Covering events from January - December 2000
VENEZUELA
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Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
Head of state and government: Hugo Chávez Frías |
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Several people were reported
to have ''disappeared'' or been extrajudicially
executed by the security forces during rescue
operations following catastrophic floods in
December 1999. Scores of cases of torture and
ill-treatment were reported. Chronic prison
overcrowding was eased by the release of
prisoners awaiting trial, but prison conditions
remained poor. Hundreds of prisoners were killed
during the year, the majority by fellow inmates.
Hundreds of refugees fleeing political violence
in Colombia were denied a proper hearing to
determine if they would be at risk if returned
to their country.
Background
In July, Hugo Chávez Frías of the
Movimiento de la V República (MVR), Movement of the Fifth Republic,
was re-elected President. The MVR also won an
outright majority in congress. High crime rates
continued to generate debate. In June the
Ministry of the Interior and Justice proposed a
bill reforming the Criminal Code of Criminal
Procedures (COPP), which would give the police
wider powers to detain criminal suspects without
a judicial order. Critics of the bill argued
that it was unconstitutional and violated
international human rights standards. In
November the National Assembly approved a law
allowing President Chávez to govern by decree
for a period of 12 months. The law included
matters affecting the administration of criminal
justice.
Human rights and the
Vargas floods
In late December 1999, the state of Vargas
suffered torrential rain and floods in which up
to 50,000 people died. In the aftermath of the
disaster, journalist Vanessa Davies and the
human rights organization Provea published
reports claiming that several people had ''disappeared''
or been extrajudicially executed by members of
the security forces in Vargas. President Hugo
Chávez reacted by calling on witnesses to come
forward, but accused Provea of publishing a ''suspicious
and superficial'' report. Within a week the
Offices of the Attorney General and of the
Ombudsman announced that they had opened
investigations into the allegations. By the end
of the year only one person had been brought to
justice and convicted for these violations.
Marco Antonio Monasterio and Oscar José Blanco Romero ''disappeared'' on 21 December 1999, during the flood rescue operations. They were reportedly detained by the army in the neighbourhood of Valle del Pino and transferred into the custody of the Directorate of Intelligence and Criminal Prevention Services (DISIP). By the end of the year their whereabouts had not been established. José Francisco Rivas Fernández and Roberto Hernández apparently suffered a similar fate. Luis Rafael Bastardo was extrajudicially executed on 25 December. A National Guard corporal admitted to shooting him deliberately and was sentenced in September to 10 years in prison.
Torture/ill-treatment
Torture and ill-treatment continued to be
reported; most cases involved police officers
beating victims.
In August Ronny Yosmar Aquino and Alexis Medina, two transgendered friends, were detained without a judicial order in the city of Valencia, Carabobo state. They were reportedly forced to undress in the street and severely beaten. They were then held in incommunicado detention without access to a lawyer, doctor or their families. The detentions took place in the context of a campaign of intimidation directed at the transgendered community, during which José Luis Nieves was fatally shot on 29 July while recovering from wounds inflicted in an earlier shooting by a state police officer.
Prison conditions
The authorities claimed that the perennial
crisis of overcrowding in Venezuela's prisons
had been ameliorated as a result of the
implementation of the COPP in July 1999 which
allowed for the conditional release of prisoners
awaiting trial.
In March the vice-president of the government's
Commission on the Functioning and Restructuring
of the Judicial System claimed that the prison
population had been reduced from 25,000 to some
14,000 inmates, and that inmate killings had
diminished. However, 460 prisoners were reported
to have been killed by guards or fellow
prisoners between October 1999 and September
2000, a small reduction compared to the previous
12 months.
In April, following a visit to several prisons,
a European Union delegation was reported to have
expressed concern about prison conditions,
describing them as ''very hard and limited,
because the inmates control them...as it is the
only way they can survive the violence''.
Refugees
Scores of people fleeing political violence in
Colombia were forcibly returned. The Venezuelan
authorities failed to provide them with access
to a full and fair asylum procedure to identify
those at risk of human rights violations. The
authorities argued that those fleeing the
violence were not refugees, but ''displaced
people in transit'', and therefore did not fall
within the terms of the UN Refugee Convention.
However, many of those fleeing the violence
stressed that their lives would be at risk if
they were to return home. The UN High
Commisioner for Refugees stated that there was a
need for an official refugee service and that it
was collaborating with the authorities to
implement one.
Impunity
In March, a friendly settlement was reached
between the government and relatives of 41
people killed by the security forces in November
1992 in the Retén de Catia. The case had been
referred to the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights. Of some 300 cases of human rights
abuses registered by local non-governmental
organizations between 1985 and 1999, only 40 had
been resolved as a result of judicial
proceedings. Of at least 200 cases of torture
reported since 1995, in none had those
responsible been brought to justice. The
authorities failed to open a prompt judicial
investigation into allegations that Peru's
Ambassador to Venezuela, army general Julio
Salazar Monroe, had been responsible for crimes
against humanity. He returned to Peru, claiming
to be suffering from ill health.
AI country report
Venezuela: Protecting human rights - the task is not yet over (AI Index: AMR 53/008/2000)