Nearly 7,000 people have been killed during security operations in Venezuela in the past year and a half, the UN said on Thursday, warning that many of the killings likely constituted “executions.”
In a report, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said that the Venezuelan government had registered at least 6,856 people killed in alleged confrontations with state forces since the beginning of last year.
“The incidence of alleged extrajudicial killings by security forces ... has been shockingly high,” Bachelet’s office said in a statement.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Last year, the government registered 5,287 killings, purportedly for “resistance to authority” during such operations, and between Jan. 1 and May 19 this year, another 1,569 similar killings were registered, the report said.
The numbers were provided by the Venezuelan government to the UN agency in response to a request made following a visit to the country by a technical team in March, spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told reporters, adding that this was the first time the UN had published the figures.
Bachelet, who last month visited Venezuela, warned in her report that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that many of these killings constitute extrajudicial executions committed by the security forces.”
The report, which Bachelet was yesterday to present to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, especially pointed a finger at the Venezuelan National Police’s Special Actions Force (FAES).
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights “is concerned that the authorities may be using FAES, and possibly other security forces, as part of a policy of social control,” the report said.
“These killings warrant immediate investigation to ensure accountability of perpetrators and guarantees of non-recurrence,” the report said, urging Caracas to “dissolve FAES.”
Bachelet also called on the government to “establish an impartial and independent national mechanism, with the support of the international community, to investigate extrajudicial executions during security operations, ensure accountability of perpetrators and redress for victims.”
Thursday’s report also decried a wide range of other grave rights breaches in Venezuela, which is caught in an economic crisis and a political standoff between Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government and Venezuelan National Assembly President Juan Guaido.
The report concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that grave violations of economic and social rights, including the rights to food and health, have been committed in Venezuela.”
It also said that “as the economic crisis deepened, the authorities began using social programs in a discriminatory manner, based on political grounds, and as an instrument of social control.”
The report found that sanctions imposed on Venezuela, while not responsible for the country’s woes, were “exacerbating further the effects of the economic crisis, and thus the humanitarian situation.”
It charged that Venezuela’s government over the past decade, and especially since 2016, had implemented a strategy “aimed at neutralizing, repressing and criminalizing political opponents and people critical of the government.”
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