The director of the NGO Foro Penal, Alfredo Romero, denounced that at least 17 people have died in the custody of the Venezuelan State since 2014a pattern that, in his opinion, evidences the existence of a systematic policy of repression against the political prisoners of the Nicolás Maduro regime.
“In total, since 2014 we have already added 17 people who have died in custody. That already makes this something systematic, because we are talking about almost 19,000 people who have been detained,” said Romero in an interview on the program The Morning of NTN24in which he warned about the normalization of these deaths within the Venezuelan repressive system.
“Today, unfortunately, it is taken as something common or regular that a person dies in custody, and that should not be normal,” he stressed.
The warnings from the Penal Forum come after a recent publication in the newspaper ABC of Spain, which revealed that political prisoners in Venezuela would be in risk of murder. According to the report, regime jailers have threatened detainees and their families with reprisals in the event of US military actions against the Maduro government.
State Policy
Romero described the situation as “very serious” and maintained that the repression in Venezuela responds to a State policy based on three pillars: “fear, time and resignation”. “That is what repression seeks,” he stated, while rejecting any attempt to relativize the human rights violations committed in detention centers.
The director of Foro Penal also warned about the climate of anguish that those detained for political reasons are currently experiencing. “There is a feeling of attack against them,” he said, specifying that in the country they remain more than 900 political prisonersa figure that has not decreased in recent months.
The report of ABC collects testimonies from relatives of those arbitrarily detained, whose complaints were confirmed to the Spanish media by Diego Casanova and Andreina Baduelmembers of the NGO Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners (CLIPP).
These alerts would also have been received by the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize and opposition leader, Maria Corina Machadowho has reiterated his complaint about the use of terror as a tool of political control by the regime.
