Dr. Javier Tarazona – an educator and human rights advocate – was arbitrarily detained four years ago by Venezuela’s intelligence services, known by the Spanish-language acronym SEBIN.
Tarazona’s work among marginalized communities in Venezuela’s westernmost states, along the border with Colombia, made him a witness to violence, illicit economic activities, and recruitment of youth by irregular armed groups active in the region. These included notorious Colombian guerrilla groups such as the National Liberation Army (ELN) and splinter factions from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The Venezuelan government should immediately release Tarazona and drop the charges against him to demonstrate that it is committed to countering criminal groups operating within its territory.
Since Nicolás Maduro came to power in Venezuela in 2014 following the death of Hugo Chávez, more than 18,400 political prisoners have suffered behind bars, according to the Venezuelan human rights organization Foro Penal. This number is likely an undercount, as many families remain fearful of reporting detained family members to human rights organizations that track these prisoners.
For denouncing human rights violations to Venezuelan government authorities, Tarazona and the organization he leads, FundaRedes, were singled out for public harassment in March 2020 by Diosdado Cabello, then the president of Venezuela’s National Constituent Assembly. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights urged the Venezuelan government to follow up on threats to Tarazona and his family in June 2020 after his home was spraypainted with a warning message that Cabello had issued against Tarazona and FundaRedes on his national television show Bolivarian Fury.
As state surveillance and threats against his family, organization, and community partners continued, Tarazona and three other human rights defenders – including his brother, Rafael Tarazona – visited the attorney general’s office in the city of Coro to file a complaint against the security services on July 2, 2021. All four were arrested by SEBIN agents, and Javier Tarazona was accused of “incitement of hate, terrorism, and treason.”
One of the accompanying human rights advocates, Jhonny Romero, was released the next day, while Tarazona’s brother and FundaRedes colleague Omar de Dios García endured four months in detention until they were released through negotiations by the Venezuelan Catholic Church.
Javier Tarazona was transferred to SEBIN’s headquarters in Caracas, El Helicoide, a former shopping mall turned prison where an estimated 200 to 300 political prisoners are currently held. Among them is the civil-military relations expert Rocío San Miguel (who was previously featured in the Struggle for Freedom series).
Tarazona remains in preventative detention, though he has been imprisoned far longer than the two to three years Venezuela’s own penal code allows for holding a suspect without prosecution and sentencing. Complicating matters, judges assigned to oversee his case have changed frequently.
Tarazona has been granted regular visits from family members but shares a poorly ventilated cell with six others and has been exposed to illnesses and ailments that run rampant throughout the prison. He has been denied access to medical care, even during acute medical emergencies during his imprisonment. This has made it difficult to fully assess the toll that four years of detention have had on his health and preexisting medical conditions, which include diabetes and hypertension.
An individual close to Tarazona described him as someone who has always been driven by love for others, the kind of person who “would take the food from his own mouth if someone else was in need.”
Tarazona’s commitment to serving his community is longstanding and motivated by local issues. Before helping to establish FundaRedes in 2002, young Tarazona was an active member of the Catholic Church and already organizing his fellow students into emergency preparedness brigades to help in the types of natural disasters to which the mountainous Táchira state is vulnerable, such as earthquakes, flooding, and mudslides.
Through FundaRedes, Tarazona organized educational, recreational, and leadership activities to build up marginalized communities and foster a sense of dignity among residents. Tarazona and his FundaRedes colleagues also began to document and report on human rights violations in areas where the Venezuelan state doesn’t have a presence, creating conditions that are being exploited and exacerbated by irregular armed groups and myriad criminal networks.
Caught between corruption and an ongoing crackdown
Rampant corruption in Venezuela and weak rule of law – first under Chávez and now under the Maduro regime – have led to a patchwork of alliances between specific political, military, and security leaders and irregular armed groups and organized criminal networks. These groups sometimes collude to gain control over strategic economic sectors and regions of the country in pursuit of profit and power.
Tarazona’s denunciations of human rights violations related to activities by criminal groups likely touched a nerve among individuals within SEBIN motivated to preserve avenues for illicit enrichment.
The power held by armed actors and the leadership of Venezuela’s security services raises the stakes for Maduro personally if he were to lose power, fueling a vicious cycle of regime violence, poverty, and intimidation that has prompted 7.9 million Venezuelans to flee the country since 2014.
Ongoing repression of Venezuelan citizens intensified last year, leading up to and following a courageous effort by the Democratic Unity Platform to mount a credible electoral challenge in July 28, 2024, presidential elections. But Maduro claimed a fraudulent victory – one that the United States and much of the international community has refused to recognize.
The Maduro regime recently again cracked down on Venezuelan citizens in the period surrounding fraudulent legislative elections that took place on May 25, arbitrarily detaining more than 50 prisoners of conscience, including Eduardo Torres, executive director of the human rights organization PROVEA, and Catalina Ramos, coordinator of Vente Venezuela’s Citizen Associations.
Tie-ups between criminal networks and the Venezuelan regime have attracted much concern from the United States. But addressing the sources of underlying instability and the impact of resulting outmigration will require the United States and other international actors, especially those within Latin America, to hold Venezuela’s leadership accountable and support democratic reformers, including human rights defenders such as Tarazona.
And because the Maduro regime has tried to neutralize avenues for internal accountability, a solution to the crisis in Venezuela requires international pressure to preserve as much space for civil society leaders as possible.
First, U.S. and other international leaders must continue to hold high-level meetings that provide visibility and recognize the legitimacy of representatives from Venezuela’s democratic political opposition.
The U.S. State Department and Congress should also continue to fund democracy assistance initiatives that directly support Venezuelan human rights defenders and nongovernmental organizations to make sure these individuals and organizations can continue their vital accountability work.
Targeted U.S. sanctions must also remain in place against Venezuelan officials known to profit from illicit economic activities and tie-ups with irregular armed groups. This will limit the space for corrupt and repressive actors to maneuver.
The United States has a strategic imperative to support democracy advocates and human rights defenders in Venezuela because they share the same values of building a more prosperous, safe, and secure future in their own country, with ripple effects for the entire Western Hemisphere.
Now more than ever, the United States and the international community need to send a clear message to human rights advocates like Javier Tarazona that they have not been forgotten.
