“Sudden and suspicious” death of another political prisoner in Venezuela

“My father was a healthy person, he did not suffer from anything. There (Chavista prison in Tocuyito) they punished him just for being hungry. If he complained, they isolated him and tied him up. If he asked to speak with the family, they beat him. My father was beaten. They punished him and killed him in prison. The political prisoner Jesus Rafael Alvarez44, died on Friday inside the prison where he was held in August, after being illegally detained during the savage repression with which Chavismo imposed its mega electoral fraud.

The one who describes his torment in prison is his son, also called Jesús, protagonist of another Venezuelan drama. The arrest of his father and mother, Anna Sánchezleft the boy in charge of the family home, with two sisters aged 7 and 17, and with the job of trying to help his parents from the outside, and without resources, even sleeping on the street.

Until on Friday the rumor reached him, through social networks, of his father’s death. The jailers did not let him see the bodyso Rafael was forced to recognize the body through a photograph, in which he appeared emaciated, very thin and with a severe bruise on his cheekbone. In prison, they not only refused to give him the body in the first instance, they even denied that he had died.

“It was learned that he was denied medical attention. He was transferred to the prison infirmary after his cellmates protested his serious state of health,” the Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners (CLIPP) joined the complaint.

Jesús Rafael Álvarez and his wife suffered a similar ordeal to those 1,600 post-election political prisoners. Members of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) removed both from their home without arrest warrants to prosecute them for terrorism and instigation of hatred.

“There is no treating or hospital doctor who signs the death certificate, which shows that it is a sudden and suspicious death that requires a legal medical autopsy,” he warned. Zair Mundaray, former number two of the Prosecutor’s Office, exiled today in Colombia.

Álvarez is the second political prisoner to die in just a month: Jesus Manuel Martinez Medinaimprisoned by Chavismo in retaliation for having participated as an opposition witness in the 28J electoral process, died in November after several weeks of serious suffering and after multiple appeals from his family and from himself. Maria Corina Machadoopposition leader.

The inhumane conditions in Venezuelan prisons, added to the prevailing impunity, have caused at least a dozen suicide attempts in the Tocorón prison alone, according to the CLIPP. Also several of the minors imprisoned by order of Nicolas Maduro have tried to end their lives, like a 17-year-old girl who drank a liter of chlorine or like Diomer Gomez16 years old, who this week wanted to commit suicide after not being included in the latest list of releases.

Faced with pressure from mothers and international organizations, the government announced this week the release of a hundred of the 1,900 political prisoners that fill the regime’s prisons. Among those elected there are 170 opposition leaders, about whom their families have little information.

Machado’s six closest collaborators remain in a different prison, taking refuge in the Argentine Embassy in Caracas. In recent hours, images of snipers threatening asylum seekers have circulated. Chavista forces have also detained a Venezuelan employee of the legation, which adds to the capture of an Argentine gendarme who traveled to the oil-producing country to visit his partner and daughter. They accuse him of being a spy.