The NGO Venezuelan Prison Observatory (OVP) stated this Sunday that the government of Nicolás Maduro will have to respond to Justice for the 25 deaths recorded since 2015 in state custody. This after the death this Saturday of political prisoner and former opposition governor Alfredo Díaz.
“In 26 years the regime has turned prisons into torture centers, where its policy is to subject those deprived of liberty to cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment. Prolonged isolation, without access to private defense and zero medical care,” the organization said in its X account.
Therefore, he stressed that The Maduro government would be “responsible for these deaths”. And he defended that the people who died “were arbitrarily detained.”
“From the OVP we ask ourselves: In which government did so many political prisoners die in state custody?” the NGO stated.
OVP and other organizations hold the Maduro government responsible for deaths in custody
The United States government denounced this Sunday the “vile nature of Maduro’s criminal regime” in Venezuela. This after the death of Díaz and also deplored the conditions of his detention.
“The death of Venezuelan political prisoner Alfredo Díaz, arbitrarily detained at Maduro’s El Helicoide torture center, is yet another reminder of the vile nature of Maduro’s criminal regime”. This is what the Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs said in X.
On Saturday, the Ministry for the Penitentiary Service of Venezuela reported that the former governor of the Nueva Esparta state died of a heart attack. As previously reported by several NGOs and political parties.
However, opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia warned that Díaz’s death reveals a “sustained pattern of state repression”. And they reported that there are already seven political prisoners who have died in prison after the presidential elections on July 28, 2024.
Machado and González Urrutia stressed that the integrity and life of the political prisoner were “the exclusive responsibility of those who kept him arbitrarily kidnapped” in El Helicoide, as the Caracas headquarters of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin) is known. And they ruled out that his death was “common.”
In his X account, González Urrutia indicated that Díaz “should have received the medical attention he needed. Like so many political prisoners who are denied a basic right that must be guaranteed without exceptions.”
Díaz, an activist from the opposition Democratic Action party and also a former councilor and former mayor, was detained in November 2024. This in a context of political crisis after the presidential elections of that year, in which the largest opposition coalition denounced the result that gave Maduro’s re-election as fraudulent.
At that time, the deceased questioned the lack of publication of the disaggregated results of the presidential elections. He also denounced, days before his arrest, the electrical crisis that the state of Nueva Esparta experienced in November, which the government attributed to attacks by the opposition.
