Venezuela’s Defense Minister acknowledges excesses in repression of protests

Gen. Vladimir Padrino López warns that he will not tolerate new excesses of the National Guard.

The Venezuelan Defense Minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino López, warned in a public ceremony that he will not tolerate new excesses of the National Guard in the control of the demonstrations. “I do not want to see one more National Guard committing an atrocity in the streets,” Padrino said during a conference on the Constituent Assembly with senior officials at Fort Tiuna, the largest military facility in Caracas’ southwest.

“Anyone who departs from the state line, from the pre-eminence of human rights respect and does not act as a professional, has to assume his responsibility,” he insisted. The event, which was part of a series of lectures on the Constituent Assembly that the government of Nicolás Maduro promotes, was broadcasted throughout the country by the main state television channel.

The defense minister’s admonition comes on the 67th day of protests that the opposition Democratic Unity Table (MUD) has called for to combat the government’s dictatorship, that, according to the opposition, started with a couple of decisions of the Supreme Court that in practice dissolved the parliament and gave Maduro power to legislate.

In the first line of the repression against the demonstrations have been the National Bolivarian Police (PNB) and the National Guard (GN). Since the beginning of the civic rebellion, numerous allegations have been made about the excesses of agents of these bodies in the containment of disorders. Luisa Ortega Díaz, Attorney General recently reported that 19 state security agents, including 14 members of the National Guard, have been charged with serious human rights violations, including homicide, during their actions to control the riots.

This Monday, however, the ferocity of military personnel reached an unprecedented peak. Multiple testimonies in media and social networks showed members of the NG stealing property from protesters, using firearms and attacking reporters covering protests.

Padrino Lopez, a general of the Army, made the mention, public and specific, of the National Guard. It is a militarized police corps created in 1936 by the then President Eleazar López Contreras. The current Minister of the Interior and Justice, Néstor Reverol, is a retired General of GN and one of his former commanders-general. Reverol – who has been charged in US courts as an accessory to drug trafficking – was not present at the event where Padrino made the remarks.

The Defense Minister also urged the military chaplains, in the midst of the current street conflict, to get closer to the troops to help them overcome “great difficulties, political convulsions, confrontation of many offenses.”