The boys were there for a water balloon fight.
It was an annual tradition to start Carnival celebrations in Barcelona, a working-class coastal city in Venezuela’s east. But only two days after the capture of the nation’s president, Nicolás Maduro, all of their shouting and laughing was not sitting well with the authorities.
Local police officers and National Guard soldiers arrived in force and, according to two of the boys and the relatives of four others, fired shots. The boys and young men — aged 13 to 25 — scattered, but the police arrested 25 of them. Two days later, state prosecutors filed charges.
Their crime? Treason.
“‘I’m going to screw you all over,’” one of the boys, 17, recalled a police officer telling him after his arrest, using an expletive. “‘You all support Donald Trump.’”
A reporter and photographer from The New York Times this past week visited the neighborhood where most of the detainees live and interviewed two of the boys and seven of their family members. Many of them, as well as other Venezuelans across the country, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal from the government.
Those interviews revealed that, under the Venezuelan interim government backed by the Trump administration, citizen surveillance and repression are alive and well.
