Funeral Bells in Venezuela

A few weeks ago, a local Venezuelan opposition leader, Edwin Alexander Santos Quiñonez, posted a video on his TikTok profile deploring the government for the degraded state of a local bridge. Last Wednesday, he was abducted. Two days later, he was found dead beside the dilapidated bridge he criticized earlier that month.

The message to Venezuelans could hardly have been more clear.

Santos, who was 36 years old when he died, had been involved in Venezuelan politics for many years. An activist against Chavismo in his youth, he helped found the political party Popular Will in 2009, one of the largest opposition parties in Venezuela. He served as the party’s regional coordinator for his home state of Apure, in the southeastern portion of the country, and was a member of the campaign leadership staff of the ill-fated presidential campaign of Edmundo González Urrutia and the chief opposition leader María Corina Machado in the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election. That election ended in chaos, as opposition leadership claimed that their review of the receipts that national law requires all voting machines to print for review by poll-watchers showed an overwhelming victory for González Urrutia, while the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council declared Maduro the victor.

In response, the Venezuelan government cracked down on public protests and demonstrations. Thousands of Venezuelans were arrested and hundreds more killed and wounded in incidents of violence, mostly perpetrated by Maduro-aligned paramilitaries known as “collectivos.” Some opposition politicians were jailed during the protests, others disappeared in what were likely state-ordered abductions. After being threatened with arrest and prosecution, González Urrutia fled the country (he now lives in exile in Spain), while Corina Machado has been forced into hiding, addressing Venezuelans only over social media.

Santos managed to avoid being arrested, abducted, or killed during the immediate aftermath of the election, but his continued public criticism of the government made him a target. According to witnesses, on Wednesday, October 23, as he was driving on his motorcycle, he was seized and abducted by men driving a pickup truck. The next day, his wife released a video with Geraldo Rosales, one of the local priests of his hometown’s Catholic parish, where they reported his disappearance and requested that he be kept safe. “Some members of our community say that they took him away in a truck, presumably from SEBINE [Bolivarian National Intelligence Service]…. We want his life and political and human rights to be preserved. We want to know what has happened to him,” said Rosales. 

The next day, Santos’s body was found with his motorcycle next to the bridge he had criticized on social media. Local authorities stated that his death was the result of “a traffic accident caused by crashing the motorcycle he was driving into a tree.” Douglas Rico, director of the Venezuelan Scientific and Criminal Investigations Corps, denounced those reporting that Santos’s death was the result of government action:

“We reject all the fake news provided by various communications media that intend to manipulate and say that the National Government could be behind this lamentable event,” said Rico. “To that end, we have received instructions from the Ministry of Popular Power for Interior Relations, Justice and Peace to open an investigation into who is conducting this campaign of misinformation and lies.”

The event is a notable escalation for the Maduro government, which in the past has preferred quieter and less dramatic methods of suppressing dissent—jailing opposition leaders or pressuring them into fleeing the country, rather than leaving their corpses on the street for the public to find. It is a signal of the confidence that the government has in its ability to maintain its control over Venezuelan civil society. Protest movements against Maduro have been ongoing for over a decade now, and domestic support for the government has cratered as the economy has fallen into ruin and the use of oppressive tactics by the state has increased. But despite the best efforts of opposition parties, there is no realistic path to a transfer of power. Maduro has kept tight control over the organs of government and the military, with a skillful deployment of both carrot and stick: positions of power and lucre for his supporters, and regular purges of those suspected to be his enemies.

The death of Edwin Santos is just one more nail in the coffin of Venezuelan popular government.

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