“Let’s get them!” Maduro’s campaign to eliminate “traitors”

Standing on a balcony of the presidential palace, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro shouted to a crowd of supporters: “Let’s get them!”

“Report the fascist criminals to me so I can find them! I will protect people street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood!” he shouted.

Maduro was referring to those who questioned his re-election to a third term in a disputed July 28 election that the opposition said was stolen from them.

The election results, which defied pollsters’ predictions, sparked protests last week in the oil-rich country that left 24 people dead, according to rights groups. The government reported the deaths of two soldiers.

Maduro said more than 2,200 people have been arrested for their links to the protests and that opposition leaders Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia and Maria Corina Machado should be “behind bars.”

Maduro’s government has set up a phone app and a military hotline allowing citizens to file anonymous complaints against opposition protesters, raising concerns among human rights activists.

“Report it!” asked a state television presenter promoting the initiative. “Have you seen that you can report the fascist… the terrorist?”

The app was later blocked by the Google and Apple stores and disabled.

Maduro, however, assured that “more than 5,000 threats” reported through this channel have been “treated.”

The General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) has also set up a telephone line for complaints.

“Operation Tun Tun has only just begun,” he warns on social media.

“Tun Tun” refers to the sound of a door being knocked on by authorities.

“We have to earn the respect of the neighborhood,” Maduro said at the Miraflores presidential palace.

In the cells of the National Police in Caracas, a woman waited for news of her brother, arrested after a demonstration.

“He was with friends in a bakery” after a march “and the police arrived and took them away,” she told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“They’re even going to take people out of their homes, take their phones to see what they have against the government,” she warned. “They’ve been going door to door, knocking on doors. We’re already afraid to make statements, we’re afraid of being arrested on the street.”

The NGO Foro Penal, which defends “political prisoners”, denounced arbitrary arrests and reported the detention of more than a hundred minors.

“There are cases where people have been arrested not while they were protesting or while they were on the street, but late at night at their homes,” Gonzalo Himiob, vice president of Foro Penal, told AFP.

“Apparently, these arrests are the result of denunciations… generally in very poor neighborhoods,” the lawyer said, highlighting what he called “the establishment of fear as a tool of social control.”

General Elio Estrada Paredes, commander of the National Guard – the military body responsible for maintaining public order – praised last week the “energetic actions” of the armed forces.

“We managed to reach the houses of these traitors after they committed acts of vandalism,” he said.

Maduro said he had authorized two maximum-security prisons to transfer all those arrested.

At an opposition demonstration, a young woman carried a placard calling for “freedom for Jesus Aguilar and all those who have been arrested!”

She prefers not to say anything about the protester arrested in Guarenas, a town near Caracas.

“There is a lot of fear… Many people refuse to report their cases,” said Himiob, of Foro Penal.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Wednesday that the United States was “very concerned” by attempts by Venezuelan authorities to arrest opposition members and suppress protests.

Such actions by Maduro “certainly do not inspire confidence in his claimed victory,” Miller told reporters.