Takeaways from AP report on fear of repression in post-election Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The last time anyone heard from Edni López was Sunday. The 33-year-old political science professor was preparing to board a flight to Argentina to visit a friend when she texted from the airport just before 10 a.m. that something was wrong with her passport.

What happened next remains a mystery — one contributing to the climate of fear and repression that has engulfed Venezuela following its disputed presidential election, the most serious wave of human rights abuses since Latin America’s military dictatorships in the 1970s.

When López's mother, Ninoska Barrios, and her friends learned she didn’t board the flight, they started frantically combing detention centers. Finally, on Tuesday — more than 48 hours later — they learned she was being held, incommunicado, by Venezuela’s feared military intelligence police on unknown criminal charges, unable to see an attorney or speak with her family.

“Please, give back my daughter,” a sobbing Barrios pleaded Tuesday outside Venezuela’s top human rights office in a video that went viral on social media. “It’s not right that a Venezuelan mother has to go through all this.”

Here are some of the takeaways from the AP’s exclusive report on López's arrest and President Nicolás Maduro’s efforts to crush dissent.

López's arrest isn’t unique. Since the July 28 presidential election, security forces have rounded up more than 2,000 people for demonstrating against Maduro or casting doubt on his claims that he won a third term despite strong evidence he lost the vote by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

The spree of detentions — urged on by Maduro himself — is unprecedented and puts Venezuela on pace to easily exceed those jailed during three previous crackdowns against Maduro’s opponents.

Those arrested include journalists, political leaders, campaign staffers and an attorney defending protesters. Others have had their Venezuelan passports annulled. One local activist even livestreamed her own arrest by military intelligence officers as they broke into her home.

The repression, much of it seemingly random and arbitrary, is having a chilling effect, said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for the International Crisis Group.

“It’s not just discouraging protests. People are scared to go on the streets period,” he said. “There’s a sense that police have a quota to fill and anyone can be stopped and carted away as a suspected subversive.”

The threats start at the top. Maduro has called on Venezuelans to denounce election doubters via a government-run app originally created to report power outages. He also said the government was refurbishing two gang-dominated prisons to accommodate an expected surge in jailing of opponents.

“There will be no mercy,” Maduro said on state TV.

But complicating efforts to crush dissent is the changing face of the government’s opponents.

While demonstrations have been far smaller and tamer than past bouts of unrest, they’re now more spontaneous, often leaderless and made up of youth — some barely teenagers — from Caracas’ hillside slums who have traditionally been a rock solid base of support for the government.

The swiftness of the government’s clampdown is staggering. In just 10 days, security forces have rounded up nearly the same number of people as they did over five months in 2017, according to Provea, a local human rights watchdog.

“Operation Knock-Knock is a prime tool of state terrorism,” said Oscar Murillo, the head of Provea, referring to the middle-of-the-night detentions touted as a scare tactic by officials.

In the low-income Caracas neighborhood of Catia, once a ruling party stronghold, residents are even deleting videos of the demonstrations from their smartphones for fear the government is tracking social media posts to identify critics.

The sudden silence is a sharp break from the hopeful mood preceding the election when emboldened opposition supporters confronted security forces at anti-Maduro rallies. They served food, lent their vehicles and opened their businesses to opposition leaders knowing they would suffer retaliation from the police or see their businesses shut down.

Even before the current wave of unrest, Venezuela’s human rights record was under intense scrutiny. Maduro is himself the target of an investigation by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity allegedly committed in the past.

Maduro’s tactics have been likened to those used in Central and South America in the 1970s by military dictatorships that forcibly disappeared opponents and sometimes innocent bystanders. Many were killed, and in Argentina, some even drugged and dropped from airplanes into the ocean, with no trace of ever having been detained.

Maduro’s alleged abuses have little in common with those “Dirty War” campaigns carried out by state security forces.

But the goal of instilling fear is the same, said Santiago Canton, an Argentine lawyer and secretary general of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, a watchdog group.

“What happened 50 years ago is unlikely to occur again,” said Canton. “But social media is a multiplier factor that didn’t exist before so you can be more selective with the use of force and achieve the same results.”

Goodman reported from Miami.

Bolivarian National Police stand guard in front of a mural with an image of independence hero Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, July 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

Police are deployed to demonstrations against the official election results declaring President Nicolas Maduro's reelection, the day after the vote in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, July 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

A man carries a protester affected by tear gas thrown by police during demonstrations against the official election results declaring President Nicolas Maduro's reelection, the day after the vote, in the Catia neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, July 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Cristian Hernandez)

Protesters face off with police during demonstrations against the official election results declaring President Nicolas Maduro's reelection, the day after the vote in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, July 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

A protester scuffles with police during demonstrations against the official election results declaring President Nicolas Maduro's reelection, the day after the vote in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, July 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

A protester kicks a tear gas canister fired by police during demonstration against the official election results declaring President Nicolas Maduro's reelection, the day after the vote in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, July 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

In this undated family photo, Venezuelan Edni Lopez, a political science professor and award-winning poet, flashes a vee sign at her home in Caracas, Venezuela. (Courtesy of family via AP)

Police fire tear gas at protesters demonstrating against the official election results declaring President Nicolas Maduro's reelection, the day after the vote in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, July 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

LONDON (AP) — Google lost its last bid to overturn a European Union antitrust penalty, after the bloc's top court ruled against it Tuesday in a case that came with a whopping fine and helped jumpstart an era of intensifying scrutiny for Big Tech companies.

The European Union’s top court rejected Google's appeal against the 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) penalty from the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, for violating antitrust rules with its comparison shopping service.

Also Tuesday, Apple lost its challenge against an order to repay 13 billion euros ($14.34 billion) in back taxes to Ireland, after the European Court of Justice issued a separate decision siding with the commission in a case targeting unlawful state aid for global corporations.

Both companies have now exhausted their appeals in the cases that date to the previous decade. Together, the court decisions are a victory for European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who's expected to step down next month after 10 years as the commission's top official overseeing competition.

Experts said the rulings illustrate how watchdogs have been emboldened in the years since the cases were first opened.

One of the takeaways from the Apple decision "is the sense that, again, the EU authorities and courts are prepared to flex their (collective) muscles to bring Big Tech to heel where necessary,” Alex Haffner, a competition partner at law firm Fladgate, said by email.

The Google ruling “reflects the growing confidence with which competition regulators worldwide are tackling the perceived excesses of the Big Tech companies,” said Gareth Mills, partner at law firm Charles Russell Speechlys. The court's willingness “to back the legal rationale and the level of fine will undoubtedly embolden the competition regulators further.”

The shopping fine was one of three huge antitrust penalties for Google from the commission, which punished the Silicon Valley giant in 2017 for unfairly directing visitors to its own Google Shopping service over competitors.

“We are disappointed with the decision of the Court, which relates to a very specific set of facts,” Google said in a brief statement.

The company said it made changes to comply with the commission’s decision requiring it to treat competitors equally. It started holding auctions for shopping search listings that it would bid for alongside other comparison shopping services.

“Our approach has worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services,” Google said.

European consumer group BEUC hailed the court's decision, saying it shows how the bloc's competition law “remains highly relevant" in digital markets.

“It is a good outcome for all European consumers at the end of the day,” Director General Agustín Reyna said in an interview. “It means that many smaller companies or rivals will be able to go to different comparison shopping sites. They don’t need to depend on Google to reach out to customers."

Google is still appealing its two other EU antitrust cases: a 2018 fine of 4.125 billion euros ($4.55 billion) involving its Android operating system and a 2019 penalty of 1.49 billion euros ($1.64 billion) over its AdSense advertising platform.

Those three cases foreshadowed expanded efforts by regulators worldwide to crack down on the tech industry. The EU has since opened more investigations into Big Tech companies and drew up a new law to prevent them from cornering online markets, known as the Digital Markets Act.

European Commissioner and Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager said that the shopping case was one of the first attempts to regulate a digital company and inspired similar efforts worldwide.

"The case was symbolic because it demonstrated even the most powerful tech companies could be held accountable. No one is above the law,” Vestager told a press briefing in Brussels.

Vestager said the commission will continue to open competition cases even as it enforces the Digital Markets Act. The DMA is a sweeping rulebook that forces Google and other tech giants to give consumers more choice by following a set of dos and don'ts.

Google is also now facing pressure over its lucrative digital advertising business from the EU and Britain, which are carrying out separate investigations, and the United States, where the Department of Justice is taking the company to federal court over its alleged dominance in ad tech.

Apple failed in its last bid to avoid repaying its Irish taxes Tuesday after the Court of Justice upheld a lower court ruling against the company, in the dispute that dates back to 2016.

Vestager, who said she had been braced for defeat, hailed it as a landmark victory for “tax justice.”

It was a surprise win for the commission, which has previously targeted Amazon, Starbucks and Fiat with tax rulings that were later overturned on appeal. They were part of the EU's efforts to stamp out sweetheart deals that let companies pay little to no taxes in a fight that highlighted the debate over whether multinational corporations are paying their fair share around the world.

The case drew outrage from Apple, with CEO Tim Cook calling it “total political crap.” Then-U.S. President Donald Trump slammed Vestager, who spearheaded the campaign to root out special tax deals and crack down on big U.S. tech companies, as the “tax lady” who “really hates the U.S.”

Associated Press writers Raf Casert and Mark Carlson in Brussels contributed to this report.

FILE - In this April 17, 2007 file photo, exhibitors work on laptop computers in front of an illuminated sign of the Google logo at the industrial fair Hannover Messe in Hanover, Germany. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer, File)

FILE - A sign at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. is shown on Oct. 8, 2010. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

Google loses final EU court appeal against 2.4 billion euro fine in antitrust shopping case

Google loses final EU court appeal against 2.4 billion euro fine in antitrust shopping case