“Tun tun, who is it? People of peace!”
Until a few years ago this was only the lyrics of a popular Venezuelan Christmas carol.
Today, however, it has another meaning.
“He who eats the light [el que se pase]… Tun tun. Don’t be a crybaby, you’re going to Tocorón [una cárcel]”the president said on Monday, Nicolas Maduroin reference to “Operation Tun Tun,” the name given by the government to the harsh response of mass arrests of protesters and opponents following the July 28 elections.
“It is an informal operation that represents an escalation of repression in Venezuela”, defines it in dialogue with BBC Mundo Gonzalo Himiob, from the NGO Criminal Forumwhich defends the rights of people arbitrarily detained.
Venezuela is experiencing a new political conflict following the presidential elections. The National Electoral Council (CNE), composed of a majority of members close to the ruling party, proclaimed Maduro the winner with 51.2% of the votesahead of his main rival, the opposition Edmundo Gonzalez.
But the CNE has not yet presented the minutes that support these results. They justify it with an alleged computer hack.
In turn, the opposition, led by González and Maria Corina Machadoannounced that its witnesses managed to collect 81.7% of the records. The data from these minutes, published on a website, show that González won with 67% of the votes.
An opposition victory would mean the defeat of Chavismo, which has been in power for 25 years and has been represented by Maduro since 2013.
Several countries, led by the United States, consider Gonzalez the winner based on the evidence, while others, including Brazil, Mexico and Colombia demand transparency and that the CNE publish the minutes.
Maduro has now transferred the electoral matter to the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ), which has always been close to the pro-government positions and is not recognised by the opposition to settle any dispute over the election results.
As a result of the disputeOn Monday, July 29, the day after the elections, people in working-class neighborhoods began banging pots and pans and protesting against the official results that gave Maduro the victory.
At the same time, mass arrests began, which relatives and local and international organizations describe as arbitrary.
And with them, a climate of fear rarely seen before in Venezuela, which has led people to not post on social media, delete their chats, not carry their phones with them, not leave home, take refuge in other people’s homes and even, as happens in much of this article, speak only anonymously.
From television to the institution
In 2017 God given haira member of parliament and one of the main spokesmen for the ruling party, spoke for the first time on his weekly television programme about “Operation Tun Tun” to refer to the arrests of “terrorists”.
It was in the context of the protests of that year, which began after two controversial rulings in which the Supreme Court of Justice temporarily assumed all the powers corresponding to the National Assembly, at that time controlled by the opposition.
At the time, it was not something “formal.” Now it is something more institutionalized and even Maduro himself names it.
But if in 2017, from April to July, there were 5,051 people arrested, now, in just one week, Foro Penal counts 1,010 arrests.
“This is an unprecedented cycle of repression, never seen before. There had been peaks of repression in the protests of 2014, 2017 and 2019. But never before has there been anything like this, never before has there been such intense repression as we have seen now,” Himiob denounces.
Maduro has boasted of the arrest of more than 2,000 people in the context of protests that he attributes to an attempted “coup” by the “fascist right.”and has announced the creation of two maximum security prisons.
One of the main security bodies in charge of arrests is the Scientific, Criminal and Criminal Investigations Corps (CICPC).
“Operation Tun Tun is just beginning. Report if you have been the target of a physical or virtual hate campaign through social media,” he wrote on his Instagram account on Saturday. Douglas Ricodirector of CICPC.
“We are seeing an intensification in the way of repressing and attacking the population,” Valentina Ballesta, deputy director of research for the Americas at the National Institute of Statistics, told BBC Mundo. International Amnesty.
The pattern of arrests also changed.
A pattern in age and origin
“The type of arrest, the place, is now varied. From people who were protesting to others who were going to work, on the street, in any circumstance and indiscriminately,” Himiob complains.
Both Ballesta and Himiob point out that if in other times the tendency was to arrest people in residential areas (with a somewhat higher purchasing power), now they are mainly arresting humble people from working-class areas.
“That is where the mobilization is taking place and that is where they are trying to demobilize them as much as possible, that is where the tun tun operations are taking place,” says Ballesta.
A local journalist, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the BBC about the atmosphere this is creating in a working-class neighbourhood in Caracas.
“People think that anyone walking down the street can be arrested without further ado.. Many were arrested because they are seen in a video protesting, people who went out to buy bread, a police motorcycle passed by and they were grabbed.”
There is also a trend in age. The average age of those arrested is between 21 and 23 years old and, of the more than 1,000 detainees, 91 are teenagers, according to the Penal Forum.
The denunciations
There is another side to “Operation Tun Tun”: denunciations, such as the call made by Douglas Rico, director of the CICPC, to report whether he had been “the subject of a physical or virtual hate campaign.”
The problem is, as a legal expert who also wants to remain anonymous tells me, “the legal issue has now become subversive.”
The hate law currently in force in Venezuela is very open “and there are no limits to the concept of hate, or to what is fascist and what is not. Everything fits into that concept,” he points out.
Anyone can report someone else under this umbrella: a neighbour, the person who helps you at the grocery store, the leader of your community. And although there is no record of how many complaints were generated in this way or how many arrests they led to, it still manages to sow distrust and fear among people.
Also, almost anything on your phone can become material for a hold or arrest.
“The authorities are currently emphasizing that they have and are using tools to generate terror and fear in the population,” Ballesta explains to me.
For example, the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) He posted a video on his social networks that starts with the phrase “Wherever I go, Chucky will find me,” from the movie Child’s Play and continues with a rather dark version of the song Ring Christmas Bells whose lyrics say “If you did wrong, he will know well… He will look for you, hide well. Your name is on his list,” while DGCIM agents are seen arresting people.
The video is no longer available.
This has a counterpart: “If (the authorities) say they have a list of people, who will go to your house… It is a confession of arbitrary arrests, of unlawful deprivation of liberty. They are possible crimes against humanity,” says Ballesta.
Maduro’s government is currently facing an investigation by the International Criminal Court for possible crimes against humanity, including arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and torture. The government denies the charges.
Arbitrariness
Foro Penal explains that there are many irregularities in “Operation Tun Tun”.
One is about the arrests themselves, which do not comply with the rule of whether they are based on a court order or in flagrante delicto.
“They also detain someone and do not say where they are, they are denying them the right to choose a trusted lawyer and they are forced to accept a public defender. Presentation hearings should be held in courts and they are held in detention centers without allowing access to anyone other than a public defender. This is a very serious violation of the right to defense,” says Gonzalo Himiob.
And it is added that, in general, a “sort of legal prequalification of the crime is made and all the detainees are called terrorists without even having carried out investigations, which is a great irregularity and a very serious trivialization of the term terrorism.”
Maduro frequently refers to protesters as “terrorists,” “criminals” and members of “new generation gangs.”
“All the guarimberos (protesters) are going to Tocorón and Tocuyito, maximum security prisons,” said Maduro, referring to these prisons that for years were under the control of criminal gangs such as the Tren de Aragua.
BBC Mundo tried to contact the Public Prosecutor’s Office to obtain its version of events, but received no response.
“Delete it”
From Europe, Juan (fictitious name) tells me that his mother, who lives in El Cementerio, a popular area of Caracas, has seen how in her area the police go around asking people for their phones and checking them.
“He became afraid of having his phone checked and now he goes out without it and deletes the conversation every time we talk about the situation in the country,” he tells me.
This is a recurring theme if you are in any chat that is shared with Venezuelans who are in the country.
“Don’t say that,” “Don’t post that shit, you’re putting us all in danger,” “Delete that immediately for our safety,” “Delete, delete, delete.” And so on, loads of messages for things that, a priori and from the outside, could seem absolutely harmless, such as jokes or political opinions.
Such is the fear that anonymity has taken hold not only in many of the testimonies in this article, but also in the signatures of the journalistic notes in media within the country, which now appear in the vast majority of cases with the generic name of the team.
Or in the cultural sphere. Casapaís Magazine (Uruguay) published on its social networks that “due to the repression of the Maduro dictatorship”, they published the pieces of Venezuelan authors under pseudonyms: “Revealing their names is a sentence of prison and death.”
The other side of “Operation Tun Tun”
In addition to the reported mass arrests in working-class areas, there is another profile, that of political activists, opposition militants or people who participated in the process of collecting the voting records on election day.
A few days ago, former opposition deputy Freddy Superlano and two of his collaborators were arrested. In a video shared on social media by opposition leader María Corina Machado’s party, Vente Venezuela, it is seen how unidentified and hooded people take them away when they were about to enter a house.
Superlano’s wife, Aurora Silva, reported on Tuesday that she has not been able to see him yet.
A particular case is that of the now ex-prosecutor Maglen Marín Rodríguez, arrested and imprisoned “for the crime of intentional delay or omission of duties” by not “prosecuting four subjects” who participated in demonstrations, he wrote Tarek William SaabAttorney General of the State, on his X account (formerly Twitter).
Another type of detainee is that of activists and human rights defenders. For example, Edni López, also a teacher, has been detained since Sunday, when at the Maiquetía airport, which serves Caracas, she was told that her passport had been cancelled and was detained.
The cancellation of passports seems to be another face of this “Operation Tun Tun”.
“It is a practice that has been documented for years, but now we see it systematically,” explains Valentina Ballesta.
Under strict anonymity and “in a shell,” that is, from a house that is not hers, Patricia (fictitious name), an activist, spoke to us.
“This is a huge emotional burden. You activate security protocols that you didn’t expect to apply, I delete chats, I don’t leave where I am, if I go out it is with thousands of precautions, without my phone… And now I realized that they have revoked my passport.”
BBC Mundo has learned of at least 15 people whose passports were revoked, including activists, academics and journalists. The exact number is still unknown and no authority has commented on the matter.
“There is a lot of fear. You normalize it, but it is not normal,” Patricia tells me.
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