Activist's husband makes rounds of Venezuelan prisons trying to find wife

For four days, Antonio González lived on a tour of detention centers in Venezuela to try to discover the whereabouts of his wife, activist Martha Lía Grajales, detained on the afternoon of last Friday (8) after participating in a demonstration in front of the UN building in Chacao, in the north of the country.

"I went to every detention center I could, and none of them gave me any information or referred me to another," says González, who was only updated on his wife's situation on Monday night (11). "Now, she remains incommunicado. Right now, I don't know if she has clothes, if she has received food, I don't know anything about her situation."

The activist, who like Martha was close to Chavismo in the past, asked for a statement from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) regarding the case.

"I invite Brazilian politicians to evaluate the Venezuelan case, to evaluate Martha Lía's case, and to express their opinions on these events," he said. "I also ask the Lula administration, a president of great importance in Venezuelan political life due to his political influence and history, to make a statement."

The situation González finds herself in is familiar to Martha, who has been accompanying relatives of people detained in similar circumstances through her work with the human rights collective SurGentes. The very demonstration she was participating in on Friday, in fact, had been called in solidarity with Mothers in Defense of Truth, a group of women fighting for the freedom of their children imprisoned after last July's elections , which returned Nicolás Maduro to a third term.

Following the election, which has been met with widespread evidence of fraud, protests swept across the country , leaving 28 dead, nearly 200 injured, and more than 2,400 arrested, of which 2,000 have been released. Although he managed to suppress large demonstrations, Maduro maintained the repression.

Three days before the activist's arrest, for example, another Mothers in Defense of Truth protest in front of the Supreme Court of Justice was targeted by a group, likely a pro-regime militia. According to González, who was present at the vigil alongside Martha, the attackers beat the protesters and took their documents, including those of his wife.

Friday's demonstration, which ended with Martha's arrest, was an act of solidarity with mothers after the attack.

González says that, at the end of the protest, he rode his motorcycle to a prearranged meeting point with his wife, while she walked to the same location with two other people. Before arriving, however, she was stopped by police officers who asked for her identification, according to people who described the scene to the activist.

From that moment on, the account of her detention followed the pattern of many post-election arrests. When she tried to explain that she couldn't present documents because she had been robbed on Tuesday by the armed group, she was allegedly forced into a pickup truck with no license plate.

Soon after, her family and friends lost contact with Martha, and her husband began an odyssey through detention centers in the Caracas region. Only on Monday (11) was he informed that his wife had been held since Friday at the Maripérez Criminal Investigation Directorate in the capital.

González claims to have gone to the site five times, and each time he was told his wife was missing. He was only updated on her whereabouts after a statement from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk.

On Instagram, the Venezuelan Attorney General's Office stated that Martha was being deprived of her liberty due to charges of inciting hatred, conspiring with a foreign government and criminal association.

"The arrest warrant against Martha Lía consists solely of a police officer's analysis of the SurGentes website, which reported on popular protests demanding rights. The report adds an interpretation that indicates that such protests are part of an attempt to destabilize the Venezuelan government orchestrated by foreign interests," says a statement from the collective.

For González, the accusations would be hilarious if the situation weren't so dire. "SurGentes is an organization that chooses the poor: grassroots organizations, social leaders, community youth, farmers," he says. "In this context, an accusation of conspiracy seems hardly credible."

Born in Colombia , Martha has lived in Venezuela for more than ten years, when she decided to move to her husband's country, with whom she has a 13-year-old son, after meeting him during a master's degree in human rights in Ecuador .

During this period, he collaborated with government initiatives, according to González, such as the Presidential Commission for Disarmament and the National Experimental University of Security, founded by Hugo Chávez and responsible for training the country's security forces.

Such credentials were not enough for some Chavista media outlets, which began accusing her of being an infiltrator. Several grassroots groups, however, called for her release.

"The demonstrations by grassroots sectors, including those associated with Chavismo and the government, have been interesting. They recognize her as someone who has been with them for years," says González. "In the authoritarian drift of the Maduro government, repression began first by right-wing sectors, then by the more liberal ones. Next came the social democrats, and in the last four or five years, repression has spread to the left."