Venezuela sweeps up dissenters after disputed vote

CARACAS, Venezuela — Hundreds of people gathered several days ago outside a detention center in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, huddled around lists of prisoners.

Eager for information about their detained loved ones, many told remarkably similar stories of sons, daughters and siblings arrested riding motorbikes, walking home from work, coming out of a bakery or stopping by a relative’s house in the days following Venezuela’s disputed presidential election.

The Venezuelan government has mounted a furious campaign against anyone challenging the declared results of the vote, unleashing a wave of repression that human rights groups say is unlike anything the country has seen in recent decades.

“I have been documenting human rights violations in Venezuela for many years and have seen patterns of repression before,” said Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, president of the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy and research organization. “I don’t think I have ever seen this ferocity.”

The country’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, claimed victory in the July 28 election, but the government has yet to provide any vote tallies to support the announcement. The opposition, on the other hand, released tallies showing that its candidate had won in a landslide.

The Venezuelan government says it has arrested more than 2,000 people for participating in protests disputing the election results.

People were taken both in indiscriminate roundups, amid the protests, and later from their homes in targeted arrests, as the government launched what it called “Operation Knock-Knock.”

“Maximum punishment! Justice!” Maduro said at a rally last Saturday. “There will be no forgiveness this time!”

The surge in detentions is particularly alarming, rights groups say, because some arrests came after the president urged his supporters to snitch on their neighbors, using a government app that was supposed to be used to report issues like downed power lines.

“It’s difficult to express in words the intensity and the indiscriminate nature of this wave of arrests,” said Gonzalo Himiob, vice president of the Penal Forum, a human rights organization tracking arrests since the elections.

The people who have been arrested will be charged with inciting hatred and terrorism, the government said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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