Nelson Merino, a 34 -year -old Venezuelan, met terror on July 29, 2024. The previous night, during the presidential elections, it was a fundamental piece to achieve the electoral records that demonstrated the victory of Edmundo González Urrutia over Nicolás Maduro. His position as an electoral coordinator of Citizen Meeting in Naguanagua, Carabobo state, made him a witness to the citizen vote and led him to have some of the thousands of minutes in his hands that certified the opposition triumph.
But 24 hours after the elections, while she was protected at home, officials of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin) arrested him. From the moment of his detention, it was clear that his case escaped any logic of ordinary justice. Family members tried to manage their release, but the response of the authorities of the center was overwhelming: “Even if you bring me a million dollars, we will not release it because it is an order above,” said Merino in a event organized by the Casla Institute In Madrid, Spain, entitled “What happens in Venezuela?”
After a month he was transferred to the Penitentiary Center of Aragua, also known as the prison of Bumpywhere he claimed to have lived a “horror movie.”
“I saw how they mistreated and violated the elementary rights of children and elderly. There were 17 -year -old children, we sang their 18 years deprived of liberty. Also older adults, over 80 years old, that the only thing they asked for God was to see their children and grandchildren again. There were people with serious health condition, such as cancer, Parkinson, Alzheimer’s and others in street situations that nobody names them,”
Thus three months, 18 days and fifteen hours passed, until Merino was released. It is a time that is accuracy of the stopwatch.
Electric and hunger downloads as punishment in bump
The first month in Tocorón was, for him, the most brutal.
“They never turned off the light. At one or two in the morning they hit the bars, they threw us cold or urine water in the mats so that we could not sleep,” he said. “Every day they entered with the psychoterror: you are not going to leave, you will die here, they are worthless. They told us that we were slaves.”
In that context, Merino described physical torture with electrical discharges. In several cases, he remembers, they put so much current to the children who bleed by the wounds caused by the electricity produced by the Tasers. But he also told the forced positions to which they subjected the inmates, usually under stairs or in small rooms that prevented them from stretching the body while the rodents passed through the sides.
To this was added poor diet, another form of torture, in Merino’s opinion. “Soap or ground flavor rice, with raw beef viscera. That was what they gave in bump,” he says. The breakfasts consisted of “burned arepas or raw with liquefied raw mortadel, the boys told him comically vomiting cat.”
However, the worst came when they were “rotten food, green, with worms”, along with a clear threat: “That was what there was and if we didn’t like we were going to starve.” The level of food deterioration was such that Merino said that “you put it to the animals that were in bump, which were mostly dogs, they did not ate it.”
Thus two weeks passed in which Merino refused to eat. “I felt that if I did I was going to get sick more than not to eat,” he explained. The result was predictable: they took him out of his cell and had to administer three serum bags due to complete dehydration. He lost 20 kilos during his seclusion. Another political prisoner lost more than 50 kilos in two and a half months, he said.
In all that time, Merino said that the custodians forced them to make “favors” that consisted of the fact that the inmates performed tasks that the officials demanded in exchange for certain “benefits”, such as an additional dish or a glass of water. “Those favors were not to get well or shut up, no, they were sexual favors. Of the custodians to the private ones (of liberty).”
The cruelty that marked it
One of the moments that most impacted Merino illustrates how far the cruelty of the system comes. It happened when leaving Tocorón, when a lady approached her with her phone.
“Do you know my son?” He asked Merino. “And I tell him, yes ma’am, I know him, he’s there,” he replied. “Nelson, they haven’t let me see him in all this time,” said the woman, who had not been able to see her son in more than three months.
Given this, in a certain disbelief, Merino told him that he did not understand how they had not allowed her to see her son being her relative direct. “It is that he was told there that his mother had died.
“At that level of cruelty we arrive. Where they don’t care absolutely anything,” Merino lamented.
In the midst of that scenario, he says that despair led many to the limit. “I witnessed amount of suicide attempts inside bump. With alcohol, with chlorine, they threw themselves from the bunk beds to paste with the edge of the cells of the cells to undress and die, hang up with the sheets. But that is simply not said.”
When he was finally released, Merino discovered severe conditions that restricted that “probation”, as he called it. So he decided to flee from the country through the border with Colombia.
“I could not be a participant and complicit with my silence. I had to denounce the atrocity that our brothers live today, within Venezuela and within the torture centers. They already took the most important thing that my freedom was. But they will never take away my desire to continue working and fighting for a country where freedom and democracy really reign.”
