“They tied his hands and feet, tied him to a car (vehicle) of Sebin (Bolivarian Intelligence Service, Chavismo’s political police) and dragged him for more than a kilometer through the streets before taking him to a detention center, where He was tortured for 24 days.The torture was literally macabre: they pulled out his fingernails and toenails with pliers; they suffocated him by covering his head with plastic bags containing insecticides, which severely damaged his lungs; they applied electric shocks to him on the genitals and private parts; they beat him all over his body with wet towels; they made him bathe at all hours in urine and excrement”.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) published on Friday testimonies, including torture, from 8,900 Venezuelan victims, 630 families and two organizations, compiled by the Section for Victim Participation and Reparations, which will form part of the investigation against Chavismo by crimes against humanity that the Prosecutor’s Office follows. Stories that summarize the systematic horror against detainees and persecuted, which includes rape and even a Rottweiler dog trained by agents to bite in intimate areas.
This is a transcendental step towards the process against the elite of the Bolivarian revolution, which has also coincided with a new death in their prisons, which has raised all suspicions: the suicide of a top-level Bolivarian official, Leoner Azuaje, that until the moment of his arrest he presided over Cartones de Venezuela and belonged to the circle of confidence of Hugo Cabezas, also captured, who served as Minister of the Presidency for both Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.
The anti-corruption purge within Chavismo, ordered by the people’s president, not only adds more than 60 arrests of leaders, soldiers, Boliburgueses businessmen and judges; It has also caused the fall of the all-powerful oil czar, Tareck El Aissami, whose whereabouts remain unknown a month after he announced his resignation through social networks.
The suspicious death of Azuaje when he was in the hands of Sebin has further obscured an operation in which due process, guarantees and the presumption of innocence have been violated, denounces the human rights organization Provea. According to Chavista prosecutor Tarek William Saab, the leader died of suffocation “by constriction of the neck by hanging; he suspended himself using sheets to hang himself in the room where he was being held.”
Sources linked to the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (Sebin), in whose investigation unit he was, maintain that Azuaje had suffered “negative thoughts” for three months and that he said goodbye with several letters from his relatives. According to this theory, he hung from an electrical wiring tube with the help of a rope made from a sheet and a blanket. Azuaje took advantage of the fact that his custodian would have gone to look for food for him.
“If they knew that he was supposedly in a depressed state, how do they put him in a cell alone, isolated, with pipes in the ceiling and a sheet?” former prosecutor Zair Mundaray was questioned at the time from his exile in Colombia.
The leaked photos of the corpse also show “the hanging groove that looks like anything but a sheet. And the histology? If you hang a dead man, it also makes a groove, only without vital reaction,” Mundaray warned.
The official report makes no mention of other types of injuries, which local journalist Javier Mayorca, a specialist in Events, has highlighted. According to sources at the Bello Monte morgue, where the autopsy was carried out, the body showed signs of torture: bruises in the middle and lower abdomen, abrasions in the right intercostal region and forearms, and signs of torture on the soles of the feet. .
Various United Nations organizations have reiterated that constant torture is carried out in Chavismo detention centers. Other fatalities from these practices were opposition councilor Fernando Albán and Navy captain Rafael Acosta.
The lifeless body of the former was thrown in 2018 from the 10th floor of a Sebin building, in an unsuccessful attempt to simulate suicide. The autopsy showed that he had water in his lungs, the product of torture.
A year later, Acosta was brought before the judge when he was already dying from torture that fractured 16 ribs, broke his nasal septum and one foot. The soldier’s body also had burns on both floors and lashes on his back and thighs, as well as multiple bruises.
The new chapter of violence comes at the worst moment for Maduro, when he still has to present a response to the TPI Prosecutor’s Office and when his ally Gustavo Petro has set up a conference in Bogotá with the intention of alleviating the international pressure against him.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
