That October, Maduro appeared on state television with a group of cabinet members. He asked them to find ways to curb criticism on social networks. Such posts, he said, fuelled the unrest. "Bring order to this," Maduro ordered.
Ministers and other senior officials convened to address his demand. Among them was Saab, the chief prosecutor.
Saab had assumed the position weeks before when his predecessor, Luisa Ortega, broke with Maduro over the creation of the new assembly. A former public defender, Saab, 57 years old, is widely described by opponents as one of Maduro's lead henchmen.
He was one of 13 Maduro officials sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury that year for "the undermining of democracy" and waging "rampant violence" against protestors. Saab has called the sanctions "a badge of honor."
"Venezuela's peace is guaranteed," Saab said in a speech upon taking the prosecutor's position.
Right away, Saab conducted a purge of the country's prosecutors and stripped authority from those who stayed. He fired as many as 300 officials considered disloyal and shut units focused on corruption and human rights abuses, seven former prosecutors told Reuters.
"Everything was centralized," said one former prosecutor. "All instructions came from him."
In November, Maduro personally submitted a draft of the Law Against Hate for Peaceful Coexistence to the new legislature. After a debate of less than two hours, the Constituent Assembly passed it with a unanimous show of hands. Legislators applauded and waved flags, shouting "long live the homeland!"
At a news conference the following day, Saab called upon Venezuelans to denounce violators. "Remember, now there is a very clear law in Venezuela that allows us to prosecute," he said.
The law is vague, opponents objected, banning conduct such as "promoting national hate" without clearly defining it. Its six pages and 25 articles of text are mostly a tract on peace, tolerance, democracy and other values it ostensibly aims to protect. The legislation doesn't specify what actions, statements, or other behavior constitute hatred.
As a result, pro-Maduro prosecutors and judges have room to allege hate as they see fit. "It's a legal justification to do what they want," Ortega, the former chief prosecutor, told Reuters. Ortega left Venezuela after resigning and now lives in Colombia.
In Saab's first two years on the job, his office pressed few charges using the law. Espacio Publico, an activist group that tracks the law's implementation, reported just four arrests for inciting hatred in 2019.
With the law's rollout, however, the government increasingly asked teams in the Information Ministry and at the state telecommunications regulator to scan Twitter and Facebook for critical comments, according to six people familiar with those efforts.
This year, the country's decrepit health system came under greater strain. For years, doctors and hospital administrators have angered the government by criticizing a lack of basic infrastructure and supplies – from latex gloves to running water to disinfectant. Outrage over coronavirus preparedness spurred more intense criticism.
Even before the virus was known to be infecting South America, doctors cautioned that Venezuela's testing capacity is scant, its health data unreliable.
Their warnings, epidemiologists say, were justified: Venezuela has since reported what appear to be unrealistically low infection figures. The country, with roughly 30 million people, has confirmed 107,177 COVID-19 cases and 949 deaths, a fraction the rate registered in neighboring Colombia and across Latin America.
Maduro pushed back. After opposition legislators in March said the government was ill prepared for coronavirus, the president in a speech said they were seeking to "torture Venezuelan minds." He accused them of "manipulating" the pandemic for political purposes.
Within days, prosecutors ramped up use of the law.
On March 21, National Police officers arrived at the home of Darvinson Rojas, a freelance journalist. The day before, Rojas had challenged the government's coronavirus statistics on Twitter, citing additional COVID-19 cases that had been reported by local authorities but left out of the national count.
The officers, Rojas said, told him there was a coronavirus case in his building and that he needed to accompany them for a test at a nearby base. Instead, officers jailed him and interrogated him about his tweets.
At a court hearing two days later, a prosecutor charged Rojas with inciting hatred and spreading "false information," according to Rojas and his attorney, Saul Blanco. Blanco told Reuters the court didn't let him read the case file and he wasn't allowed to visit Rojas in jail.
After 12 days in a cell, a court released Rojas pending further investigation. The court barred him from leaving the country and told him to limit his reporting to conveying government statistics. Officials from the court didn't respond to requests for comment.
He's too frightened to report much on coronavirus now, Rojas told Reuters. "I've left the subject alone," he said.
"HATE AMONG VENEZUELANS"
Giovanni Urbaneja had long irritated Belisario, the mayor of San Jose de Guanipa, a small city in the eastern state of Anzoategui. Once a staunch Socialist, Urbaneja served as a state legislator when Venezuela was governed by the late Hugo Chavez, Maduro's mentor and predecessor.
After Chavez died and Venezuela's economy imploded, Urbaneja became disillusioned. With his wife, an attorney, he set up a foundation to provide legal assistance to victims of human rights abuses. He used the platform to speak out against Maduro and other ruling party officials.
In a letter to Reuters from jail, Urbaneja, 54, said mismanagement and embezzlement had destroyed the local economy. Once a booming oil town, it is now the site of abandoned drilling rigs, shuttered stores and homes darkened by blackouts that sometimes last days.
Urbaneja didn't cite evidence for his accusations in the letter to Reuters or in the public statements that triggered the mayor's demand for hate-law charges.
Belisario, 70, previously commanded Venezuela's National Guard. He was elected mayor in late 2017. At first, Urbaneja said he supported the new mayor, believing his military experience would help him stomp out local corruption. But soon, Urbaneja found fault.
In a Facebook post in December 2018, Urbaneja called Belisario a "traitor," alleging the mayor was letting local police rob and extort citizens. The mayor, in an official statement a few weeks later, denied the allegations. He accused Urbaneja of belonging to an "international conspiracy" to topple Maduro.
Last year, Urbaneja was invited by a private local radio station to discuss the public health system. On air, he said Belisario had failed to address a recent malaria outbreak. Minutes later, a local councilman and ally of Belisario burst into the studio and punched Urbaneja repeatedly, yelling that he was tired of the criticism.
Urbaneja, who lost consciousness in the beating, reported the assault to the office of Jairo Gil, the state prosecutor. Gil, who is the prosecutor now pursuing the hate-law case against Urbaneja, didn't respond to questions from Reuters about the attack or the current investigation of his comments about the mayor.
Jose Nassar, the radio host, confirmed details of the assault to a local newspaper. The alleged assailant, Ruben Herrera, was never charged. Neither Nassar nor Herrera responded to requests to discuss the incident.
The mayor, on another radio station shortly afterward, denied any involvement. "If this man's dead body appears around here one morning," he said of Urbaneja, "it won't have anything to do with me." In his text message to Reuters, Belisario said he never ordered any physical attack against Urbaneja.
Tensions escalated anew with coronavirus.
In a series of Facebook posts, Urbaneja accused Belisario and other government officials of misusing public health funds. "COVID-19 is their great business," he wrote on August 9. The comments prompted Belisario's request for the hate-law investigation.
In his letter to Gil, the state prosecutor, the mayor said Urbaneja's posts were particularly worrisome at a time when Maduro's government is subject to intense international and domestic opposition. "The peace of the republic is seriously threatened," he wrote, by people promoting "violence, chaos, anarchy" and "hate among Venezuelans."
Previously undisclosed court documents reviewed by Reuters show that after receiving the mayor's request, Gil promptly ordered police to review Urbaneja's social media accounts. Investigators then sent Gil a report with snapshots of Urbaneja's posts. The posts, they wrote, "were against the nation's leaders."
On August 20, the documents show, Gil signed the order for Urbaneja's arrest. That evening, municipal police, guns drawn, raided Urbaneja's home. Martinez, his wife, held their one-year-old daughter as the officers hauled him away, she told Reuters.
Ever since, Urbaneja has been detained at a police base just a few blocks from Mayor Belisario's office. He hasn't been charged and has had only one court hearing so far, at which a judge authorized prosecutors to continue investigating.
The detention, legal experts say, violates a law stipulating that suspects can only be held for 45 days without being formally charged with a crime.
In a handwritten letter to his lawyer, Adrian Moreno, Urbaneja said guards were keeping him "totally isolated." To keep him from becoming a bad influence, he wrote, guards prevent him from speaking with other inmates.
Urbaneja blames his arrest on "desperation among officials cornered by corruption," he told Reuters in a separate letter. "They are trying to silence my voice."
https://news.trust.org/item/20201214110323-rg53k