SPECIAL FORCES PUNISH ANTI-MADURO PROTESTERS.

• The crack of the gunshot echoed down the narrow concrete stairs and off the crumbling hotchpotch block walls closing in over Jhonny Godoy as he slumped to his death.

Two days earlier, the 29-year-old was running through his neighbourhood with a wide grin, draped in a Venezuelan flag. “Maduro get out, you son of a bitch,” he cried in the road outside his home, in a defiant video uploaded to social media.

Then the feared Special Action Forces (FAES) police unit came knocking.

“The people who killed him were wearing uniforms and had ski masks,” said a family member who did not want to be identified out of fear of more violence.

They dragged Godoy out amid screams of protest from his mother, slammed the door shut, and shot him dead. Family members and neighbours heard him begging for his life in the seconds before the gun was fired.

Godoy is one of 40 people to have been killed in such circumstances since protests shook Venezuela this year, the UN estimates. More than 900 have been jailed in a crackdown on political dissent that has left a tense silence on the streets.

Residents of working-class barrios that rose up, such as Godoy’s, are watched over by FAES operatives lurking in the shadows as the crisis in Venezuela hurtles towards another climax. The regime is bracing itself for opposition groups to defy security forces and hand-deliver U.S. aid that is stacking up on the border.

But the fear imposed by President Nicolas Maduro’s special forces could prevent working-class areas, where the country’s crisis has hit hardest, from demanding that aid be let in.

“We’re all going hungry here, but in the end nobody will say anything any more, because we see what happens,” another of Godoy’s family said.

Maduro’s authority is being challenged by Juan Guaido, who on Jan 23 declared himself the country’s legitimate president amid a nationwide uprising.

Increasingly isolated at home and abroad, Maduro has relied heavily on the FAES, created in 2017 to fight crime and terrorism, to prevent working-class communities from showing support for Guaido. Agents from the group arrived at the opposition leader’s home on Jan. 31 looking for his wife and daughters; Guaido called it an attempt to intimidate.

Erika Guevara-rosas, the Amnesty International Americas director, said: “The authorities under Nicolas Maduro are trying to use fear and punishment to impose a repulsive strategy of social control against those who demand change.”