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MARACAY, Venezuela - Juana Loreto, 52, can barely bring herself to describe how her husband and a son died at the hands of Venezuelan police.
Months of anguish have reduced her voice to almost a whisper.
"The police burst in and grabbed Robert," she said, recalling how a squad of police officers raided the family home Jan. 6 and seized her son, Robert Diaz.
"They never explained why," she said. "He objected, so they shot him in the stomach."
As he writhed in agony on the ground, Diaz was shot again, the bullet striking him in the shoulder. The police dragged him to a waiting car, ordering his father and brother not to leave the house. Witnesses say the officers shot the 21-year-old former navy cadet once more, in the hip, as they forced him into the car.
No one saw him alive again.
What happened to Diaz, say human rights activists, is typical of the kind of "death squad" tactics used by police in Aragua state, one of Venezuela's most lawless provinces, about 50 miles southwest of the capital, Caracas.
His death was among 800 extrajudicial killings by police in the state over the past few years, they say. Several officers in Aragua have been arrested, but none have been tried. Families of victims and their lawyers say local prosecutors and judges are afraid to pursue the cases.
"I don't know who can sort this out. The problem is so generalized," said Sara Mier, 51, a human rights lawyer in Maracay, the Aragua state capital. "All morals are gone. It's out of control."
Mier and others allege that a policy of police impunity is unofficially sanctioned by the highest federal authorities.
The government is carrying out a "criminal policy of extermination," said former Supreme Court judge Jorge Rosell, who resigned his position in protest. "They see the crime problems in terms of war."
The government denies such a policy exists. The office of Venezuelan Attorney General Isaias Rodriguez, a former Aragua labor lawyer, declined repeated requests for an interview.
Angel Mercado, the Aragua police chief, also denied that such a policy existed at a state level. He said officers were under constant evaluation and 15 percent had been investigated for alleged infractions. But he conceded there had been few firings, and no officers had been convicted in the courts.
In an interview, he declined to discuss details of the Loreto case, due to pending legal proceedings.
Juana Loreto lost more than one son that day. When her husband, Octavio Diaz, 58, and another son, David, 23, rushed to a nearby hospital in a neighbors' car to search for Robert, police intercepted them.
Police shot out the car tires and forced the driver to lie face down on the road. The officers then allegedly executed father and son. David was hit three times in the chest; his father was struck once in the back. Afterward, police dropped the bodies off at the hospital.
About 30 minutes later, police also showed up at the same hospital with Robert's body. Medical reports found signs of torture. Mud was found in his nostrils and mouth, indicating he suffocated in a ditch.
As in many similar cases, the police have sought to depict the Diaz men as suspected violent criminals who defied authority. Official reports say officers fired in self-defense after being fired upon, although neighbors say they heard no exchange of shots when police raided the house.
None of the three men had any police record before the incident, say lawyers. Octavio Diaz, a 58-year-old car mechanic, was an honest and law-abiding citizen, neighbors say.
After a preliminary investigation, seven police officers were arrested in August. They were mysteriously released last month, then re-arrested, and are scheduled for trial next month. But the case's prosecutor has refused to investigate the allegations that Robert was tortured and has declined to take evidence from several defense witnesses.
"She has rejected elementary aspects of the investigation," said Mier, an attorney with the Justice and Peace Human Rights Commission, an independent nonprofit group in Aragua.
One thing no one disputes is that Venezuela's police and judiciary are overwhelmed by the fastest-rising crime rate in the hemisphere. Killings have leapt from about 8,000 per year in 2001 to more than 11,000 projected for this year, a rate of 46 per 100,000, almost eight times that of the United States.
Caracas is now the third most violent city in Latin America, according to one recent study, trailing only Recife, Brazil, and Medellin, Colombia.
Each Monday the Interior Ministry issues nationwide homicide statistics for the previous weekend, which typically range from 80 to 100 slayings. For the weekend of Nov. 8-9, the ministry reported 79 killings, 19 in Caracas and 60 outside. Of those, 46 were attributed to "settling scores," and "resisting arrest," terms that human rights activists believe are euphemisms for extrajudicial killings by police.
Opinion polls have shown that a crime-weary public tolerates police taking justice into their own hands. At the same time, relatives of known criminals are usually not inclined to challenge police actions.
Questions only arise when police kill people who are clearly innocent, said Ivan Simonovis, a security consultant and former Caracas police commander. He cited the case of Portuguesa state in western Venezuela, where a police death squad, known as the "Extermination Group," murdered at least 65 alleged criminals in about nine months, between September 2000 and June 2001.
"Everybody was happy. Society went along with it," said Simonovis, until they killed the wrong person and relatives protested loudly. A number of police officers were arrested after an official investigation and are still awaiting trial.
Human rights activists and a former police officer accused the Portuguesa state security minister, Rodrigo Perez, of being behind the killings as part of a policy of social cleansing. He denies the allegations and still holds his post.
The police officer, Juan de Dios Perea, said the security minister tried to recruit him to join the extermination group.
"He handed me a list with five names of people who had to be eliminated to protect the governor," Perea said. He declined the offer and briefly went into hiding.
Much of Venezuela's violence results from the country's economic decline and rising unemployment. Things have only gotten worse under leftist President Hugo Chavez, who took office in early 1999 on a platform to reduce poverty and end government corruption.
In Aragua, where Chavez allies hold political control, the recession has hit the state's 1.5-million residents especially hard. In the capital, Maracay, a sprawling industrial city, business leaders say tens of thousands of jobs have vanished in the last two years.
But analysts also blame politics and judicial corruption for turning Aragua's courts into a mockery of justice. Critics say the state courts are among the most politicized in the country. Mier accuses Chavez-appointed prosecutors and judges of "washing their hands" in cases involving police abuses.
The state attorney's office declined to be interviewed for this story, but other officials say prosecutors are simply overwhelmed with cases.
To be sure, both prosecutors and police are ill-equipped to deal with the current crime rate. Venezuela has only 75,000 police nationwide, about 50 percent less than internationally recommended standards. The country only has 400 prosecutors, according to official figures handling a total of 90,000 active cases. Another 3.5-million are reportedly unresolved.
Aragua plans to introduce 1,500 new police officers by next spring, almost doubling its current force strength of 3,800. They are all receiving special human rights training. But Mercado, the police chief, says he'll still have only half the men he needs.
But critics say more police officers isn't the solution.
"If they don't have the prosecutors and judges they've only got 25 percent of the problem solved," Simonovis said.
Meanwhile, the case load - and alleged police abuses - continue to grow.
Reporters recently spent five hours interviewing a dozen families at the Workers Training School in Maracay, a local labor organization. Among the cases were two teens riding a motorbike who were allegedly executed in the street after police stopped them on their way home from college university. Police mistook them for thieves they were looking for riding a similar brand of Japanese-made motorbike, relatives say.
Another woman described how her 24-year-old brother, Maximiliano Agrinsoni, was killed after witnessing police officers rob a bank in November 1999. The police were later arrested but the trial has been suspended 27 times, because of bureaucratic problems.
Such cases are not limited to Aragua state, say critics. The country's leading human rights group, the Committee of Victims Families (COFAVIC), says it is investigating 64 cases of extrajudicial killing by police in other states.
"Seventy percent of the cases don't get past the first investigatory stage," said Liliana Ortega, COFAVIC's president.
Loreto has little faith left in the justice system. After she and other relatives and friends denounced the killings in the local press, they received death threats.
Robert's girlfriend, Dahiana Cava Orosco, a 22-year-old student, was especially vocal, and began investigating other cases of police abuses in her neighborhood. She was also threatened.
One night in May she was out with friends at a street cafe in the center of town when a car pulled up. A man shouted her name. As she walked over to the car, someone stuck a revolver out the window. She was shot six times.
Cava Orosco died in a hospital 16 days later.
"Dahiana was like me, a poor woman with aspirations," said her mother, Maria Orosco, a local primary school teacher interviewed in the family's small duplex in a gated cul-de-sac. "They killed her because she became an activist."
After her daughter's murder, Orosco, 42, pregnant with another daughter, received death threats too. Police agreed to provide 24-hour security at her home, but made her sign a release form every time she left to go to work or for medical check-ups.
Orosco refuses to be silenced: "I won't rest until I see those people pay for what they did in some way. This mustn't be allowed to stay the way it is."
- David Adams is the Times Latin America correspondent. Phil Gunson is a Times freelance reporter based in Caracas.