Luz Marina’s father was one of the founders of Mene Grande, the town where the commercial exploitation of oil in Venezuela began, in 1914, located two hours from Maracaibo. She remains there. She cannot leave like many of her neighbors who are fleeing after the blackouts of March and April 2019, when their land became an impossible place to live in.

Luis Guillermo Espinoza, 15, was shot in the head during an opposition sit-in suppressed by the Bolivarian National Guard. The demonstration took place in San Diego (Carabobo) on June 5, 2017. After 74 days fighting for his life, he died of a respiratory arrest. Luis Guillermo played soccer since he was 8 years old, and he was the goalkeeper.

On May 16, 2017, José Francisco left his home in San Cristóbal to buy a package of corn flour. He met some friends and stopped to chat with them when National Guard troops arrived firing their guns to break up a nearby protests in this city of the Venezuelan Andes. Without giving him time to react, a bullet was embedded in José Francisco’s back.

The last of the list of fatalities after the 2017 protests in Táchira state was a girl, Daniela Salomón Machado, aged 15. The poet and storyteller Jacqueline Goldberg talks about how Nohelia, the girl’s mother, experiences that loss and wakes up every day believing that it is a nightmare, praying to God that it be so. 

Yusbelis Álvarez lives in Maca, Petare, with her mother and her little son. The photos of her sister and niece not only reignite in her the absence of her beloved; they also revive in her the horror of a night when a bunch of demons came in through the roof and took their lives.

As if they were replicas of an earthquake, the general blackout of the first days of March was followed by a looting spree in Maracaibo that left approximately 500 shops with basically no chance to recover. The Brisas del Norte Hotel, which is located in a neighborhood with the same name, was one of them.

Karina had gone to Barranquilla to look for a sustenance that she did not get in Maracaibo, in the northwest of Venezuela. On July 20, 2017, she received a call from home. Jean Luis, her second son, only 15 years old, had been shot dead during protests staged in her neighborhood.

The afternoon of January 23, a day of citizen protests throughout Venezuela, Luis José y Alexander were caught in a violence swirl that took place in the middle of the town of Tinaquillo, Cojedes state. Trying to flee, the high school students were intercepted by national guards who beat them savagely and took them to the command…

Amidst the protests that took place in El Limón, in the state of Aragua, the Special Actions Forces (FAES) detained 11 teenagers, on January 24, 2019. A judge ordered their detention, and eight days later, in a special court hearing – ordered by no law-, they were released under precautionary measures. This is the story of one of them.

After 225 hearings, during which he walked 39,000 kilometers using handcuffs in his hands, Ivan Simonovis was never found guilty in the accusation of “complicity in aiding and abetting”, in the death of two people during the events of April 11, 2002. Despite this, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. After 10 years in prison…