Venezuela Probing Police ‘Death Squads’

Jose Ramon Rodriguez didn’t believe police when they told him that his son, Jimmy, a bright young law student, had been killed in a holdup.

That disbelief eventually cost Rodriguez his own life. In May, while working with a prosecutor to investigate 23-year-old Jimmy’s murder, six masked gunmen shot and killed him at his cattle ranch in the western Venezuelan plains town of Acarigua.

Investigators blame the slayings--and possibly as many as 93 others in Portuguesa state--on bands of rogue police and thugs, dubbed “grupos de exterminio,” or extermination squads, by the media.

Most of the victims, slain since last year, are believed to be criminals, witnesses to crimes, and targets of personal scores. Two were the suspected murderers of a police officer, killed while working at his second job as a security guard.

Gov. Antonia Munoz says she, along with judges, prosecutors, attorneys and journalists looking into the scandal, has received anonymous threats. “They called me to warn me to be quiet, to threaten me,” she said.

On Sept. 25, after two police officer suspects were released for lack of evidence, Venezuela’s National Guard finally took over the police stations in Portuguesa state.

In the stations and at officers’ homes, troops found unregistered and military-issue firearms, tear gas grenades, 3 million bolivares ($4,000) in cash and six stolen cars, federal Atty. Gen. Isaias Rodriguez said. He said some alleged “exterminadores” had even resorted to using witchcraft against two investigators.

As Portuguesa’s government considers dissolving the 2,300-member department, 22 federal prosecutors and 40 detectives from the Technical Investigative Police--Venezuela’s FBI--are working the case.

Four police officers are in custody over Jimmy Rodriguez’s slaying, and 36 more are under investigation for murder, drug possession, extortion and illegal weapons charges. Detectives believe more police abetted or knew about the slayings.

“This decay has been going on for years,” said Munoz, a member of Venezuela’s ruling Fifth Republic Movement party who replaced an opposition party governor in August 2000.

The governor said several factors combined to produce a vigilante system that spiraled out of control: underpaid and untrained police recruits, an underfunded court system that releases suspects when judges don’t show up, and a public backlash against rising crime.

“This is happening all over the country,” Munoz said. “The people allowed it to happen too.”

Vigilante lynchings and illegal police killings aren’t new to Venezuela, and when the U.S. State Department’s annual global report on human rights mentioned alleged killings by police, President Hugo Chavez bridled, saying the U.S. also abuses human rights.

Still, crime is bad enough that Chavez this year ordered National Guardsmen to help police patrol the streets of Caracas; now he claims violent crime has dropped in dangerous neighborhoods. The president also vowed to bring those responsible for the killings in Portuguesa to justice.

Cleaning up Portuguesa’s police force will take time, Munoz said. “I can’t convert [the force] into a nun’s convent in just 13 months.”

New horror stories emerge each week. A state congressional investigation found that some officers blackmailed alleged lawbreakers by threatening to kill their families if they didn’t pay for their release. Those same criminals “would rob again to meet the police’s demands,” said state Deputy Genaro Godoy.

Former state police Cmdr. Carlos Navaro--fired by Munoz earlier this year--insists that no police officers participated in the death squads.

But he did say that hired gunmen were “doing what I could never do--stop crime. I realized that fathers were taking justice in their own hands and killing those who raped their daughters, robbed their cars and assaulted them.”

Nestor Ramirez Paz, director general of Acarigua’s Ultima Hora newspaper, the first to report on the extermination squads, agreed that some crimes were committed by civilians. He said that although the corrupt police are few, the protective silence of other officers makes the scandal harder to investigate.

“But you know something is wrong when police chiefs who earn just 200,000 bolivares ($270) a month are driving around in brand-new sport-utility vehicles, send their children to private school and wear expensive watches,” he said.

The Rodriguez family, meanwhile, speculates that Jimmy was killed because he witnessed a crime; his father died because he tried to uncover the truth.

“Jimmy was in his third year of law school,” said his widowed mother, Leidy de Rodriguez. “He didn’t have behavioral problems. His only crime was leaving the house at the wrong time.”