Venezuelan protesters face military trials
Such prosecutions violate law, Human Rights Watch says.
CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan university professor Sergio Contreras went to demonstrate in central Caracas against President Nicolas Maduro’s government last week and never came home.
After a couple of days of searching for him, his frantic wife, Mariana, caught a glimpse of him being transported to a military base before a closed tribunal charged him with treason and stealing a police firearm.
The accusations — which Mariana Contreras described as absurd, saying her husband is a nonviolent social activist — could bring a sentence of several years in prison. Neither she nor her lawyer has seen or communicated with her husband for days.
Sergio Contreras, who teaches at Andres Bello Catholic University, is one of an estimated 2,300 protesters arrested since demonstrations broke out across the country in late March.
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets over the last seven weeks to protest food shortages, rising crime and anti-democratic measures taken by Maduro, including the suspension of elections, neutering the powers of the National Assembly and the barring of opposition candidates from running for office.
The protests have led to frequent violent clashes with police and the national guard in which at least 43 have died and thousands have been injured.
Many of those detained are, like Contreras, being subjected to military justice in violation of Venezuelan law and held incommunicado, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
“It’s been an exhausting road because we have yet to receive any official information on his situation,” Mariana Contreras said during an interview at her home in Caracas’ San Bernardino neighborhood.
She said images of her 38year-old husband’s arrest sent to her via social media show police dragging him away by the neck. She insisted that authorities must have planted a gun and explosives on her husband.
“Who knows how because video taken during his arrest shows him speaking into a megaphone with nothing but the jeans and a T-shirt he was wearing,” she said.
“I can’t stop thinking of the picture of him getting thrown to the ground. I don’t want our 8-year-old son to see it.”
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has condemned Maduro’s “militarization of the management of the protests,” referring to the imprisonment of hundreds of detainees in military installations and their being subjected to summary military justice without the presence of family or attorneys.
Based on interviews with lawyers and family members, Human Rights Watch this week accused the Maduro government of subjecting detainees “to physical and other abuses that may in some cases amount to torture at the moment of arrest or during detention.”