez. His file is flawed, reiterates his mother. "One person, a cooperating
patriot, incriminated him," she adds. That figure of informer -not provided for
in the Venezuelan laws- began to be used by the Government in 2014. It is an
unidentified person who denounces someone and does not have to appear in court
to give statement.
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The expert
examination in the apartment of Héctor Cusati, who lived on an 11th floor with
his wife, his 8-year-old daughter and his 61-year-old mother, turned out
negative. No gunpowder was found in the apartment, which dismantled the version
he had fired from the balcony of his home, a fact that was also ruled out by the
distance between the apartment on an 11th floor and the place where the brother
of the Psuv deputy fell. The police finally determined that the shot came from
80 centimeters away from Martínez. Héctor Cusati was not on the street when that
happened, but on the fifteenth floor of his building looking for his daughter in
a neighbor's apartment. Her grandmother had left her there to protect her from
the tear gas that the National Guard was throwing.
Thirty-six
people testified against Héctor Cusati. There were contradictions in most of the
testimonies, his mother says. It could not be verified that Héctor Cusati was
firing near where the brother of the deputy of the government party was shot. At
the trial, the possibility that Cusati lend his weapon to another person arose,
but that version could not be proven.
This case
was taken from the beginning by a private lawyer who recommended the family not
to give statements to the media. He even suggested his client to plead guilty
and admit the facts so that his sentence would be reduced. Héctor Cusati did not
accept. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison and has been held in the Uribana
prison for three years. In order to pay the attorney's fees, the family had to
sell the apartment where they lived.
Several
human rights defenders identify a pattern that connects the cases of people
prosecuted for the protests that took place in 2014 and 2017. "There are private
lawyers who neglect legal defense. There is no continuity, or they convince
their representatives to plead guilty so that they receive an express sentence
to be released from the responsibility of a litigation that could extend for 4
or 5 years," explains Andrés Colmenares, Funpaz (Strength, Union, Justice,
Solidarity and Peace civil association) general
coordinator.
Gonzalo
Himiob recalls the case of Víctor Ugas, who pleaded guilty to be free of the
pressure quickly. They gave him a release card, but they have not released him
yet. "When a court forces you to plead guilty is to show that nobody is in
prison for political events. However, the side effect is that the authority does
not honor its word and does not release you."
Héctor's
case is in the appeal phase, now without the assistance of private lawyers.
Amada does not know if her son is on the list of political prisoners managed by
the Criminal Forum, but wants them to include him. On March 6, 2014, when Héctor
was arrested, hours later, President Nicolás Maduro referred to him on national
television. "This boy, Héctor Doménico, why did he become a homicide at 20 years
old? Oh, because of the hate speech." Maduro not only made a mistake when
calculating Héctor Cusati's age. He also said that he had confessed a crime. It
was a lie.
“Media” Profile
There are
several political prisoners in Sebin who are indigent. Little is known about
them. There are also cases like that of Yeison Rodríguez, a 20-year-old boy who
was selling water in the protests that took place in Caracas between April and
July, who was arrested for knowing a group of protesters who used to face the
National Guard with shields and helmets, known as "The
Resistance".
His
detention occurred on June 10 in Guarenas, after leaving the funeral of Neomar
Lander, the 17-year-old teenager who died by the impact of a tear gas bomb on
his chest. Four men got out of an Aveo (car model), approached him and forced
him into the car under threat. They took him to the Helicoide. The director of
the Sebin, Gustavo González López, was in charge of spreading information about
Yeison’s detention through his account on Twitter. He was marked as one of the
"organizers and executors of terrorist actions in
Caracas."
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González
López showed alleged evidence incriminating Yeison, consisting of audio and text
messages obtained from his cell phone. In one of them, another young man tells
him about some shields that he would take to one of the marches, and a
conversation he had with an official from the government of Miranda who was
helping him to get a job as a rescuer. Sebin argues that this conversation is
proof that the state government -run until October by the member of the
opposition Henrique Capriles Radonski- financed Yeison for him to organize
"terrorist actions".
In the
first presentation hearing, days after his arrest, the young man only had a
public defender. After six months in Sebin, he has not attended his first
preliminary hearing, has no assigned prosecutor or date of his next presentation
before the military justice, which accuses him with charges of treason,
rebellion and theft of military equipment. The assistance of lawyers has been
intermittent, and even those who have tried to assume his defense have been
denied access to the file.
Yeison
comes from a humble family. He does not have parents, his grandmother was his
main support and since he was taken to the Helicoide, she was paying attention
to his case, looking for lawyers, going to court, but months later, she fell
ill. On one of her trips to Caracas to visit her grandson, she had an accident
boarding the railroad that connects the capital with Valles del Tuy. Both her
legs were broken and she has not been able to walk again.
Gonzalo
Himiob affirms that every political case must be considered and approached from
three variables: legal, media and political. The first variable is to analyze
all the legal elements of the case to be able to hold that the case is about an
arbitrary detention for political reasons. The second variable has to do with
"raising the media profile" of a case, because sometimes it is very important to
do so, but sometimes it is better to lower it, says Himiob, and gives as an
example the group of indigents who are political prisoners, detained because
they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. "It is not that we neglect them,
but we do not raise their profile because it is more difficult. They do not have
any relatives to speak for them. And in general, we never raise the profile of a
case if the lawyer or the family does not agree. We respect
that."
The
political variable has to do with how it is tried, inside and outside the
country, to raise the political cost of these cases to the Government.
"Political prison is not only a legal issue; it is a cost-benefit issue for the
Government. Sometimes they accuse us of using the power of media, but insofar as
the profile of a case is raised and thus the political cost to the Government,
that person has more possibilities of being released. You will not succeed if
you do not handle these three variables," adds Himiob.
But not all
political prisoners and their families want to be assisted by the Criminal
Forum, and the arrests for political reasons have not stopped. In December 2016,
the political police arrested the executives of company Credicard for allegedly
being responsible for a computer attack that collapsed the point of sale network
in the country, and for being accused by the Government of "treason to
motherland." Five executives of the company are being tried by the military
justice.
More
recently, the escape of metropolitan mayor Antonio Ledezma, arrested in February
2015, who was under house arrest, caused the arrest of more than 20 people,
including the janitor of the building where Ledezma lived, the president of the
condominium board, a representative of the private company in charge of
providing the security cameras service to the building, and workers of the
Metropolitan Mayor’s Office of Caracas. Most of them were released a few days
after being detained by Sebin, but Carmen Andarcia, 61, director of Mayor’s
Office Administration, was left behind bars (in the
Helicoide).
It is not
necessary for a protest to be held for arbitrary detentions for political
reasons to occur. The revolving door is still active, and a message from Gonzalo
Himiob in his media illustrates it. "As of August 11, 2017, we registered 676
political prisoners in Venezuela. From August 11 to November 19, the liberation
of 476 has been achieved, but in parallel 167 people have been arrested," he
wrote on November 25. Meanwhile, the forgotten ones remain in the cells.