‘Operation Knock-Knock’: Venezuela sweeps up dissenters after disputed vote

CARACAS, Venezuela – Hundreds of people gathered several days ago outside a detention center known as “Zone 7” in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, huddled around lists of prisoners, as they clutched plastic bags filled with meals they had packed for the inmates inside.

Eager for information about their detained loved ones, many told remarkably similar stories of sons, daughters and siblings arrested riding motorbikes, walking home from work, coming out of a bakery or stopping by a relative’s house in the days following Venezuela’s disputed presidential election.

They described arrests both sweeping and selective. And no one had been told what criminal charge their relatives faced.

The Venezuelan government has mounted a furious campaign against anyone challenging the declared results of the vote, unleashing a wave of repression that human rights groups say is unlike anything the country has seen in recent decades.

“I have been documenting human rights violations in Venezuela for many years and have seen patterns of repression before,” said Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, president of the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy and research organization. “I don’t think I have ever seen this ferocity.”

The country’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, claimed victory in the July 28 election, but the government has yet to provide any vote tallies to support the announcement. The opposition, on the other hand, released tallies showing that its candidate had won in a landslide.

Now, experts say, Maduro, having seemingly been repudiated by a majority of his constituents, is bent on punishing those he considers disloyal.

“My son grabbed a flag and participated in a protest, but I don’t think he will be convicted for that, will he?” said María Vázquez, 62, a Caracas street vendor who supports the government and urged her son not to protest. “It’s worrisome.”

The Venezuelan government says it has arrested more than 2,000 people for participating in protests disputing the election results.

People were taken both in indiscriminate roundups, amid the protests, and later from their homes in targeted arrests, as the government launched what it called “Operation Knock-Knock,” according to interviews with family members and human rights activists documenting the detentions.

The surge in detentions is particularly alarming, rights groups say, because some arrests came after the president urged his supporters to snitch on their neighbors, using a government app that was supposed to be used to report issues like downed power lines.

“Maximum punishment! Justice!” Maduro said at a rally last Saturday. “There will be no forgiveness this time!”

The result has been an aggressive crackdown on dissent designed to silence anyone who dares question the election results, human rights activists said.

At least two human rights lawyers are in jail, including one who was arrested when he went to inquire about other detainees. Another activist was taken from the Caracas airport when she tried to leave the country.

When authorities showed up at the home of María Oropeza, an opposition party leader in Portuguesa, southwest of Caracas, she livestreamed it. “I think first you should show me whether you have a search warrant, no?” she could be heard telling a police officer. “Because this is my home, private property.”

Jordan Sifuentes, the mayor of Mejía, the only opposition mayor in the state of Sucre, in northeast Venezuela, has been held for a week on unknown charges. Mayor José Mosquera of Lagunillas, in Zulia state, was held for six days after being accused of a social media post against the government, which he had denied.

Human rights activists and journalists learned in recent days that the government had annulled their passports, effectively trapping them in Venezuela.

People are leaving their houses without their phones, fearing that authorities will stop them on the street and look at their messages for objectionable content. One man in Zulia was arrested after police found a meme critical of the elections on his phone, his family said.

“It’s difficult to express in words the intensity and the indiscriminate nature of this wave of arrests,” said Gonzalo Himiob, vice president of the Penal Forum, a human rights organization tracking arrests since the elections.

Though the government claims that more than 2,000 people are in custody, Himiob said human rights organizations have only been able to document nearly 1,300 people detained.

“Maduro speaks of 2,000 detained, but it doesn’t seem true,” he said. “It seems more like an instruction. He wants to reach that number.”

On July 28, Maduro faced off against a little-known diplomat named Edmundo González, a stand-in for a more popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who had been disqualified by the government from running for office.

About six hours after the polls closed, the elections council announced Maduro had won another six-year term. Nearly two weeks later, the government has yet to publish any precinct-level elections data proving it.

The tallies collected by opposition observers on election night show González won by millions of votes.

Spontaneous protests erupted the day after the race, some of which led to clashes among demonstrators, security forces and armed civilian groups that support the government. At least two dozen people were killed, according to human rights groups. Hundreds were arrested.

But arrests continued days after the protests, sometimes on the word of anonymous informers who reported them on VenApp, an app that the government had originally introduced to report public nuisances.

The app has been removed from Google Play and the App Store but is still available for those who have already downloaded it, according to Amnesty International.

Using civilian supporters to inform on neighbors has echoes of what has happened in Cuba, where the communist government has long deployed an extensive network of community-based informants.

“Operation Knock-Knock is just beginning,” Douglas Rico, the head of Venezuela’s criminal investigations unit, posted on Instagram. “Report if you have been the target of a physical or virtual hate campaign through social media.”

The government appeared to be employing a “pluralistic” approach to squash dissent, Jiménez said, using all the methods at its disposal, including technology, security forces, intelligence services, armed civilians and the armed forces.

“The array of tools the government is using,” she said, “is something not seen in previous cycles of repression in the country.”

Maduro insisted that the detained people had participated in an extreme-right fascist plot to oust him. People were paid to burn electoral centers and knock down statues of former President Hugo Chávez, he said, adding that they had confessed to their crimes.

The people who have been arrested will be charged with inciting hatred and terrorism, the government said, and activists said they had been referred to a specialized terrorism court in Caracas. Some of those arrested were caught committing acts of vandalism such as taking down government statues, but many others were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, civil rights lawyers said.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

On Thursday, the family of opposition party leader Américo De Grazia, 64, announced on Instagram that he had been missing for more than 24 hours.

His daughter, María De Grazia, 30, said that after receiving threats on social media, her father, a former mayor and congressman, left his house in Upata and traveled 450 miles to Caracas. After five days there, he suddenly disappeared.

The family learned he was in jail but said they were not told why.

“They did not come to the house with an arrest warrant,” said María De Grazia, who lives in exile in Houston. “If a family member had not gone looking under rocks for two days, we would still not know where he was.”

The government was clinging to power, she said, by arresting everyone from student leaders to well-known politicians to ordinary citizens. Opposition activists barely stood a chance against such an organized apparatus.

“We are going to war armed with a plastic fork,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.