Death squads have returned to Latin America, this time on the left: A new UN report says government forces in Venezuela have killed at least 6,854 people since the start of 2018, and cites accounts by independent groups that put the total above 9,000.
To be clear, it’s the witnesses who call them “death squads”: They describe Special Action Forces, masked and dressed in black, careening into towns in pickup trucks with no license plates — and proceeding to break into homes, molesting women and separating out young men, then executing them. Afterward, the goons stage a scene to make it look like their victims were resisting arrest.
The government calls this “Operations for the Liberation of the People.” UN human-rights officials told The New York Times it’s in fact “an instrument to instill fear in the population.”
On top of the death squads, the report flags thousands of political arrests and widespread torture of political prisoners, including waterboarding, electric shocks, suffocation with plastic bags and rape.
Dictator Nicolás Maduro gave unusual access to the UN investigators, apparently because they were led by UN human-rights chief Michelle Bachelet, who as president of Chile declined to openly criticize the regime’s turn to repression before she left that office last year.
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