The disappearance of an aid worker at the airport raises fears of repression after controversial elections in Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela — The last time anyone heard from Edni López was on Sunday. The 33-year-old political scientist and award-winning poet was preparing to board a flight to Argentina to visit a friend when she texted her from the airport saying there was something wrong with her passport.

“Immigration has confiscated my passport because it shows as expired,” she wrote to her boyfriend in the message she shared with The Associated Press. “I pray to God that I will not be scammed due to a system error.”

What happened next remains a mystery, adding to the climate of fear and repression that has prevailed in Venezuela since the disputed presidential election, which saw the worst wave of human rights violations since the military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s.

When López’s mother, Ninoska Barrios, and her friends learned she had not boarded the plane, they began frantically combing the detention centers. It was only on Tuesday – more than 48 hours later – that they learned she was being held incommunicado by Venezuela’s feared military intelligence service, facing unknown criminal charges and not allowed to see a lawyer or speak to her family.

“Please give me back my daughter,” Barrios sobbed on Tuesday before Venezuela’s highest human rights body in a video that went viral on social media. “It is not right that a Venezuelan mother has to go through all this.”

López’s arrest is not an isolated incident. Since the July 28 presidential election, security forces have arrested more than 2,000 people for demonstrating against President Nicolás Maduro or for expressing doubts about his claim that he won a third term, despite strong evidence that he lost the election by a margin of more than 2-1. Another 24 have been killed, according to local human rights group Provea.

The wave of arrests instigated by Maduro himself is unprecedented and will result in Venezuela easily surpassing the number of detainees arrested in the three previous crackdowns on Maduro’s opponents.

Those arrested include journalists, politicians, campaign staff and a lawyer defending protesters. Others have had their Venezuelan passports revoked as they tried to leave the country. One local activist even broadcast live her arrest by military intelligence agents as they broke into her home with a crowbar.

“They are entering my house arbitrarily and without a search warrant,” says Maria Oropeza, an opposition leader in the rural state of Portuguesa, in the livestream, which ends abruptly after three minutes. “I am not a criminal. I am just a normal citizen who wants a different country.”

The repression, which is largely arbitrary and indiscriminate, has a deterrent effect, says Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst with the International Crisis Group.

“It’s not just about preventing protests. People are afraid to go out on the streets, period,” Gunson said, adding that parents of teenagers are particularly concerned. “There is a feeling that the police have to meet a quota and that anyone can be stopped and taken away as a suspected enemy of the state.”

The threats start at the top.

“They are hiding rats, but we will catch them,” said the head of the ruling Socialist Party, Diosdado Cabello, in a speech to the Maduro-controlled parliament one day after the election about several prominent opponents.

Meanwhile, Maduro has urged Venezuelans to report election doubters on a government-run app originally created to report power outages and complaints about government services. He also said the government is renovating two gang-dominated prisons to accommodate an expected influx of incarcerated guarimberos – his derogatory term for middle-class protesters who barricaded themselves in the streets for weeks in 2014 and 2017.

“There will be no mercy,” Maduro said on state television.

However, efforts to suppress the resistance are made more difficult by the changing face of the government’s opponents.

Although the demonstrations are much smaller and less aggressive than previous unrest, they are now more spontaneous, often leaderless, and made up of young people – some of them barely teenagers – from the slums on the hillsides of Caracas that have traditionally formed a rock-solid base for the government.

“I don’t care how many people have to die,” 21-year-old tattoo artist Cleiver Acuna said recently at a grassroots march where protesters climbed lampposts to tear down Maduro’s election posters.

“What I want is my freedom. My homeland. I want to live in the Venezuela that my grandparents once told me about.”

Maria Corina Machado, an influential opposition politician who rallied Venezuelans behind a last-minute replacement candidate after she herself was barred from running against Maduro, also called for restraint, expressing the fear felt by many.

“There are times when we must go out, times when we must come together to demonstrate all our strength and resolve and to embrace one another. Just as there are times when we must prepare, organize, communicate and consult with our many allies around the world,” she said in a recorded message posted online on Tuesday.

“Sometimes a break in operations is necessary.”

But the government’s swift action appears to be bearing fruit. According to Provea, security forces have arrested almost as many people in just ten days as they did in five months of the previous year.

“Operation Knock-Knock is a major tool of state terrorism,” said Oscar Murillo, the head of Provea, referring to the surprise arrests in the middle of the night that Cabello and others have touted as an intimidation tactic.

In the poorer Catia neighborhood of Caracas, once a stronghold of the ruling party, no one talks about politics these days. One woman closed her shop when protests began nearby and ran home. Over the next few hours, videos of the demonstration flooded her phone, but she deleted them for fear the government might track social media posts to identify critics.

“I could be arrested just for having them,” she said.

The sudden silence is a stark break from the hopeful mood before the election, when emboldened opposition supporters faced security forces trying to prevent demonstrations against Maduro. They handed out food, lent the opposition leader vehicles and opened their shops to him, despite knowing they could face police retaliation or closure of their businesses.

Even before the current unrest, the human rights situation in Venezuela was under intense scrutiny. Maduro is the target of an investigation by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity in the past.

Maduro’s tactics have been compared to those in Central and South America in the 1970s, when military dictatorships arrested their opponents and sometimes innocent bystanders. Many were killed, and in Argentina some were even drugged and thrown from airplanes into the sea with no sign of their arrest.

Maduro’s alleged abuses of power have little in common with the “dirty war” campaigns of the state security forces.

But the goal of spreading fear is the same, says Santiago Canton, an Argentine lawyer and secretary general of the International Commission of Jurists, a Geneva-based watchdog group.

Canton said López’s case reminded him of the 1977 disappearance of an activist in Argentina who was dragged off a plane to Venezuela and never seen again. At the time, oil-rich Venezuela was the richest country in South America and a democratic haven for exiles fleeing military regimes across the region.

“What happened 50 years ago is unlikely to happen again,” said Canton, who previously headed the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. “But social media is a multiplier that didn’t exist before. You can target violence in a more targeted way and still get the same results.”

Machado sought to urge other countries on Thursday to help end the repression. “I feel that all governments and all sectors lack the determination to demand an immediate end to the madness,” she told reporters.

Meanwhile, López’s friends and family cannot explain why she was targeted.

Since 2020, she has been doing relief work in poor communities, for which she was recognized by the Dutch Embassy in Caracas as one of Venezuela’s “100 Protagonists”. Her work is purely humanitarian in nature and López is not part of any political movement.

Her social media profile is free of any anti-government content and consists mainly of quirky butterfly drawings, poems she has written, and pictures of beaches and sand dunes from her travels through Venezuela.

Cristina Ramirez, who moved to Argentina from Caracas eight years ago, joining more than 7.7 million Venezuelans who have left the country, said she bought a ticket for López in May so her friend could enjoy a well-deserved vacation.

The two were looking forward to meeting again after a long separation and a difficult year for López, whose family is struggling financially. She worries that her friend, who takes medication for diabetes, is suffering in prison, not knowing what led to the nightmare.

“It was supposed to be her first trip outside Venezuela,” Ramirez said in a telephone interview. “I’m still waiting for her.”

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Goodman reported from Miami.