Posted on 06/22/2002 3:58:13 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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 the cops.
Across the country, police death squads are killing more of Venezuela's suspected criminals, or simply poor people.
Many are executed outright or killed in fake shootouts to counter a rising crime wave and sidestep a corrupt judicial system roiled by a 1999 ``modernization.''
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 in 2001 ''in circumstances suggesting they were victims of extrajudicial execution or excessive use of force,'' Amnesty International added in its latest report.
In the western state of Portugesa alone, a so-called ''Extermination Group No. 1'' allegedly made up of police and civilians has been blamed for more than 100 killings between mid-2000 and September 2001.
And it's not just police officers killing alleged career criminals.
Civilians lynched 63 supposed criminals during PROVEA's 2000 reporting period compared to 22 in the 2001 period, the human rights group reported.
Police executions of suspected career criminals is not a new phenomenon in Venezuela, where ill-trained and low-paid police have long faced hardened criminals and a judicial system were 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 (SPCIB).
CULT HERO
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 behind body tags with messages such as, ``He was socially unredeemable.''
When the policeman became a virtual 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 promptly fired.
In police argot, killing a suspected criminal is called ''giving him the 40'' or ''the 357,'' both police radio codes for a homicide.
Killer police 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.
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 hardened criminals whose sentences were shortened.
''The new legal code left a vacuum that promotes injustice,'' Urdaneta said in an interview. ``No one says the new code is bad, but we need time to adapt ourselves to it.''
One investigator in the SPCIB, until recently called the Judicial Technical police, was more blunt.
'Now that we're `Scientific' we can't pressure people to talk or beat them,'' said squad commander Alberto Hernández, 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.
Another 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 has testified that he saw Zulia State Police drive off with Johan Javier De La Hoz, a 21-year-old 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,'' said De La Hoz's stepfather, Orlando Florián, a 43-year-old bricklayer, 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, Florián insisted, though SPCIB officials said he was suspected in several burglaries around his neighborhood.
Investigators said they asked to run ballistics tests on the pistols of the two state police officers seen driving off with De La Hoz, but the suspects submitted only one pistol.
`HARD CORE GROUP'
One veteran of several police forces around Zulia says he knows who the killers are -- a ''hard core group'' within the Zulia State Police's Rapid Reaction Force, equivalent to a SWAT team.
''Cops talk to cops. The code of silence says you never snitch to judges on another cop, but everyone knows who these guys are,'' said the veteran, who asked to remain anonymous.
The new group is definitely not related to the first Anonymous Avenger's group, the veteran officer added, though that group was also made up of Zulia policemen.
The officer who led that death squad, he said, confessed to him that he stopped the killings after realizing that he had shot to death two innocent teenagers mistaken for the gunmen who had robbed a gambling casino.
The officer now works for the Maracaibo police, the veteran officer said, and was recently in Miami training in SWAT tactics.
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