Millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote their widely loathed authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro out of power last Sunday – but Tibisay Betancourt was not one of them.
“I voted for him,” said the 60-year-old masseuse, a loyal supporter of the president’s Chavista movement who lives in a housing estate apartment given to her by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez.
Within hours of casting her vote, Betancourt had cause to rue her choice. As turmoil gripped the streets of Caracas after Maduro’s disputed claim to have won the election, she sent her son, Alfredo Alejandro Rondón, to a nearby shop to buy a bottle of Sprite for his sick father. Minutes later his brother, Yorluis, said he had seen Alfredo being beaten and dragged away by members of the Bolivarian national police.
By Thursday morning, the high school graduate was one of hundreds of prisoners languishing behind bars at a police base on the east side of town, facing possible terrorism charges that could land him in jail for up to 30 years.
If she could speak to Maduro, Betancourt said, “I’d tell him to let the innocent people go and to order the police to stop hitting people in front of the children.” She was one of hundreds of mostly working-class citizens who had gathered under a ferocious Caribbean sun to seek news of their incarcerated loved ones.
Venezuela’s embattled president – who has presided over a catastrophic economic collapse since inheriting Chávez’s socialist-inspired “revolution” in 2013 – says more than 1,200 people have been seized as part of a crackdown on the alleged “traitors” and terrorists who took to the streets to demonstrate against what they call a stolen election. “And we’re going to capture 1,000 more,” Maduro declared, vowing to imprison those detained in maximum security jails.
Acts of violence and vandalism undoubtedly occurred during the explosion of dissent, fuelled by anger over economic hardship and a migration crisis that has shattered families and seen some 8 million Venezuelans flee abroad. The metro station at the heart of El Valle – the blue-collar district where Maduro was raised – has had its windows shattered, and the area’s main street is stained with black marks where tyres and trees have been burned. Maduro visited the area with police on Wednesday night and claimed vandals had tried to destroy a local hospital.
But many of the families outside the Zone 7 police detention centre said their loved ones had been arrested for simply attending peaceful protests or speaking out against Maduro’s administration online.
Friends of Carla Madelein López, 32, said members of a feared special forces unit called the DAET had arrested her at home on Wednesday after she supposedly posted a message on social media criticising the government. “It’s a [forced] disappearance,” said one close friend as he waited outside the jail for news. He suspected López had been arrested after a tip-off from a neighbour via a mobile phone app Maduro has encouraged citizens to use to snitch on government enemies.
Nearby, a 46-year-old man who asked not to be named fell to his knees and let out a wail of despair as he described how his son had been taken during a protest in Catia, a working-class area in west Caracas that has long been a bastion of Chavismo. “He’s just turned 18,” the father said, as black police vehicles resembling cattle trucks rolled out of the prison compound packed with detainees on their way to court.
A 27-year-old woman, who also asked not to be named, described how her boyfriend had been shot in the hand with a rubber bullet and arrested after the pair had attended a peaceful rally organised by the opposition politicians who claim to have beaten Maduro in the election – former diplomat Edmundo González and his ally María Corina Machado.
“He’s not a terrorist – he’s an entrepreneur,” said the detainee’s father, who, like Maduro, hails from El Valle and grew up in one of its deprived hillside favelas.
The father said most El Valle residents had turned against Maduro – who calls himself the “president of the people” – because of the economic meltdown that had unfolded on his watch, leaving jobless Venezuelans with empty fridges and broken homes. “Maduro has lost the streets. Nobody likes him,” the 63-year-old said as he waited for news of his son.
“Edmundo won [the election] in El Valle just like he won all over the country,” the man said of González, whose victory has been recognised by countries including the US, Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica. “And all the young people were trying to do was express the impotence they feel.
“It’s just like everywhere in Venezuela. People are tired. They are tired of the lies. They are tired of these people thinking they are the bosses of everything.”
Observers say such feelings are a key part of what distinguishes the current push to remove Maduro from previous attempts, such as Juan Guaidó’s failed bid to spark an uprising in 2019 or 2017’s mass protests.
For years after Chávez’s election in 1998, the barrios of Caracas were overwhelmingly loyal to the comandante’s “revolution” and its use of petrodollars from Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to bankroll social welfare programmes and empower the poor.
“Our hardest supporters were there [in the barrios],” said Chávez’s former communications minister, Andrés Izarra. “If you look at the voting record in all these communities, they were all hardcore Chavismo. We were winning like 80 or 85% of the vote.”
Maduro retains some support in such areas, which are adorned with propaganda murals saying things such as “I have faith in Maduro”.
“María Corina is a terrorist and an arselicker,” said José Ángel Seijas, a 58-year-old Chavista, as he played chess in a plaza at the foot of one El Valle favela. Showing off an old picture of himself alongside a youthful Maduro on his phone, Seijas urged his president to take no prisoners in his clampdown on objectors: “We want an iron fist against these punks.”
But Venezuela’s economic disintegration under Maduro over the past decade – which the president blames on US sanctions but critics attribute primarily to rampant corruption and economic mismanagement – has seen the mood in the barrios overwhelmingly shift.
Izarra said Maduro’s worst fear was such communities rising up against him en masse, as began to happen for the first time in the hours after the president’s disputed claim to have won a third term. Enraged by that declaration – for which Maduro has yet to provide proof – thousands of residents from barrios such as Petare swept west towards the presidential palace on motorbike and by foot before being pushed back by security forces.
“We’ve had enough! Enough!” shouted Rafael Cantillo, 45, who came down from a Petare favela called El Campito to demonstrate last Monday.
“There are people here from Mariche, from Petare, from El Campito, from Valle-Coche, from Caucagüita, from everywhere,” he said, reeling off the names of Caracas’s sprawling low-income communities where hundreds of thousands live.
Izarra said that the mass mobilisation of Venezuela’s poor explained Maduro’s clampdown, as authorities battled to nip the barrio mutiny in the bud. “That’s why this huge security operation is under way to try to stop this,” added Izarra, who lives in exile in Germany. He predicted that more repression lay ahead.
Interviews with relatives of detainees outside the Zone 7 jail suggested the crackdown was overwhelmingly targeting residents of working-class areas, such as Antímano, Catia and Petare. Stefania Migliorini, a human rights lawyer who had come to offer legal support, said the prisoners included men, women and minors. “People who were simply going to a protest, or going back home, or going to work, were arrested,” she said. “This is an extremely harsh situation.” Migliorini’s group, Foro Penal, says at least 16 people have so far been killed, five of them in Caracas.
Protesters have vanished from the streets in recent days as security forces and armed pro-government gangs called colectivos are reported to be trawling the barrios for targets. A relative of one prisoner told the BBC police had been chasing young people through one community and “shooting at them as if they were on a safari in Africa”.
But the demonstrators have vowed to return from their redbrick hilltop homes, and Machado called fresh protests for Saturday morning.
“This time it will be different – this time things are different, because they’ve lost everyone who lives in the poor areas,” said Cantillo, as marchers scattered for cover to avoid being detained or hurt.
“Tell the world this government is no good,” he implored as his group sought shelter from security forces.
As he spoke, the women who had accompanied Cantillo from their favela broke into song. “It’s going to fall! It’s going to fall!” they chanted. “This government is going to fall!”
