María Emely Delgado crossed paths with Carmen Navas several times this year: at the offices of the NGO Foro Penal, at the Public Ministry, and once at the El Rodeo prison on the outskirts of Caracas. Delgado is 63 years old, Navas was 82. Both were looking for their sons, who disappeared after being arbitrarily detained. Carmen Navas died 10 days after finding her son Víctor Hugo in a cemetery. She had spent 16 months searching for him. María Emely has still not found Jorgen. “You have to be in these shoes to know what this is like,” says the retired teacher, who has been wearing them for almost two years. “Her son had been missing for less time than mine; with Jorgen I’m now coming up on 22 months without news of him.”

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Héctor Rovaín was 34 when he went to prison and his parents were still alive. He left at 57 without having been able to bury them. Luis Molina left his daughter as a three‑year‑old and will now meet a married woman and a grandchild he has yet to know. Like the other two, Erasmo Bolívar spent 23 Christmases without embracing his family. All three were officers of the Metropolitan Police (PM), a force that operated in Caracas and which no longer exists. They were accused, without evidence, along with six other officers, of two of the 19 deaths that occurred on April 11, 2002, when an opposition‑called protest tried to reach the Miraflores presidential palace and demonstrators were repelled by gunfire. There remain doubts about where those bullets came from. That same day, Hugo Chávez was toppled in a coup d’état, though he returned to power 48 hours later.

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