“He told us that they had suffocated him until he throws blood down his nose.”

“My brother was not there that day. We took him (to the police) to make the inquiries that he was not guilty and it turns out that he was tortured to say he was guilty,” Mirbelis denounces.

In addition to that of La Guaira, at least five effigies of Chávez were attacked by protesters in the Aragua, Carabobo, Falcón and Guárico states, in the midst of 187 protests to reject the electoral result, which took place in 20 of the 23 states of the country, according to calculations of the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict.

The opposition claimed the victory of González, who ran to replace the leader María Corina Machado, after being disabled by the Judiciary to occupy public office.

For a year, the opposition requires the CNE to show the voting records and still wait for evidence. However, it published 80% of the vouchers that gave González 7.4 million votes compared to 3.3 million Maduro, with a level of participation of 60% of the electorate, which excluded most of the Venezuelan voters registered abroad.

In the demonstrations that followed the elections, 28 people died and 2,229 were arrested in capture operations that were deployed throughout the country, as Maduro himself said at the time, who blamed the opposition of wanting to destabilize the country.

BBC Mundo requested an interview with the Venezuelan government but did not get an answer.

In an interview in February with BBC Mundo, the attorney general, Tarek William Saab, said:

“On July 29 and 30 (2024), brutal events of violence occurred. 28 people died at the hands of violent protesters, burned health centers, schools, electoral centers and demolished monuments and depending on this, a group of people were arrested (…)

Their plan (of the opponents) was not to go to the elections, was to sing fraud and promote an armed insurrection in Venezuela. “

Organized civil society warned that 114 of those arrested were minors, such as Ángel Gabriel González.

Guaira police officers looked for the teenager at his father's house days after the elections, on August 8, 2024 at 9:00 at night, Mirbelis recalls.

“They threatened that if we did not give up Angel, they were going to take my dad detained. And they showed a video where the statue fell, but there is no (no one) similar to my brother.”

Due to the father's physical ailments, they ruled out that he appeared before the authorities and decided to accompany Angel the next day to the “Citizen Security House”, a local police headquarters, to clarify the situation.

When they arrived at the police station, Mirbelis says that the officials asked them to stay outside while the young man entered.

“(He) tells me that they put a bag on his face and threw him in a mattress back,” Mirbelis says. “He told us that they had suffocated him until he throws blood down his nose, so he said in that video that he was guilty, because he was tortured.”

“He says he no longer endured what he was living.”

From that moment, the family routine changed completely.

Ángel Gabriel was held with other teenagers in a cell without light. “They asked us for the collaboration of (buy) cables and bulbs,” Mirbelis recalls. His brother and other detainees do not have a sink, but a latrine between two walls and a curtain, tells about the space she visits every Wednesday.

As they do not receive running water, Mirbelis calculates that together they have accumulated a hundred refreshment plastic bottles that fill once a week with a hose from which brown water comes out.

Mirbelis, his father and aunt visit the police station every day between 9:00 and 11:00 in the morning to take lunch, dinner and frozen drinking water. The visiting day is Wednesday and can only go Mirbelis or his aunt, because it is forbidden for men to enter the detainees.

“My brother says he is tired of living,” Mirbelis says when he remembers conversations with his brother. “He says he is sad, asks when this is going to end and when we are going to get it out of there.”

By mid -July of this year, the Venezuelan NGO for Human Rights Defense Criminal Forum estimated that there were 948 people detained for political reasons and four of them were teenagers.

Several organizations confirmed that 59 prisoners were released on Friday, July 18 as part of an unpublished exchange of prisoners between the governments of Venezuela, the United States and El Salvador.

Although Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said that 80 Venezuelans would be released in the exchange, no authority in Caracas published an official list, beyond the calculation of NGOs.

The Maduro government does not recognize the political reasons for arrests. In fact, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the released had been prosecuted for “the Commission of Common Crimes and against the Constitutional Order.”

They were also released ten Americans who were imprisoned in Venezuela.

In return, the Salvadoran government released and sent back to Venezuela to 252 migrants who were deported from the United States and who remained for months in the maximum security prison Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), designed to stop Salvadoran gang members.

However, at least 20 people were arrested in the 72 hours after the exchange of prisoners for migrants, according to the opposition leader María Corina Machado, who accused Maduro's government of applying a “rotating door policy”, in which some leave while others enter prison.

Amid the arrests, Criminal Forum warns that at least 51 people remain “missing.”

After examining 15 cases, Amnesty International concluded in a report published in mid -July that the Venezuelan authorities “commit forced disappearances as part of a generalized and systematic attack against the civilian population”, which configures a “crime against humanity.”

Angel's father is so devoted to Archangel Gabriel that he decided to put his name.

Mirbelis's mother and Angel died a year before her arrest, when he was 15. At that time they thought that losing it would be the most painful experience of their lives.

However, Angel's arrest triggered a season of incetidity and regret for his relatives who never imagined that they could live. The celebrations have gained a new meaning, especially birthdays, Christmas and the New Year.

“My brother's birthday has always been a reason for celebration,” Mirbelis says. “We celebrate it last year on the beach. But this year it has been very difficult.”

After his mother's death, the most painful for Angel has been absent at the birth of his son due to detention. “He doesn't know his son because they don't allow the baby's visit. But we have spent photos.”

Mirbelis says his father met in December with the Venezuelan prosecutor, Tarek William Saab. Now he does not understand why the head of the Public Ministry said that Angel would be released, but then the release was not fulfilled.

The young man wrote a letter to his father who went viral through social networks. In it he regretted not having been released on December 12, 2024 and asked his relatives for forgiveness to force them to live their arrest.

“That day they had promised my freedom, to be with you and my son. I am already tired of this life, sometimes I want to continue sleeping and never get up again.”

After that episode, the head of the police station forbade Angel access to pencil and paper, although he has a bible that reads frequently.

He has also got sick several times, including four abscesses that came out on the skin of the arms and armpits. “They only allow us to take four ibuprofenos and four antibiotics.”

Three months after the elections, in October 2024, the international mission independent of determining the facts on Venezuela had documented 850 cases of serious human rights violations in Venezuela that included arbitrary arrests, torture, sexual violence and forced disappearances, among other crimes.

Marta Valiñas' team, the president of this mechanism, warned that the Maduro Government had launched “a campaign of mass and indiscriminate arrests unprecedented” after the elections, which included a number of arrests of minors never seen before seen in Venezuela.

Recently, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said “deeply concerned about the disproportionate use of strength and violence during the post -election protests of July and August.”

While following the news about the release of prisoners in exchange for migrants, Mirbelis González longs for his brother to be one of the next release.

“He is not a bad teenager, he is not a rebel teenager, he liked to work with my dad. I always tell him to have hope, that this is going to end soon.”

Subscribe here To our new newsletter to receive every Friday a selection of our best content of the week.

And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and act.