In Venezuela you are a critic one day and arrested the next

Of all the government critics, few thought Rocío San Miguel would be the one to disappear.

Ms. San Miguel, 57, has long been one of Venezuela's best-known security experts, a woman who dared to investigate her country's authoritarian government even as others fled. She is also moderate, internationally recognized and appears to have strong contacts in the secretive world of the Venezuelan military, qualities her colleagues believed could protect her.

But late last week, Ms. San Miguel arrived at the airport outside Caracas with her daughter, en route to what a relative called a quick trip to Miami, when she was detained by counterintelligence agents. Shortly afterwards, her family also began to disappear. The daughter, two brothers and two former romantic partners. Away.

For four days, the only public information about Ms. San Miguel came from Venezuela's top prosecutor, who claimed on social mediawithout providing evidence that Ms San Miguel had been linked to a plot to assassinate the country's president, Nicolás Maduro.

Ultimately, her lawyers said Tuesday evening that she had surfaced — and was being held in a notoriously brutal detention center. Her family was also in state custody.

The arrest of Ms. San Miguel, the head of a modest but influential nonprofit that oversees the armed forces, has caused a minor earthquake in Venezuela's human rights circles, where just a few months ago many watched with wary anticipation as Mr. Maduro signed. a deal with the country's opposition, promising to work towards free and fair presidential elections later this year.

Political change, even if still a remote possibility, seemed worth dreaming about.

Now the small group of activists, aid workers, critics, analysts, journalists and others who have managed to survive in the country despite years of repression and economic crisis are seeing the space in which they operate shrink even further.

And as a result, the road to democracy looks as difficult as ever.

A new law proposed by Maduro's party aims to strictly regulate nonprofits and ban them from engaging in actions “that threaten national stability,” leading to concerns that it will be used to criminalize these groups .

The country's leading opposition candidate, María Corina Machado, has been disqualified from running in the presidential election, several of her staffers have been arrested and a violent government-linked gang recently interrupted one of her events, leaving supporters bloodied.

“If this happened to Rocío San Miguel, what is left for the rest?” said Laura Dib, who directs the Venezuela program at the Washington Office on Latin America.

Imprisoning people the Maduro government considers a threat is not new. According to a watchdog group, Foro Penal, there are 263 political prisoners in Venezuela, many of whom have been held without trial for years.

What sets Ms. San Miguel's case apart isn't just how prominent and well-connected she was — it's that authorities detained her entire family and then held them without communication for days, a tactic known under international law as ” forced disappearance'.

Taken together, these measures are part of a remarkable shift in repression, says Gonzalo Himiob of Foro Penal, with the government seeking out cases that attract media attention and using detention tactics that are likely to escalate fear among those who question its rule Pull.

“The government is crossing lines it has not crossed before,” he said.

At the heart of these actions seems to be Maduro's own fear. Chavismo, the movement he leads, has ruled Venezuela since his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, won the 1998 presidential elections.

Mr. Chávez, and then Mr. Maduro, oversaw a socialist-inspired revolution that initially lifted many out of poverty. But in recent years, government mismanagement of the oil sector, as well as corruption and US sanctions, have devastated the economy.

A humanitarian crisis in the country has spread beyond its borders, with millions of Venezuelans seeking refuge elsewhere.

Mr Maduro wants the US to lift sanctions, which could help improve the country's financial situation, and Washington has said this will happen if Mr Maduro takes steps to support democracy.

In October, with cautious praise from the US and its allies, Maduro signed a deal with the opposition to hold presidential elections.

Days later, the main opposition candidate, Ms. Machado, won a primary with a turnout that exceeded expectations and was seen as a sign of Mr. Maduro's weakness.

The arrests of Ms. San Miguel and her family, Ms. Dib said, are a “message to civil society that they will not get what they want.” That means: real elections.

Mr. Maduro, she added, “is not willing to lose power.”

Ms. San Miguel, a Venezuelan-Spanish national, is the head of Citizen Control, which has published a study into the number of people killed by state security forces and criticized a Venezuelan law allowing the use of lethal force during protests.

According to Minnie Díaz Paruta, an aunt of the daughter, Ms. San Miguel had arrived at the airport outside Caracas with her 26-year-old daughter on the morning of February 9.

Ms. San Miguel was approached by government agents and taken into custody.

Terrified, the daughter returned to Caracas. A day later, she returned to the airport to collect her luggage, but the young woman soon disappeared and did not answer messages, the aunt said. According to Ms. Díaz and other reports, Ms. San Miguel's brothers and former partners were arrested around this time.

Two days later, Venezuela's top prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, said announced the social media platform

He assured the public that the detention had taken place in accordance with “international standards for the protection of human rights.”

(Maduro's government regularly claims to uncover assassination plots against him.)

Ms. San Miguel's lawyers were not allowed to see her or tell her where she was.

A group of human rights activists toured some of the country's detention centers in the hope of finding her, Ms. Dib said, without success. It is unclear how she was eventually found.

The US Embassy in Venezuela, located in neighboring Colombia, said the arrests followed “a worrying trend of apparently arbitrary detentions of democratic actors.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council, which in 2020 said that Mr Maduro had committed “crimes against humanity” in his attempts to silence the opposition, issued a similar statement.

On February 13, Ms. San Miguel appeared at a hearing the night before, charged with treason, conspiracy and terrorism. said. Her lawyers said they were not present.

Later that day, a member of her defense team announced online that she had been located: She was in the Helicoid, a 1950s building that was built as a shopping center and has since become a well-known detention center.

The United Nations mission investigating human rights abuses in the country has interviewed Helicoid prisoners and says they have reported torture, including beatings and the use of electric shocks.

The mission also reported in 2022 that the director of the country's top intelligence agency, who has significant power in the Helicoid, received direct orders from Mr. Maduro.

Ms. San Miguel's lawyer said that one of her ex-partners, Alejandro González, would be held in another facility, and that both would remain in custody.

The four other family members, Miranda Díaz San Miguel, Víctor Díaz Paruta, Miguel San Miguel and Alberto San Miguel, would be released on the condition that they would not leave the country or talk to the media.

News of the arrests spread quickly. Jairo Chourio, 46, who lives in the city of Maracaibo, said he heard about Ms. San Miguel's arrest in a Telegram group, where he received information from the country's Socialist Party. He welcomed the arrests, which must have been “well deserved.”

Others said the arrests were troubling signs of the state of democracy in the country.

“In my family we are all afraid to speak out,” said Andrea Bracho, 28, also from Maracaibo.

Ms. Bracho had only decided to speak to a reporter, she said, “because I am leaving the country tomorrow.”

“For now, I have no hope,” she continued. “And I'm so sad about it.”

Sheyla Urdaneta reported from Maracaibo, Venezuela.