María Emely Delgado crossed paths with Carmen Navas several times this year: at the offices of the NGO Foro Penal, at the Public Ministry, and once at the El Rodeo prison on the outskirts of Caracas. Delgado is 63 years old, Navas was 82. Both were looking for their sons, who disappeared after being arbitrarily detained. Carmen Navas died 10 days after finding her son Víctor Hugo in a cemetery. She had spent 16 months searching for him. María Emely has still not found Jorgen. “You have to be in these shoes to know what this is like,” says the retired teacher, who has been wearing them for almost two years. “Her son had been missing for less time than mine; with Jorgen I’m now coming up on 22 months without news of him.”
The case of Carmen Navas and her son has laid bare the pain of the mothers of the disappeared in Venezuela, a pattern that has been noted for years in the dossier of repression that has reached bodies such as the International Criminal Court. Carmen spent 16 months searching for Víctor Hugo without any institution telling her the truth: her son had died in state custody nine months before she found him in a cemetery. During that entire period, she was repeatedly told he was imprisoned. Several Venezuelan families are trapped in that same limbo: they wander through the maze of the justice system, prisons and courts looking for their loved ones.
The non-profit group Justicia Encuentro y Perdón has recorded 21 cases of missing people, some dating back more than a decade. Forced disappearances — lasting hours, days, months or years — are a documented pattern in United Nations reports. Amnesty International has described them as “arbitrary detentions with no trace.” Activists identify a recurring sequence: arrests without a judicial warrant or notification, carried out by unidentified agents; a systematic refusal by police and courts to acknowledge cases; and obstacles or outright denials when filing habeas corpus petitions.
There are many Carmens among the more than 2,000 political prisoners recorded in Venezuela over the past two years, the harshest period of political repression. There are also Carmens among those who have spent more than a decade searching for their relatives, like the families of social leader Alcedo Mora or of the peasant brothers Esneider and Eliézer Vergel, Colombian nationals displaced to Venezuela by conflict in their country, who disappeared after filing complaints against the government and receiving threats from the intelligence service. Or like the mother of Hugo Marino Salas, a deep-sea diver specializing in recovering aircraft black boxes, who since 2019 has daily held the government responsible for her son’s disappearance.
María Emely is unclear who took her only son on August 2, 2024, when the streets of Rubio, a town in the Venezuelan Andes on the border with Colombia, fell quiet. Detentions and threats by armed groups known as colectivos had forced those who had taken to the streets to protest the presidential election results to lock themselves in. Jorgen had also shut himself in, until he received a phone call. He told his partner that he had been threatened and had to leave. He left his home but never reached a destination.
Jorgen Yoneiker Guanares Delgado is 35. Before disappearing he worked in photography: he shot weddings scenes and did commercial work. Shortly before the elections he had filmed opposition leader María Corina Machado’s visit to Táchira state, a massive rally where she met with supporters during the campaign. On the night of the vote he took part in tallying results that allowed the opposition to obtain the records needed to defend its victory and denounce Nicolás Maduro’s fraud.
His mother has been told that black vans and masked men took him away; the family suspects they were intelligence agents. No authority has confirmed anything. María Emely reported the disappearance to the courts in San Antonio del Táchira, the Venezuelan city neighboring Cúcuta, but after three months with no response she traveled to Caracas to begin the pilgrimage that all mothers searching for their children undertake.
In Caracas she went to the Palace of Justice: there was no case file. In that huge gated building in the city center, the assignment of cases to courts is posted each day on a paper list nailed to the trunk of a tree outside the entrance. That is where families search for their detained relatives. María Emely also went several times to the Ombudsman’s office, where every visit starts from scratch. “No one keeps a folder, a record. Every time you go, you have to tell the whole story again to the ombudsman on duty that day,” she complains. She has been waiting for an answer since October 2024.
At the Ministry of Penitentiary Services she was given a shred of hope that soon faded. Apparently, Jorgen was allegedly in Tocorón prison. She went there but did not find him; they told her they had the wrong name. She also went to El Rodeo to ask among the relatives who sleep outside the prison, in case anyone had seen him during a visit. “He has a tattoo of a small crown and a rose on one arm,” she said she kept repeating as an identifying mark. A former inmate, she was told, had mentioned a photographer from San Cristóbal who was missing. But no further information was found.
María Emely keeps all the paperwork from her inquiries in Táchira, where her son disappeared, and in Caracas, where she has traveled several times with financial help from friends. After several failed attempts, the Supreme Court admitted an habeas corpus petition. “They tie you up in knots, talk to you about laws, only to lie to you later,” she says, disappointed. But the Supreme Court replied that she had to go back to where it all began: the courts in Táchira. All she is asking for is proof of life.
The family of Army Lieutenant Colonel Juan Antonio Hurtado Campos has been searching for him for eight years. On September 4, 2018, he left his home in Maracay for his workplace: the Palacio de Miraflores, where he was in charge of the presidential residence’s weapons park. He had just returned from vacation, during which he had carried out errands with his mother. When they lost his trail, it was his mother — Juana Campos — who went to ask at his workplace. A man in civilian clothes who identified himself as Juan Antonio’s supervisor told them he was not there and that they would not get answers anywhere. The family’s eldest son vanished as he was about to turn 50.
Years went by as the family gathered leads and came up against the silence of every institution they approached: the judicial police, the Military Prosecutor’s Office, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Ombudsman’s office. The family also remained silent until this year, when they finally took the step to make the case public. “Before you couldn’t speak out, because you could be detained too,” says his sister Dora Hurtado, 53, who has had to take the lead in the search because in these eight years her 72-year-old mother’s health has deteriorated. The public complaint came amid the political climate following the U.S. military intervention on January 3.
His name now appears among the disappeared. But on January 24, 2024, a lead took an unexpected turn: Juan Antonio’s name showed up on a list of 33 Armed Forces officers who would be demoted for treason and an alleged attempt on Nicolás Maduro’s life, according to a statement signed by the then minister of defense, Vladimir Padrino, now in charge of the agriculture portfolio. The move was seen as a military purge; at the time, the prosecutor general Tarek William Saab had reported four alleged assassination attempts against the president, neutralized in 2023. The list of suspects ranged from a division general to sergeants. At least eight of the 33 had reportedly been discharged years earlier, it was later alleged, along with other irregularities in the procedure.
“For us it was proof of life, it gave us hope, it was shocking,” Dora says, and that is where they began to pull at the thread. “We never understood why my brother, detained and missing since 2018, shows up as demoted six years later, alongside people who were detained recently in 2023. It doesn’t seem normal.” Many of those who were demoted are imprisoned in El Rodeo, according to what the family has been able to investigate. They visited Ramo Verde, El Helicoide, Tocorón and El Rodeo penitentiaries multiple times. In each one, Dora’s heart was in her throat. “Every time I gave my brother’s ID number and they told me he wasn’t there, it was very painful. You always go with the hope they’ll say he is there.”
In January of this year another false lead emerged. At the Palace of Justice they informed her of a file opened in 2019 and assigned to Court 36 of Control in Caracas, bearing her brother’s ID number and name. “There is a number and a name, but there are no documents or anything. There are no public or private lawyers registered either. It’s an empty file.” Dora only asks for two things: to be allowed to visit her brother if he is imprisoned, and for an explanation of what has happened in these eight years. The fate of Carmen Navas, who died without seeing justice after finding her son in a cemetery, also weighs on this family: “We are very afraid we will have to go through the same pain.”
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