Death of political prisoner ‘cries out to heaven’ say Venezuelan bishops

Carmen Navas, mother of Víctor Hugo Quero Navas, became an icon among families of political prisoners as she travelled across Caracas for months demanding to know her son’s whereabouts.

The bishops of Venezuela voiced “profound consternation and sorrow” after their government revealed that a political prisoner sought for more than a year by his 82-year-old mother had died last July.

Víctor Hugo Quero Navas, a 51-year-old businessman, was arrested in Caracas on 1 January 2025 by the DGCIM, the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, a national secret police agency accused of torture by international bodies.

Quero Navas was charged with treason, conspiracy and terrorism and received no legal counsel after his arrest. His family was never informed of his whereabouts.

His mother, Carmen Navas, became an icon among the families of political prisoners as she travelled across Caracas, visiting prisons to demand news of her son’s location.

The Venezuelan bishops’ Commission for Justice and Peace said that it “accompanied” Carmen Navas “with prayer and in sorrow”.

“She personifies the Via Crucis of so many Venezuelan families. Her tireless search, marked by harassment and uncertainty, cries out to heaven,” the commission said in a statement released on Sunday, when Venezuela marked Mother’s Day.

The bishops said they were “raising their voice” as a “cry of peace for those defend the sacred right of mothers to keep their children alive and well in the light of the cruelty of violence and war”.

Last week, the Venezuelan government announced that Quero Navas had died of respiratory failure nine days after he was hospitalised in the Military Hospital of Caracas on 15 July with gastrointestinal bleeding and a fever.

Political prisoners released in January during an amnesty informed his mother that Navas had been held in the Rodeo I Prison on the outskirts of Caracas, where he fell ill after subsisting on a diet of only beans.

“The fact that Víctor Quero died in July 2025 while the state gave information contradicting this to his family is a sign of the state’s lack of transparency and probity” said the bishops. “The fact that Rodeo I refused to reveal [Quero’s] whereabouts when he had died constitutes a grave lack of public ethics.”

Such “deliberate concealment”, the bishops added, “has all the elements of a forced disappearance, a crime that the courts cannot and should not ignore”.

They urged the national ombudsman to investigate, saying it was “vital” to establish the exact responsibilities of the officials who “by action or omission allowed a young Venezuelan to die forgotten, without access to his family and deprived of due process”.

Venezuela still holds more than 450 political prisoners, despite the release of some under an amnesty law introduced in January. In late April, Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodriguez rescinded the law, which her government claims benefited 8,616 prisoners.

It said 314 people were freed from prison according to the government, but independent organisations believe the true figure was 110.

Venezuelan cardinal demands release of political prisoners despite Church ‘mistakes’

Voices of Venezuela

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