Students reveal tortures during detention

“Stay put, we are going to kill you. This will be fast. You all are nothing”. Juan Carrasco (21) and Jorge Leon (25) relive for the world their own terror film, filled with knocks and kicks, abuse and even torture. These young men were arrested by National Guard in Valencia, Carabobo, Venezuela, one day after 12F, and remained up to 60 hours before being presented before the judge.

Cruelty in the narration of these hitting, starts at the same moment of detention. Carrasco, Leon and a girl friend hid inside their car and were pulled out with “perdigons” (salt bullets). Guards, afterwards, fired up the vehicle with absolute impunity.

The hitting was so hard that “I pretended I was dead so they could take me to the morgue. To reassure I was not dead, the Guard touched my anus with the bayonet. I moved so he kicked me again”, remembers Leon.

From the beggining, Carrasco faced the guards. Juan is a Spanish citizen, he was born in Venezuela. “When I claimed for my rights, they hit me very hard, in the ribs, head, with kicks and the back of their weapons, even with caskets”, explains Carrasco.

“When we arrived at El Tocuyito, one of the most dangerous prisons of Venezuela, they brought a dog to us and the animal licked our wounds. They kneeled us and started to play soccer. A kick and a “gol” shout every time they assaulted us”.

Thus far Foro Penal Venezolano accounts for 18 tortured students, inside reclusion centers, 388 detentions, 30 wounded by bullets, five dead.

Carrasco stated that after a 48 hour nightmare, the National Guards pulled his pants down and put a fusil canon in his anus. He lost conscience three times during the whole time of detention until he was finally liberated.

Carrasco says that the judge cried when he narrated tortures. He was given home for prison.

“I also noted that some of these guards were Cubans. I could tell from the tone of his words and tha way they expressed themselves”, Carrasco ended.

Even the Church

Padre Palmar is a renown priest from the Catholic Church. He is a dear man from Estado Zulia and loved by many and hated by others because he professes his open rejection towards this Government and that being known too that he comes from Chavez followers.

Yesterday, February the 19^th, Padre Palmar was at Plaza Republica as he has been for many days, protesting with students, when the National Guard arrived and started hitting and kicking the priest. He was taken by the people to a private clinic and accounted for three ribs broken and contusions in his body.

Events in Venezuela started before Feruary the 12^th, when students from Tachira Universities protested on behalf of a classmate who was almost raped within the campus by members of the National Police. Protesters were imprisoned and this fact drove Caracas Students Movement to organize a rally on February the 12^th. Students, supported by Opposition leaders Leopoldo Lopez, Maria Corina Machado and Antonio Ledezma, and by social movements, mothers and political parties, marched to the Office of Attorney General aiming to hand a document requesting liberation of those imprisoned. The rest of the story is history. Since that fatidic date when three people were shot dead, with bullets on their heads, Venezuela has been restless, agitated and passing through perhaps the worst crisis in its contemporary days.

Maria Mendoza