The young lawyer warned her followers on social media: President Nicolás Maduro’s security forces were cracking down as she had never seen, even in authoritarian Venezuela.
“What we are facing is a witch hunt,” María Oropeza, an opposition organizer in the mostly rural western state of Portuguesa, said in a video on X.
Less than two hours later, she shared another video: an Instagram live stream showing agents of the state breaking into her home. In the video, recorded from the top of a dark stairwell, she can be heard demanding that they show her a search warrant and calling for help. “I’m not a criminal,” she says. “I’m just another citizen who wants change in this country.” The agents walk up the stairs, and the video goes dark. Oropeza has not been seen or heard from since.
She’s one of more than 2,200 people who have been arrested since Venezuela’s presidential election July 28, according to Maduro’s count. His electoral council declared the authoritarian socialist the winner of that contest, but voting machine receipts collected at the polls by the opposition on the election date indicate challenger Edmundo González won more than twice as many votes.
Protesters in Venezuela have demanded Maduro release precinct-level results to prove his victory claim. He has refused. The United States and other governments have called for negotiations.
The government, meanwhile, has doubled down on repression. Maduro has boasted of a mass operation to capture and detain protesters he accuses of being “terrorists” and “criminals.”
The opposition and rights advocates say security forces are rounding up not only political leaders but also the regular citizens who helped monitor the presidential election — and anyone who has demanded that he accept his loss.
The government has dubbed it “Operación Tun Tun.” The name recalls a notorious 2017 crackdown, “Tun Tun” being the sound of security forces or pro-government paramilitaries banging on doors late at night without identification or arrest orders, their faces covered, to carry Venezuelans away.
National Assembly Deputy Diosdado Cabello, a former vice president and National Assembly president influential in the government, warned this week that the targets could include journalists working for international organizations. He claimed they were CIA plants.
“Take care of your agents,” Diosdado advised the outlets. “Because if they are alone, Operación Tun Tun could come for them.”
Police and military leaders have promoted a phone line for citizens to report their neighbors to authorities. Maduro says he plans to transfer the new detainees to two infamously dangerous prisons that were emptied last year, facilities he says he’ll “adapt” to their new purpose.
“Report the fascist criminals to me, so I can go after them!” Maduro said.
The result, many Venezuelans say, is a level of fear they’ve never before experienced. They’re refusing to leave their houses at night for fear of being stopped on the street by police. They’re deleting social media posts and exchanging tips on how to wipe WhatsApp messages from their phones. (Maduro this week announced he would criminalize WhatsApp, the messaging app used by just about every Venezuelan.)
Every night now, Mairim Yanes reviews her WhatsApp chats, making sure texts are disappearing after 24 hours and deleting those that are “too risky” — such as those calling Maduro a dictator or criticizing the repression.
“We’re in survival mode,” Yanes said. On Tuesday, she said, national guard members went through a friend’s phone, and he was detained. His family, Yanes said, still doesn’t know where he’s being held. On Wednesday morning, she said, she spotted a group of officials at a bakery near her home asking people to show them their phones.
“I can’t explain the amount of fear swirling around,” Yanes said. “It’s having to pray every time you step outside your door, hoping you’ll make it back. It’s pure terror.”
At least 23 people have been shot to death during protests since the election, according to Victims Monitor, an independent group that tracks homicides in Venezuela. Of those shootings, the group says, eight were linked to the military, three to police and seven to the pro-Maduro motorcycle gangs known as “colectivos.” The youngest victim was 15.
Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, did not respond to a request for comment.
The crackdown, lawyers and human rights activists say, is an escalation even for Maduro, who is already under indictment in the United States for narcoterrorism, and under investigation in the International Criminal Court for allegations of torture and the extrajudicial killing of political opponents. A United Nations fact-finding mission accused Maduro and his inner circle of ordering and coordinating arbitrary detentions, disappearances and killings that constitute “crimes against humanity.”
It’s not just the number of arrests that stand out, said Alfredo Romero, president of the independent legal rights group Foro Penal. Unlike in previous waves of repression, when many detainees were processed and released within days or hours, the great majority of the current arrestees remain locked up, he said. Many, he said, have not been given choice of lawyer.
“We’re going to have the highest number of political prisoners in history,” Romero said, or at least since Foro Penal began tracking cases more than two decades ago.
Most of the detainees have been charged in initial arraignments with “terrorism,” “instigating hate” and “association to commit a crime,” Romero said. Some were arrested during protests after the election. Some, he said, have been detained for posting a video of a protest online. Others simply had the misfortune of walking near a protest, on their way to somewhere else.
The number of detainees has been too high for lawyers and other advocates to keep up. For the first time, they say, the government’s count is significantly higher than their own. Foro Penal has been able to verify only 1,229 arrests — little more than half the tally Maduro boasted this week on television. Of those, Foro Penal says, 105 are under 18.
“We are absolutely overwhelmed,” said Rafael Uzcátegui, a director of Laboratory for Peace. “The lawyers who are available to accompany the victims cannot cope with the amount of demand. Some of our colleagues have also received threats and have had to take refuge.”
Some lawyers have been arrested when trying to visit a client. Kennedy Tejeda, a 24-year-old Foro Penal lawyer, was asking at a national guard station in Carabobo state to see his clients when he was taken into custody, the organization said.
Verifying the cases has been made difficult by the reluctance of family members of the detained or killed to come forward.
Moments before she was detained, Oropeza spoke to a Washington Post reporter about a young protester who was beaten so badly he was almost “unrecognizable.” He died in the hospital. Oropeza tried to contact family members of the young man to discuss the case, she said, “but everyone is afraid.”
Maduro’s government in some cases has accused the opposition of fabricating stories of deaths.
On July 29, a man was reported dead in the Caracas neighborhood of Antímano. Video of his lifeless body, covered in blood, circulated on social media. He was identified as Aníbal Romero, known as Pimpina.
Two days after the reported death, Maduro showed a video of a man he claimed was Pimpina. Saab, the attorney general, said the blood covering the body was just “ketchup” and accused the opposition of faking the death.
Days later, a woman emerged who said she was Pimpina’s mother, and was recorded saying that he did in fact die and that she was waiting for the government to release his body to her.
A Victims Monitor researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said Pimpina’s body was given to two of his sisters last week.
