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‘You shot my granddaughter!’: the drama of police violence and deaths in Venezuela

Human rights organizations denounce hundreds of extrajudicial executions. A stray bullet and a drama in Caracas.

María Eugenia accuses a police officer of having killed her 11-year-old granddaughter in a Caracas neighborhood, while pointing a finger the hole left by the bullet in a window of his house.

The policeman says he saw “a shadow,” but “he shot the girl, directly at the girl,” says María Eugenia Segovia, 54, recalling the tragedy she experienced on November 13.

His granddaughter, Yadimar, she was sleeping when the projectile hit her in the neck after breaking through one of the bars of the window grate and shattering the glass.

Reports of deaths at the hands of authorities have multiplied in Venezuela. The NGO Venezuelan Violence Observatory (OVV), a reference in the absence of official figures, documented more than 700 deaths at the hands of police in the first semester of the year.

María Eugenia says that she faced the officer and a companion who accompanied him.




A police operation in a Caracas neighborhood. Photo: AFP

“I went up to him and stood in front of him and said: They shot the girl, you shot my granddaughter!” she recalls. “They turned and ran off.”

At least five people were arrested for this crime, according to the scientific police. “I have no confirmation that they are police officers,” said a spokesman for the Prosecutor’s Office.

extrajudicial executions

Human rights organizations denounced more than 4,000 extrajudicial executions in 2020 and 2021 in operations against crime, which they considered a “State policy” of extermination.

In a climate of widespread impunity, cases such as that of Yadimar also occur, says the director of the OVV, Roberto Briceño León, in which there is “individual” responsibility of a police officer or a group of police officers, rather than superior orders.

Violence has been “moving” from the criminals to the police, says Briceño León, who warns that “in a good part of the country, the police had more victims and more deaths than the criminals themselves.”

Neighbors and relatives of the girl, who was studying in the sixth grade, say that the police searched a young man in the sector and that relatives came out to complain. The officials, who according to Segovia belonged to the Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM), requested “reinforcements” and they entered the street shooting according to his story.

Others claim that the policemen were drinking before the incident.

The girl’s relatives filed a complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office. They ask for justice and “more control” over the forces of order.

“We cannot be more afraid of them than of the street itself,” said Yuleimy Valencia, 34, the little girl’s cousin.

A Venezuelan police officer targets alleged members of a criminal group in a Caracas neighborhood.  Photo: AFP


A Venezuelan police officer targets alleged members of a criminal group in a Caracas neighborhood. Photo: AFP

The UN has expressed its concern about police operations, while the Prosecutor’s Office defends itself against accusations of impunity, assuring that 358 security officials have been convicted of violating human rights.

The NGO Cofavic estimates that “98% of cases of human rights violations are not investigated.”

parting and pain

“Why did you leave Yadimar? Why did you leave, friend? Fly high!” read one of the posters pasted on the walls of her house.

White balloons, nursery rhymes, flowers and white hand marks were around the urn of the little girl, fired by a crowd.

Yadimar was “charismatic, cheerful and joyful,” her grandmother and cousin agree. She was under the care of her grandmothers because her mother had traveled to Peru to look for a sister who migrated and her father died nine years ago from a stray bullet in a shootout between criminals.

“My girl, they killed you just like your dad!” The mother cried when she saw her daughter’s coffin, after a return trip of thousands of kilometers by land due to the lack of money to pay for a flight.

“We still haven’t been able to understand it. Why, if she was inside her house, did this situation arise?” Yadimar’s cousin wonders.

Source: AFP

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