VENEZUELA: Police Convicted of 2002 Pre-Coup Killings

• by Humberto Márquez (caracas)
• Friday, April 03, 2009
• Inter Press Service

In the verdict handed down after a four-year trial, former Caracas metropolitan police chief Henry Vivas, former deputy chief Lázaro Forero, and then security chief for the city government Iván Simonovis, were found guilty of complicity in the homicides of three civilians and the wounding of 29 others.

Judge Maryorie Calderón also handed 30-year sentences to three police officers convicted of firing on pro-Chávez demonstrators who had gathered in front of the government palace as hundreds of thousands of opposition demonstrators marched towards the building.

Four other policemen were given sentences of between three and 17 years, and one was acquitted.

After a two-month strike and business lockout by the opposition aimed at toppling the leftwing Chávez, up to 500,000 demonstrators from middle-class and upscale neighbourhoods on the east side of Caracas took to the streets on Apr. 11, 2002 and marched towards the centre of the city – guarded by the metropolitan police, who answered to opposition Mayor Alfredo Peña - to demand that the president step down.

Meanwhile, thousands of Chávez supporters had surrounded the seat of government, and the National Guard took up positions between the two groups of demonstrators, who did not clash because shots rang out on several streets as the opposition protesters began to reach the Miraflores presidential palace.

Nineteen people were shot and killed, and dozens were wounded.

Immediately after the shootings, opposition business and military leaders seized and imprisoned the president and replaced him with Pedro Carmona, the head of the country's leading business association.

Carmona dismissed Congress and the Supreme Court, abolished the constitution that was rewritten under Chávez and approved by voters in a 1999 referendum, and revoked the president’s economic decrees.

'The investigations show that shots were fired from both sides that day – by Chávez supporters and the opposition,' journalist Sandra La Fuente, who along with Alfredo Meza wrote a book on the coup, 'El acertijo de abril' (The April Riddle), told IPS.

Two days later, in the midst of massive street protests by Chávez supporters, military officers loyal to the president returned him to office, and the leaders of the coup were arrested.

Carmona was granted asylum in the Colombian Embassy. The four top military officers involved in the coup were acquitted by the Supreme Court. When the attorney general’s office reopened the case against them years later, they had already fled abroad.

Several Chávez supporters who were filmed opening fire in the direction of opposition demonstrators on Apr. 11, 2002 were arrested, tried and acquitted, after a court found that they were shooting in self-defence against metropolitan police and other snipers.

Earlier this week, General Raúl Baduel, a former Chávez ally who broke with the president in 2007 over his opposition to Chávez’s attempt to amend the constitution so that he could run for president indefinitely, was arrested and charged with corruption during his years as defence minister (2006-2007).

And another high-profile opponent of Chávez, Manuel Rosales, mayor of Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-biggest city, went into hiding this week to avoid arrest. Rosales, a former governor of the northwestern state of Zulia who was defeated by Chávez in the 2006 presidential elections, is facing charges of illicit enrichment.

Opposition leaders complain about what they call an 'escalation of the judicialisation of politics.'

But the government welcomed Judge Calderón’s decision. 'Justice, which is beginning to appear in the Apr. 11 case, is welcome. It is good that it is arriving, even though it is tardy,' said presidential spokesman Jesse Chacón.

The spokesman said he was sorry for 'what the families of the police officers may be feeling at this time, but we must also think about what the families of those who died that day outside Miraflores palace were feeling.'

The families on both sides had strong words. 'I am very sorry for what the mothers of the police officers are going through, but no one can violate human rights like the metropolitan police did that day, when they bloodied the constitution,' said Yesenia Fuentes, president of a Victims Committee.

Because both 'chavistas' and opposition demonstrators were killed and wounded on Apr. 11, 2002, victims committees were set up on both sides of the deep political divide that has polarised Venezuela for the past decade. And both sides demanded an investigation, which the parliament conducted without reaching any definitive conclusions.

'I don’t understand the celebrating by that committee of victims’ families,' said Dayana Vivas, the daughter of former police chief Henry Vivas. 'The men who were convicted today didn’t kill anyone, and the real culprits are still free. What my father did on Apr. 11 was to save lives by preventing two political currents from clashing. I am sad to be a Venezuelan.'

La Fuente, who spent a year and a half investigating the Apr. 11 incidents, found that it took three weeks for the judicial police to show up at the site of the violence to study what evidence was left there, and that numerous pieces of proof had been spoiled or eliminated.

'The weapons that injured the victims did not appear until September 2003,' wrote La Fuente. And during that entire period, 'it was impossible to prove that the shots came out of the specific weapon of one particular individual.'

A lawyer for the police officers, Theresly Malavé, asked at the end of the trial 'how can a policeman photographed with a (38 caliber) Magnum 357 pistol be convicted of killing a person who was shot with a nine millimeter weapon?'

But prosecutor Amado Molina said the convicted men 'committed grave human rights violations, including homicide and injuries, and formed part of a strategy of a coup d’etat. This conviction is not vengeance and we do not feel happy, but sad about how they used the weapons that were entrusted to them.'

Defence attorney José Luis Tamayo said the verdict came as no surprise, and maintained that 'This was a political trial, not a legal one. No one proved that any of the weapons used killed anyone. Yes, there was a coup that day, but that was not the object of this trial.'

Judge Calderón abstained from making any comment, and Tamayo, as well as family members of several of the convicted men, accused her of 'giving Chávez a present on this April anniversary; she was acting to protect her job, not justice.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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