The mere question is difficult to ask: what is to be deprived of 23 years of your adult life, in prisons more similar to Hell than to Earth, sentenced for crimes you never committed? What is left of someone who comes back to freedom after a quarter century isolated from all the good things life has to offer?
This is what is happening to three Venezuelan men: Erasmo Bolívar, Luis Molina and Hector Rovain. They were part of a group of officers of the Caracas Metropolitan Police deployed to protect the opposition demonstrators on April 11, 2002, when hundreds of thousands approached Miraflores Palace to demand the removal of Hugo Chávez, and chavista supporters opened fire against them. Nineteen people—in the anti Chávez crowd but also among the President’s supporters and a photoreporter—were murdered that day. Dozens more were injured. Venezuelans watched live on TV how chavista Círculos Bolivarianos shot over the march from Llaguno Bridge. The Metropolitan Police fired back. Bullets were raining over downtown Caracas. I was there, along with thousands more.
Chavez was toppled that night and came back to power two days later; as part of his vengeance, in the trials that followed no chavistas were charged and all the blame from the dead on April 11 fell on Iván Simonovis, the security commissioner of the Caracas mayorship with an administrative responsibility over the Metropolitan Police, and several officers of this force. Before the trial even began, the government’s propaganda apparatus had established the version that violence erupted when snipers and Metropolitan Police officers started to kill people, in order to ignite a coup.
Evidence is absent or manufactured, prosecutors and courts just obey the order from the Executive branch, and security officers, military personnel, ordinary civilians or opposition politicians are targeted. Just to make a point.
All evidence was erased from the crime scene. No proof was presented to sustain that story. But the order was clear: those officers had to be punished because what mattered wasn’t truth, but what the Comandante and his acolytes had decided to impose as truth.
As Mirtha Rivero recalls in her recent book about those years, Bolívar, Molina and Rovain were indicted “in correspective complicity degree”, meaning that there’s no proof they killed anyone but they were there so they must have killed someone. Chávez wanted them sentenced, period, no matter how vague the indictment. Simonovis spent nine years imprisoned until he managed to flee the country. Other officers were released over the years. Bolívar, Molina and Rovain were released last night, most likely because of US pressure and because the Rodríguez regime needs to control the damage caused by the Victor Quero case. “I hope you appreciate the gesture,” said cynical-in-chief Jorge Rodríguez.
Besides the circumstances around their release, the story of these former officers encapsulates one prevailing pattern of lawfare and human rights violations of the chavista era: to deflect responsibility of a crime or failure of the government by creating a propaganda myth, and immediately to detain people and sentence them to even 30 years of prison to communicate to the population that the myth is truth.
Evidence is absent or manufactured, prosecutors and courts just obey the order from the Executive branch, and security officers, military personnel, ordinary civilians or opposition politicians are targeted. Just to make a point.
There are many cases similar to this one where the Metropolitan Police was the official scapegoat of the violence of April 11, 2002. The Guevara Brothers were imprisoned and tortured for the killing of Danilo Anderson, the prosecutor that led those trials of 2002. Leopoldo López, a civilian opposition politician, was thrown into a military prison, blamed for the violence of the severely-repressed protest wave of February 2014, where the two first victims were killed by police and colectivos. Chávez ordered the imprisonment of the executives of a brokering firm because he argued that inflation was the product of financial speculation. Union leaders and oil workers have gone to jail because the government needed to propagate a narrative of constant sabotage to evade its responsibility in oil spills, refinery fires or failures in steel mills. Chávez and Maduro invented many more conspiracies or attempts against their lives to punish people they distrusted in the armed forces, the NGOs or the political parties, adding some common civilians to complete the story they were telling.
All this has been done with discipline and order, combining prosecutors like Tarek William Saab, judges, fake witnesses, security officers, and thousands of propaganda operators from Telesur or VTV to social media. They could use an entire State to spread the same story and direct the ire of the people who believe them to the individuals the regime chose as culprits. The erosion of credibility and political capital did not stop the pattern of imprisonment as part of propaganda: chavismo continued to do so, even if the premises of the story were absurd and completely implausible, just to show who’s in charge.
One short way of defining chavismo is that it’s an authoritarian project that spreads lies and myths to conquer and hold power in order to sack the nation. Chávez is dead, Maduro is in a Brooklyn jail, but they are still there and doing the same. Now, the Rodríguez-led interim government is releasing people to prove the story that they are implementing some kind of political openness, a more palatable, business-friendly form of the same thing. They are not acknowledging the injustice of having Bolívar, Molina and Rovain losing many years of their lives, as the chavista governments did with many more people. They are not questioning the myth that Chávez created to break the lives of those men.
They are just playing with human beings, as characters in a story they are still telling us, to continue with the occupation of our country.
