Charity Flores, a lawyer representing the pair of Juan Guaido’s bodyguards who were arrested two weeks ago, has told reporters that her clients were tortured by the authorities in the days following their arrest.
Jason Parisi and Erick Sanchez were arrested on July 12 after ending their shift. The government later claimed that the men had been caught trying to sell weapons stolen from the National Guard on the black market.
According to Flores, the two men were only brought before a judge yesterday, after spending 14 days in detention, which is too long a period of time under Venezuelan law.
Flores said that she was only allowed to speak to her clients for ten minutes, and that it is still not clear to her of the rest of the legal team what the charges against the men are, or what evidence the government claims to have to prove it.
On the treatment of her clients while in detention, Flores said that they were forced to record confession tapes under the threat of torture.
Flores also suggested that the fact that it took the authorities 14 days to bring her clients to court was part of a strategy to hide the evidence of the torture that they received. She said:
They said that they had been beaten on the face, the body, [and] beaten with a bat folded in cloth so that it wouldn’t leave marks. After they said all of that [in court], the judge ordered a medical examination covering toxicology and psychology.
However, we already know what the results of those tests will be, because 14 days have passed since they suffered those injuries so they have already disappeared. This gives us an idea as to why it took 14 days to bring them to court. Obviously, the goal was achieved: it was to erase those bruises from their bodies, those traces of torture.
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