Venezuela sends hundreds to maximum security jails after election

People charge their mobile phones from a truck of the municipality of Chacao during a blackout in Caracas on August 30, 2024. [AFP]

More than 700 people arrested during protests that erupted after Venezuela's disputed presidential election have been transferred to maximum security prisons, a human rights group said Saturday.

The detainees, who had been held at police stations around the country, were transferred over the past week to two notorious prisons that were previously controlled by gangs, the Venezuelan Prisons Observatory said.

In many cases the transfers were conducted under questionable circumstances, with detainees' relatives not informed of the moves to Tocuyito and Tocoron prisons, the group said.

"They were conducted with many irregularities," the NGO said in a press release.

More than 2,400 people were arrested after the protests that broke out after President Nicolas Maduro was declared winner of the disputed July 28 election.

The opposition claims it won by a landslide and has voting records to prove this.

The leftist Maduro government, brushing off accusations of authoritarianism, has resisted intense international pressure to release vote tally numbers to back up its claim of victory.

The United States, the European Union and several Latin American countries have refused to recognize Maduro as having won without seeing detailed voting results.

The violence that accompanied the protests left 27 people dead and 192 injured.

Venezuelan Prisons Observatory said none of the people transferred to maximum security facilities have been allowed to contact their families or attorneys.

Of the 2,400 detainees, 1,581 have been listed as political prisoners by another advocacy group, called Penal Forum.

Penal Forum said 114 of the total are adolescents and at least 40 of them were released on bail Saturday. Sixteen were freed from detention on Thursday.

Some of those arrested are as young as 13 and have been sent to prisons with older, common criminals, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said this week.

"What they have done is brutal," she said of the Maduro government.