Category Archives: Venezuela

World’s most violent cities: Medellín crime surge helps Latin America top list

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Region has two-thirds of world’s most dangerous cities, with Bogotá, Rio, Mexico City and San Salvador also named in study

When police found the body of Marcela Graciano, a 31-year-old Colombian DJ, last Thursday, the brutality of the crime shocked even them. Her body, found in a house in a suburb of Medellín – Colombia’s second city – revealed signs of torture and her hands had been tied behind her back.

“The body was in an advanced state of decomposition,” the local police chief, Col Rolfy Mauricio Jiménez, said. The Valle de Aburrá municipality has had 11 murders this year, authorities said.

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West must not lift sanctions on Maduro, says Venezuelan opposition

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Helping president would hand victory to autocratic alliance led by Russia, warns deputy foreign minister

The west must not backslide into aiding the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, or it will hand victory to an autocratic alliance led by Vladimir Putin and weaken the democratic cause in Europe and Venezuela, the country’s deputy foreign minister, Isadora Zubillaga, has warned.

A delegation of Venezuelan opposition politicians have been touring Europe in an attempt to reassure the west that despite recent divisions and setbacks, they have a viable strategy to secure new presidential elections.

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Venezuelan troops operated alongside Colombian rebels, report claims

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Human Rights Watch says Venezuelan soldiers conducted joint operations with ELN in violence-plagued Apure state

Venezuelan soldiers conducted joint operations with Colombian rebels in the state of Apure earlier this year, as violence increased along a remote and often lawless stretch of the Colombia-Venezuela border, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

The report published on Monday said that in January a truce ended between the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and another rebel organization known as the Joint Eastern Command, leading to clashes, abductions and murders of civilians that forced more than 3,300 people to flee their homes in the Venezuelan state of Apure. In the Colombian province of Arauca, more than 3,800 people were displaced.

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After Ukraine, how will the world replace Russia’s oil products?

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A report from the International Energy Agency makes clear that viable alternatives are limited

As Boris Johnson flew to the Gulf this week to ask for more oil to replace supplies from Russia, he was accused by the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, of “going cap in hand from dictator to dictator”.

At the same time, a report produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA) underlined just how limited the options are for any economy seeking to replace Russian crude and other oil products.

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Venezuela releases two Americans in effort to improve relations amid energy crisis

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Citgo’s Gustavo Cárdenas and Jorge Fernández released Tuesday while US representatives visited Caracas over the weekend

Venezuela has released two jailed Americans as the two countries seek to improve relations amid an energy crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Gustavo Cárdenas, an executive with US oil refining company Citgo was released on Tuesday night, along with Jorge Fernández, who was arrested last year on terrorism charges the White House described as “spurious”.

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US officials fly to Venezuela for talks in apparent bid to further isolate Russia

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Experts believe rare meeting with Moscow ally could signal significant shift in US policy towards Caracas

Senior US officials have flown to Venezuela for rare talks with Nicolás Maduro’s government in an apparent bid to prise the South American country away from its Russian backers after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

White House and state department negotiators met Maduro representatives in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, on Saturday in what was the first such encounter in years.

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Sanctions are neither new nor guaranteed to work – just look at Cuba

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Analysis: Economic penalties have been meted out since Napoleon’s day but there’s little proof they achieve the desired outcome

Waging war by economic means is nothing new. Napoleon imposed an ineffective embargo on British exports in the early 19th century and during the first world war there were attempts by both sides to starve each other into submission.

But since 1945 sanctions have been used with increasing frequency as a means of trying to change either the policy stance or the regimes in targeted countries.

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Venezuelans despair at smears, stigmatization and arbitrary arrests

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Amnesty International decries ‘systematic policy of repression’ as Maduro clamps down on enemies real and imagined

Juan Carlos Marrufo Capozzi, an electrician and former soldier from Valencia, Venezuela, and his wife María Auxiliadora Delgado Tabosky, were at home when agents from the South American country’s military intelligence unit barged in.

Soldiers with rifles sifted through their paperwork and hard drives, before taking the couple away, leaving Marrufo’s distraught teenage daughter from a previous marriage behind. That was in March 2019, and they haven’t tasted freedom since.

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Infant killed after coast guard opens fire on boat carrying Venezuelan migrants

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The baby’s mother was injured after the Trinidad and Tobago coast guard shot at the boat, later saying it fired in ‘self defence’

A Venezuelan woman was shot and wounded and her nine-month-old baby was killed in her arms when Trinidad and Tobago’s coast guard opened fire on the boat carrying migrants fleeing their home country.

In a statement posted on Facebook, the coast guard said its personnel had opened fire “in self-defence” on Saturday after “aggressive manoeuvres” by the migrant craft when it was intercepted as it entered Trinidadian waters late on Saturday.

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SuperMoustache! Sounds like a job for Venezuela’s socialist superhero

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A cartoon character smiting imperialist enemies – a dead ringer for President Nicolás Maduro – has inspired acclaim and derision

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No – it’s a Venezuelan propaganda campaign designed to burnish Nicolás Maduro’s strongman credentials with the help of a caped crusader called SuperBigote – or SuperMoustache.

The musclebound cartoon superhero – who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Venezuela’s authoritarian president – has been met with acclaim or derision, depending on which side of the country’s bitter political schism viewers stand.

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Venezuelan opposition defeats Maduro candidate in Chávez’s home state

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Regime suffers symbolic blow as little-known Sergio Garrido secures victory in Barinas governorship election

Venezuela’s opposition has claimed a rare and highly symbolic victory over Nicolás Maduro’s regime after defeating the government candidate for the governorship of Hugo Chávez’s home state of Barinas.

Maduro had hoped his former foreign minister Jorge Arreaza would win control of the region, which is considered the cradle of Chávez’s “Bolivarian revolution”, in Sunday’s election.

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‘Brutal aggression’: Venezuela halts talks with opposition after envoy extradited to US

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Alex Saab, an ally of president Nicolás Maduro, was extradited to face money laundering charges after a 16-month legal battle

Venezuela’s government is halting negotiations with its opponents in retaliation for the extradition to the US of a close ally of president Nicolás Maduro, who prosecutors believe could be the most significant witness ever about corruption in the South American country.

Jorge Rodríguez, who has been heading the government’s delegation, said his team wouldn’t travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.

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Killing of two boys for alleged shoplifting shocks Colombia

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Pair were taken away by armed men on motorbikes and later found shot dead on edge of town

The murder of two boys for allegedly shoplifting in Colombia has evoked memories of some of the country’s darkest days of armed conflict.

The pair, who were 12 and 18, were allegedly trying to rob a clothing store in Tibú, a small town near the Venezuelan border, last Friday when they were apprehended by bystanders who taped their hands together, according to witnesses quoted by local media.

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Weatherwatch: Venezuela’s varied climate

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Country’s topography means local variations in temperature and rainfall can be very pronounced

The most northerly country in South America, Venezuela is also the sixth largest – roughly one-and-a-half times the size of France or Texas. It is very varied topographically, from the northernmost part of the Andes mountains in the west, via the Orinoco River, which runs across the country towards its coastal delta, to the Guiana Highlands in the east.

Being so close to the equator, there is very little variation in temperature from month to month: the capital, Caracas, has typical daily maxima in the mid-20s, and night-time temperatures in the mid-teens, throughout the year. It is noticeably cooler than coastal cities because of its higher altitude: roughly 1,050 metres (3,420ft) above sea level.

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Former Venezuelan spymaster arrested by Madrid police on US drugs charges

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Gen Hugo Carvajal, who had defied a Spanish extradition order and disappeared, was arrested on Thursday night

Police in Madrid have arrested a former Venezuelan spymaster on US narcotics charges nearly two years after he defied a Spanish extradition order and disappeared.

Gen Hugo Carvajal, who for over a decade was Hugo Chávez’s eyes and ears in the military, was arrested on Thursday night at a small apartment where he had been holed up.

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‘If I go back, I’ll die’: Colombian town scrambles to accommodate 10,000 migrants

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Necoclí, population 20,000, faces bottleneck as Covid rules lift and unrest, poverty and violence grow across region


When the loudspeaker announced that the day’s last boat across Colombia’s Gulf of Urabá would begin boarding, a desperate scrum of Haitians rushed forward, jostling for spaces on the rickety craft.

Most had been stuck in this remote Caribbean coastal town for days, trapped in a migration bottleneck caused by the loosening of Covid travel restrictions and growing unrest, poverty and violence across the region.

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‘I didn’t eat for days’: hunger stalks Venezuelan refugees

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Colombian health workers struggling to cope as malnutrition and dirty water ravage new arrivals in Maicao’s swelling shanty towns

A seemingly endless lake of cardboard and tin shacks surrounds the perimeter of a former airport runway in Colombia’s desert-like city of Maicao. Known locally as La Pista, the area is home to more than 2,000 families, and is one of 44 informal settlements to have emerged around the city in the past two years.

The old airport has become a landing strip for desperate migrants and bi-national indigenous Wayuu people fleeing the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, where the basic essentials of life are hard to come by.

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‘Latin America will never be the same’: Venezuela exodus reaches record levels

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Country at a ‘tipping point’ that could affect wider region, experts warn, as ‘donor fatigue’ causes aid shortfall

The continuing exodus of millions of Venezuelans is reaching “a tipping point” as the response to the crisis remains critically underfunded.

More than 5.6 million have left the country since 2015, when it had a population of 30 million, escaping political, economic and social hardships. It has become the largest external displacement crisis in the region’s history, and the most underfunded.

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It could take a decade to vaccinate Venezuela against Covid as pace drags

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Head of country’s academy of medicine issues warning with less than 1% of population having received a dose

Venezuela’s slow rate of vaccination for Covid-19 means it could take up to 10 years for the country to be fully vaccinated, the president of the nation’s academy of medicine said on Monday.

Venezuela, with about 30 million inhabitants, has received 1.4m vaccines from China and Russia, according to its health ministry. Authorities hope to receive enough doses for about 5 million people from the World Health Organization’s Covax system.

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