“Let’s go get them!” shouted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from the balcony of the Miraflores Palace, who has initiated a campaign of denunciation targeting those who committed “violence” during the unrest that followed his contested re-election on July 28.
The government has set up a mobile phone application and a telephone line for the much-feared DGCIM (Directorate of Military Counter-Intelligence) to flush out “traitors” and “terrorists,” as Mr. Maduro calls them.
According to him, some 2,200 people were arrested during and after the protests, which left 24 dead according to human rights organisations.
The National Electoral Council (CNE) ratified Mr Maduro’s victory on Friday with 52% of the vote, without however making public all the minutes of the polling stations, assuring that it had been the victim of computer hacking.
According to the opposition, which published the electoral documents obtained through its scrutineers, but whose validity is rejected by Mr. Maduro, Mr. Gonzalez Urrutia won the election with 67% of the votes.
“We must earn respect,” Maduro also said from the presidential palace. “I will protect the people street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood.”
In front of the Caracas prison where some of the protesters are being held, a woman waits for news of her brother, who was arrested after protests in a working-class neighborhood.
“He was with friends in a bakery” after a march, “and the police came and took them away,” she told AFP, asking that her name not be used.
” They [les policiers] “They even take people out of their homes, take their phones to see what they have against the government. They go from house to house… We are afraid of being arrested in the street,” she adds.
The NGO Foro Penal, which defends “political prisoners”, denounces “massive arbitrary detentions” including more than a hundred minors.
“A lot of fear”
“There is a lot of fear […]”Many people refuse to report their cases,” Gonzalo Himiob, vice-president of the NGO, told AFP.
“There are cases where people have been arrested not while they were protesting or on the street, but late at night, at home, and apparently these arrests are the result of denunciations […]generally in very modest neighborhoods,” he continues.
Pro-government activists have also opened groups on messaging and social networks to denounce violent protesters.
The government, for its part, very quickly opened a tab on the VenApp application, which is used to access various state social services, allowing people to report guarimberos (protesters).
“Denounce him!” shouts a state television presenter in a video promoting the initiative: “Have you seen that you can denounce a fascist, a guarimbero, a terrorist?”
The app was blocked in the Google and Apple stores and then disabled.
Mr. Maduro, however, assured that “more than 5,000 threats” reported through this channel had been “treated.”
At the same time, the DGCIM has set up a telephone line for complaints. The operation has been called ” Tun-Tun “, the equivalent of “Knock-knock”, to show that the police can knock on any door.