Nicolás Maduro appeals to the elite police unit facing an uncertain future

Meridith Kohut contributed to this report.

CARACAS – The agents broke into Yonaiker Ordóñez's house, aged 18, on Sunday morning, while the Venezuelan boy was asleep. The men, armed with handguns and helmets, seized the teenager and forced him to change rooms without explaining why they were there, according to the young man's family.

"They took him in the back and killed him," said Yonaiker's sister, Yengly González.

The operation resembled a police raid against people accused of gang membership and terrorizing poor neighborhoods in Venezuela. Except that the only crime attributed to Yonaiker, according to his family, is this one days before his demonstration to protest against the government of Nicolás Maduro.

Maduro faces the biggest challenge of his authoritarian government. Protesters are on the streets, an opposition leader has been sworn in as president, a considerable number of foreign governments have backed this claim and the US government of Donald Trump has increased the pressure by removing the pressure. Maduro access to revenue from the sale of oil in the United States, the main source of money for the government.

Faced with the crisis, Maduro severely reacted: he deployed the security forces to dispel any dissension in operations that alarmed even some of the president's traditional supporters.

However, although the armed forces have publicly stated that they support Maduro, they have not taken on this role of managing protesters as in the past. Two months ago, during chaotic protests against Maduro, the Bolivarian National Guard was largely responsible for putting an end to the demonstrations with batons and rubber bullets, while many participants in these protests were prosecuted for trial. military.

On this occasion, in a possible sample of the division of loyalties within the armed forces, almost all acts of repression were entrusted to a police unit recently created by Maduro to carry out raids against gangs in the neighborhoods.

Now, this unit known as Special Action Forces, or FAES, seems to target political opponents. Its agents were deployed in the poor neighborhoods that once supported Maduro, and today they have turned their backs, according to human rights groups, former government officials and legislators.

According to militant groups, some 40 people have been killed in recent days during the last demonstrations against Maduro, many of them during FAES night raids.

"The FAES has become very involved in the crackdowns," said Delsa Solórzano, a legislator of the opposition National Assembly, who has met with victims of recent raids.

Human rights advocates point out that the role of the special police unit is particularly alarming because the FAES was created to end gangs or save hostages, not to control the crowd that manifest peacefully.

"The consequence is that when they go there, mbadacres occur," said Keymer Ávila, a researcher at the Provea organization. "They were not created to handle demonstrations."

However, Cliver Alcalá, a former military general who broke Maduro's ranks, said he was not surprised that the government turned to the special police forces. He explained that it is because the Maduro government can no longer depend on the armed forces facing the protesters, as it happened in 2017.

According to Alcalá, many members of the National Guard who had been deployed in the streets in recent years have not returned to work because their salaries have lost their value. Venezuela's inflation, the highest in the world, decimated these wages.

In addition, the general added, the government fears that the armed forces will show up in public. this happened on January 21, when members of the National Guard were arrested after declaring to be loyal to the opposition in a video. There have been other small uprisings that have also been repressed.

Human rights groups say that very little is known about the FAES, including the names of their commanders and those who have been invited to join their ranks.

The unit patrolled Venezuela with a completely black uniform; the identity of the members is unknown because they wear hoods. A person who previously worked in the Venezuelan government and asked to remain anonymous because he said he is now being persecuted by the authorities calculated that there were 1,500 police officers in the FAES. It is common to see them in Caracas, mounted on motorcycles with which they land on the slopes of the mountain, armed with badault rifles and bulletproof vests.

"They cover their faces because they want impunity," said Luis Izquiel, a criminologist from Caracas who teaches at the Central University of Venezuela. "They know that they violate human rights."

The FAES were created in 2017, when Maduro fought to regain control of the poorer neighborhoods that had been left in the hands of criminal gangs.

The government had led joint raids by police and armed forces on the so-called Operation People's Liberation Operation, which became very bloody: in two years of work, the authorities indicated that there was had more than 500 dead.

Faced with growing opposition to these raids, Maduro changed course and created the special unit tasked with this task.

FAES members have learned to be loyal to the president; They were trained at the National Experimental Security University, an institution founded by Hugo Chávez, Maduro's predecessor.

Izquiel said agents receive only six months of training from ideology professors who only promote loyalty to the Maduro government.

The FAES unit had been involved in several acts of repression even before the current protests.

Among them, the discouragement of Óscar Pérez, a rebel police pilot who took control of a helicopter in 2017 and drew attention by opening fire on government buildings while sporting a banner inviting Venezuelans to rise up against Maduro.

For months, he attacked several military bases and made fun of the government on social networks.

In an interview with the New York Times, shortly before his death, Perez claimed that a pro-Maduro paramilitary group, so-called collectives, had infiltrated the FAES to exert a direct influence . This was a strong accusation, suggesting that civilian mercenaries appeared as uniformed police officers.

On the day of Perez's death, the leader of a collective, Heiker Vásquez, also died when he fought with FAES agents who fought Pérez.

The uniformed members of the police unit were also seen and captured in photographs during Vásquez's funeral procession, as well as known members of his collective, Tres Raícez. In Venezuela, the collectives come from fervent support groups in Chávez.

"If they are not the FAES in these raids, they are collectives dressed in FAES uniform," said Assembly member, Ms. Solorzano, adding that she believed that pro-government groups had received weapons to ask them to fight alongside the officers.

Julio Reyes, an opposition activist, said that on Sunday, January 27, he had been attacked by the Tacagua Vieja district police unit.

Shortly after getting up, while he and his wife were preparing coffee, he heard about the arrival of motorcycles in front of his home. He said that six men entered his home, forced the family to sit in an armchair and pointed a gun at him and his wife. Reyes said that they left after a while.

"I had the habit of saying," Brother, drop the weapon, "said Reyes. "You're not talking to a criminal, you're talking to a parent who works from Monday to Saturday."

Family members of Ordóñez, who were murdered the same day, said that they had never received any explanation about the raid on their home or the death of the young man.

His sister, Yengly Gonzalez, said that he had asked a FAES officer who was patrolling the area why he had been shot and that he had replied that Ordóñez had died during a confrontation with the army. 39 unit after which he had tried to escape.

But Gonzalez said it made no sense, as FAES officers fired a few rubber bullets at his brother a few days earlier during a demonstration, and because of the pain he could barely walk.

On Wednesday, January 30, at the funeral, the body of Ordóñez rested on a wooden coffin carrying the butcher's paper. His family members knelt beside the casket while he was in a truck from where he was driven into the grave.

"It can not be that the government forces you to be what they want you to be," Gonzalez said. "They put you in prison or you died."

* Copyright: 2019 The New York Times