Venezuelan ‘death squads’ kill thousands

Venezuelan ‘death squads’ kill thousands

Venezuelan ‘death squads’ killed thousands and covered it up, the UN says

Government’s ‘Operations for the Liberation of the People’ allegedly responsible for more than 9,000 killings

Death squads have returned to Latin America,: A new UN report says government forces in Venezuela have killed at least 6,854 people since the start of 2018, and cites accounts by independent groups that put the total above 9,000.

To be clear, it’s the witnesses who call them “death squads”: They describe Special Action Forces, masked and dressed in black, careening into towns in pickup trucks with no license plates — and proceeding to break into homes, molesting women and separating out young men, then executing them. Afterward, the goons stage a scene to make it look like their victims were resisting arrest.

Special Action Forces described by witnesses as “death squads” killed 5,287 people in 2018 and another 1,569 by mid-May of this year, in what are officially termed by the Venezuelan government “Operations for the Liberation of the People,” UN investigators reported.

Venezuelan special forces have carried out thousands of extrajudicial killings in the past 18 months and then manipulated crime scenes to make it look as if the victims had been resisting arrest, the United Nations said in a report detailing wide-ranging government abuses targeting political opponents.

Laying out a detailed description of a lawless system of oppression, the report says the actual number of deaths could be much higher.

It cites accounts by independent groups who report more than 9,000 killings for “resistance to authority” over the same period.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that these killings constitute extrajudicial executions committed by the security forces,” the investigators said.

The government calls this “Operations for the Liberation of the People.” UN human-rights officials said it’s in fact “an instrument to instill fear in the population.”

On top of the death squads, the report flags thousands of political arrests and widespread torture of political prisoners, including waterboarding, electric shocks, suffocation with plastic bags and rape.

Dictator Nicolás Maduro gave unusual access to the UN investigators, apparently because they were led by UN human-rights chief Michelle Bachelet, who as president of Chile declined to openly criticize the regime’s turn to repression before she left that office last year.

Bachelet plainly understands that others need to tell the truth about Maduro’s reign of blood, which has forced more than 4 million citizens to flee the country. Too bad so many American progressives who once sang the praises of the Venezuelan regime seem indifferent to its horrors now.

“I sincerely hope the authorities will take a close look at all the information included in this report and will follow its recommendations. We should all be able to agree that all Venezuelans deserve a better life,” she said.

The report, which UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet will present to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Friday, delivers a scathing critique of President Nicolás Maduro’s embattled government and its handling of Venezuela’s deepening political and economic crisis.