By Juan O. Tamayo
Knight Ridder Newspapers
July 06, 2002
MARACAIBO, Venezuela - The word spread quickly as the bodies of eight thieves,
glue sniffers and neighborhood bullies began turning up in April, shotgun blasts
on their chests, notes signed "The Anonymous Avenger" stuck in their
clothes: The police were executing criminals again.
Probably not the same police officers who killed 16 victims in this gritty oil
port in 1995 and left behind the same notes. Probably younger, meaner cops.
Two victims were also stabbed or garroted. But almost certainly by the cops.
Across the country, police death squads are killing more of Venezuela's suspected criminals, or simply poor people.
Many are executed or killed in fake shootouts to counter a rising crime wave and avoid a corrupt judicial system roiled by a 1999 "modernization."
Executions on the rise
The respected Provea human rights group documented 241 "extrajudicial killings" by police and other security officers from October 2000 through September 2001, compared with 170 in the previous 12-month period.
At least 240 people were killed by Venezuelan police last year, "in circumstances suggesting they were victims of extrajudicial execution or excessive use of force," Amnesty International added in its latest report.
In the state of Portugesa alone, "Extermination Group No. 1," reportedly made up of police and civilians, has been blamed for more than 100 killings from mid-2000 to September 2001.
And it's not just police officers killing purported career criminals.
Civilians lynched 63 supposed criminals during Provea's 2001 reporting period compared with 22 in the 2000 period, the group reported.
Police "executions" of suspected criminals are not new in Venezuela, where ill-trained and low-paid police have long faced hardened criminals and a judicial system where the accused can easily buy judges.
"The police feel impotent before this, so they become judge and executioner," said Ildefonso Urdaneta, head of the federal police, the Scientific Penal and Criminal Investigations Bureau.
One of Venezuela's most popular telenovelas in the mid-1990s was In These Streets, about a policeman who regularly executed hard-core criminals and left body tags with messages such as, "He was socially unredeemable."
When the policeman became a cult hero for Venezuelans tired of crime, the show's scriptwriter tried to make him realize the error of his ways and stop the killings. The scriptwriter was fired.
In police argot, killing a suspect is called "giving him the 40" or "the 357," both police radio codes for a homicide.
Police who kill suspected criminals usually get off free because both witnesses and judges fear going against them.
Evidence disappears, and their fellow officers often refuse to investigate.
"The perpetrators of extrajudicial killings act with near impunity, since the government rarely prosecutes such cases," said the U.S. State Department's 2001 human rights report in its Venezuela section.
Capital a bloody place
But the killings increased in recent years amid a rising wave of crime that turned Caracas, 320 miles east of Maracaibo, into one of the most dangerous capitals in Latin America, with 50 murders on an average weekend.
Adding to the officers' murderous frustrations is a 1999 "modernization" of the penal code that cut from eight to three the number of days they can hold suspects without charging them, time they used to extract confessions.
The new code also forced prison officials to free 11,000 of the nation's 25,000 inmates. Most were awaiting trials for as long as five years, but some were criminals whose sentences were shortened.
"The new legal code left a vacuum that promotes injustice," Urdaneta said. "No one says the new code is bad, but we need time to adapt ourselves to it."
One investigator was more blunt.
'Now that we're 'scientific' we can't pressure people to talk or beat them," said squad commander Alberto Hernandez, 42, who investigated two of the eight confirmed Anonymous Avenger killings from April 12 to mid-June.
The same hand wrote all eight notes left by the killers, with messages such as "This one is no good," "Unrecoverable," and "I am back. The Anonymous Avenger," Urdaneta said.
All the victims were killed with shotguns, whose pellets cannot be traced to specific weapons, and their bodies were left in garbage dumps and isolated dirt roads around Maracaibo's southern shantytowns.
Copy-cat killings?
An additional 11 bodies have been found with shotgun wounds and some handwritten signs, but those are probably copy-cat killings, Urdaneta said.
Urdaneta said he does not believe the killers were the same officers who operated here in 1995, taking the Anonymous Avenger name from the Charles Bronson movies about a man who kills thugs in revenge for his wife's murder.
But there's little doubt that they are police.
A 12-year-old testified that he saw Zulia State Police drive off with Johan Javier De La Hoz, 21, a Colombian car washer, after detaining him near the site of a shootout April 24 three blocks from his home.
His body turned up the next morning on the shoulder of a nearby dirt road, a shotgun wound in his chest, a pistol shot in his throat and a note, one of the eight with the same handwriting, stuck under his shirt collar that said, "This one is worthless."
"It was them, the Zulia police," De La Hoz's stepfather, Orlando Florian, a 43-year-old bricklayer, said during an interview in his dirt-floored tin shack. "They pick on poor people because they think we're all criminals."
His son was never in trouble,
Florian insisted, though police officials said he was suspected in several burglaries
around his neighborhood.
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