Caracas Chronicles

Following the presidential elections of July 28, repression included a massive cancellation of passports. Although the documents’ suppression has affected members of political parties and social organizations, it has also harmed people of different profiles, including migrants who have been outside the country for years and without any known public activity. This has been an effective, low-cost control mechanism, both in political and logistical terms.

According to the report “Post-electoral and Human Rights Crisis 2024 in Venezuela”, a joint documentation effort by different Venezuelan NGOs, the cancellation of passports would have massiveness as the main pattern of application, being part of the so-called “soft methods” applied by the Venezuelan authorities denounced by the United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission.

In September 2023, UN experts released a report describing the repression by Nicolás Maduro’s government as a combination of “hard” and “soft” mechanisms that are part of “an oppressive state apparatus that has been used to varying degrees, depending on the nature of social dissent and the perception of its influence.” Hard mechanisms include extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detentions, and torture. Soft mechanisms could include the dissemination of frightening messages on institutional social media accounts, the approval of regulations restricting rights, and the cancellation of identity documents.

Who’s the target

With no official notification, dozens of journalists, activists, NGO members and political activists –and sometimes their relatives– discovered since the election through the (identity service) SAIME website, or when trying to leave the country, that their passports have been canceled in the digital platform managed by the authorities.

The NGO Laboratorio de Paz continues to collect testimonies from people who, when trying to travel through Maiquetía International Airport, are informed at the immigration point that their passport has been canceled. “In some cases, their document has been confiscated,” adds a member of the NGO. The possibility of political motivation is not ruled out: “Among the masses there are lists of people to be punished for their political activities. In these cases it can be the prelude to greater reprisals.”

The joint report prepared by the organizations includes several testimonies from people affected by the cancellation of their passports. Journalist Melanio Escobar stands out, because he asked to be identified in the report by name. In 2019, Escobar tried to obtain a new passport. When he attended his appointment, he realized that his situation was irregular: “They transferred me to another official who also could not process [the request] and they called the manager of that office (…). The official entered the data and, the truth is, her face changed. She promised to give me another appointment, she gave me a paper certifying that they were committed, that they would call me soon for an appointment in the next seven days, a situation that never happened.” The director of the NGO Redes Ayuda tried, without luck, to resolve his situation institutionally: “I was able to speak with one of the assistants of Gustavo Vizcaíno, the president of Saime, who asked me to pay 7,000 dollars to issue me a passport and remove the cancellation, remove the blockage that the system had.”

From the testimonies, we can see that there are two situations surrounding the cancellation of documents. One is political retaliation. But the other is widespread extortion, similar to that of people who have been detained by police officers after the elections.

A second testimony is that of “R”, a journalist who has had his document canceled on two occasions: “Well, finally they canceled my passport, they informed me that, for the second time in less than six months, they are annulling the document. The first time I managed to get a new one, this second time I don’t think I can it because I am out of the country. This has been done to other journalists who are inside Venezuela. I was warned that they were going to cancel my passport. I had already received threats before that if I continued saying and writing the things I write, there would be retaliation against me. And they have already carried out their actions.”

From the testimonies , we can see that there are two situations surrounding the cancellation of documents. One is political retaliation. But the other is widespread extortion, similar to that of people who have been detained by police officers after the elections. 

“Even if you pay and can get a new passport, you know that the possibility of them doing it again remains. You start to live like people who have had a heart attack: with the permanent fear of doing some activity that causes another cardiac arrest,” says S, a human rights defender.

Passport to silence

Although not at the scale it has had following the elections, this punitive tool has precedents. In 2021, a new regulation allowed authorities to cancel a Venezuelan passport for theft, robbery, loss, deterioration, and alteration, adding that  “a judicial order issued by the competent body is a ground for disqualification.” Before that, passport cancellations had been recorded as political retaliation, the best-known cases being those of journalists César Miguel Rondón and Nelson Bocaranda, besides several leaders of opposition political parties. Usually, those affected tried to obtain a new document through formal and informal contacts with SAIME officials, who in exchange asked for large sums of money and demanded to reduce criticism against the government on social media. Fearing that was the first in a possible chain of reprisals, many of those affected ended up leaving the country.

After July 28, these stories went from scarce to common. Laboratorio de Paz issued a public alert after receiving complaints from people who had been detained and extorted, in the offices of SAIME, for asking about their revoked document. According to the cases documented by this NGO, after the annulment, people stop expressing their opinions about politics on social media. “They even refrained from attending opposition rallies,” says one of the members of Laboratorio de Paz. “They feel watched,” she adds. “When we tried to create a confidential list of those affected for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, we were only able to obtain the consent of 36 people.”

According to the joint report, the rights violated by the annulment of passports would be the right to nationality, the right to identity and the right to free movement. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights adds that the right to leave a country is also violated: “Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) stipulates that everyone has the right to freely leave the territory of a State (…) If a State refuses to issue a passport or requires its citizens to obtain exit visas in order to leave the country, this is a case of interference in their freedom of movement, which is difficult to justify.”

Repressive International 

However, this strategy is not an invention of chavismo, as it has also been applied in Nicaragua, which shows how authoritarian regimes in the region share and optimize tactics against dissent.

“They have been annulled in droves. It is already a recognized practice. They go step by step following the same protocol,” says Haydee Castillo, a human rights defender from Nicaragua. Castillo is one of the 317 people whose nationality was taken away by the Ortega government in 2023. According to the website Divergentes, “the retention of passports was one of the first repressive strategies of Migration and Immigration against journalists, opponents and critics of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship.” The measure began to be applied regularly after the Nicaraguan protests in 2018.

Along with Cuba, the organization Civicus says that in Nicaragua and Venezuela “an atmosphere of fear and violence prevails, where state and powerful non-state actors are routinely allowed to imprison, seriously injure and kill people with impunity, for attempting to exercise their rights to associate, peacefully assemble and express themselves.” The cancellation of passports is part of the strategies shared by both countries to frighten and neutralize their dissidents with great effectiveness – but without the political and media costs of mass arbitrary detentions or murders.