Of all the government’s critics, few believed that 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 when others left. She is also moderate, has international recognition and appeared to have powerful contacts in the secret world of the Venezuelan military, qualities her peers believed could protect her.
But late last week, Ms. San Miguel arrived at the airport outside Caracas with her daughter, bound, a relative said, for a short trip to Miami, when she was intercepted by counterintelligence agents. Soon after, her family started disappearing as well. The daughter, two brothers and two former romantic partners. Lost.
For four days, the only public information about Ms. San Miguel came from Venezuela’s attorney general, who he claimed on social mediawithout providing evidence that Ms. San Miguel was connected to a plan to assassinate the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro.
Finally, on Tuesday night, her lawyers said she had come forward — and was being held in a notoriously brutal detention center. Her family was also in state custody.
The arrest of Ms. San Miguel, head of a modest but influential nonprofit that monitors the armed forces, has caused a minor earthquake in Venezuela’s human rights circles, where just a few months ago many were watching with guarded anticipation the signing of Mr. Maduro struck a deal with the country’s opposition, promising to work for free and fair presidential elections later this year.
Political change, though a distant possibility, seemed worth dreaming about.
Now, the small group of activists, aid workers, critics, analysts, journalists and others who have been able to stay inside the country – despite years of repression and economic crisis – are watching the space in which they operate shrink even further.
And as a result, the road to democracy seems as difficult as ever.
A new law proposed by Mr. Maduro’s party seeks to tightly regulate non-profit organizations, barring them from engaging in activities that “threaten national stability,” prompting concerns that it would be used to criminalize such groups.
The country’s leading opposition candidate, María Corina Machado, has been barred from running in the presidential election, several of her staff members have been arrested and a violent government-linked gang recently disrupted one of her events, bloodied supporters .
“If this happened to Rocío San Miguel, then what’s left for everyone else?” 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. There are 263 political prisoners in Venezuela, according to a monitoring group, Foro Penal, many of whom have been held without trial for years.
What distinguishes Ms. San Miguel’s case is not just how prominent and well-connected she was — it’s that the authorities detained her entire family and then held them all incommunicado for days, a tactic known in international law as “ forced disappearance”.
Taken together, these measures are part of a marked shift in repression, said Foro Penal’s Gonzalo Himiob, where the government seeks cases that attract media attention and uses detention tactics likely to stoke fear among those who challenge its rule. .
“The government is crossing lines it hasn’t crossed before,” he said.
At the heart of these actions appears to be Mr. Maduro’s own fear. Chavismo, the movement he leads, has ruled Venezuela since his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, won the 1998 presidential election.
Mr. Chavez, 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 inside the country has spilled 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 economic situation, and which Washington has said it will do if Mr Maduro makes moves to support democracy.
In October, to cautious praise from the US and its allies, Mr Maduro signed a deal with the opposition to hold presidential elections.
Days later, the main opposition candidate, Ms. Machado, won the 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 are not going to get what they want.” That is, real elections.
Mr. Maduro, he added, “is not willing to lose power.”
Ms San Miguel, a dual Venezuelan-Spanish national, is the head of Citizen Control, which published research into the number of people killed by state security forces and criticized a Venezuelan law that allows the use of lethal force during demonstrations.
On the morning of February 9, Mrs. San Miguel had arrived at the airport outside Caracas with her 26-year-old daughter, according to Minnie Díaz Paruta, the daughter’s aunt.
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 without responding to messages, the aunt said. Ms. San Miguel’s brothers and former associates were detained around this time, according to Ms. Díaz and other reports.
Two days later, Venezuela’s top prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, was announced on the social media platform X that Ms. San Miguel was being held by the state, accused of participating in an operation that it claimed sought to assassinate Mr. Maduro.
He assured the public that the detention was carried out in accordance with “international standards for the protection of human rights”.
(Mr Maduro’s government often claims to be uncovering assassination plots against him.)
Ms. San Miguel’s lawyers were not allowed to see her or told where she was.
A group of human rights activists toured some of the country’s detention centers, hoping to find her, Ms. Deeb said, without success. It is not clear how it was eventually found.
The US embassy in Venezuela, which is located in neighboring Colombia, he said The arrests followed “a disturbing trend of seemingly arbitrary detentions of democratic actors.”
The United Nations Human Rights Council, which in 2020 said Mr Maduro had committed “crimes against humanity” in his efforts to silence the opposition, issued a similar statement.
On February 13, Ms. San Miguel appeared in a hearing the previous evening, charged with treason, conspiracy and terrorism, Mr. Saab he 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 Helicoide, a 1950s building built as a shopping center that has since become a notorious detention center.
The United Nations mission looking into human rights abuses in the country has interviewed Helicoide detainees 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 service, who wields significant power at Helicoid, took direct orders from Mr. Maduro.
Ms San Miguel’s lawyer said one of her former partners, Alejandro González, would be held at another facility and both would remain in custody.
The other four members of the family, Miranda Díaz San Miguel, Víctor Díaz Paruta, Miguel San Miguel and Alberto San Miguel, will be released on the condition that they do not leave the country or speak to the media.
News of the arrests spread quickly. Jairo Chourio, 46, who lives in the city of Maracaibo, said he learned of Ms San Miguel’s arrest in a Telegram group where he received information from the country’s socialist party. He cheered the bookings, which must have been “deserved”.
Others said the arrests were worrying signs of the state of the country’s democracy.
“In my family, we’re all afraid to speak,” said Andrea Bracho, 28, also from Maracaibo.
Ms. Brajo had only decided to speak to a reporter, she said, “because tomorrow I’m leaving the country.”
“For now, I have no hope,” he continued. “And I’m so sad about it.”
Sheyla Urdaneta contributed reporting from Maracaibo, Venezuela.
