Carmen Navas, the Venezuelan mother who spent months searching for a son the Chavista regime had already killed in custody, dies

Carmen Teresa Navas, the 81-year-old woman who for more than a year toured jails, courts and the media looking for her missing son, died this Sunday, just ten days after the Chavista regime admitted in writing that the political prisoner had been dead for nine months while in state custody. Her relatives and Venezuelan journalists confirmed the news.

The case of her son, Víctor Hugo Quero Navas, became the most recent evidence of the pattern of forced disappearances that activists, journalists and human rights organizations attribute to Chavismo's repressive apparatus, investigated for crimes against humanity. A 51-year-old businessman, Quero, was captured on January 1, 2025, by hooded officers of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) when he was on his way to celebrate New Year's Eve with his mother. From that day on, his trail was lost in the regime's network of clandestine detention centers.

For months, the authorities maintained Quero was still alive. A record from the Ombudsman's Office, dated October 24, 2025, placed Quero in the infamous El Rodeo I prison, on the outskirts of Caracas, facing charges of "treason, conspiracy and terrorism" in a process without evidence and basic guarantees. By then, however, he had been dead for three months. The regime only admitted the death on May 7, in a statement from the Ministry of the Penitentiary Service that placed the death on July 24, 2025, due to respiratory failure. Quero was buried six days later, without his family's knowledge.

Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado bid farewell to Navas on social media: "Not just a mother died; a woman who turned pain into courage and despair into denunciation died," Machado said, who highlighted how Navas "faced, alone and without fear, a whole apparatus of terror that wanted to erase her son and break her family," and warned that "a country that forgets its victims runs the risk of getting used to horror."

The outcome of the Quero family case is not an isolated event in Venezuela, ruled by Chavismo. According to Foro Penal, at least twenty political prisoners have died in Venezuelan state custody since 2014, in a context that the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission has linked to possible crimes against humanity committed by chavismo structures, including torture, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances. The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has been conducting a formal investigation into these events since 2021.

The number of political prisoners in Venezuela remains high despite the amnesty law that interim dictator Delcy Rodriguez pushed through in February, following the capture of former dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, by U.S. forces. The most recent balance sheet of Foro Penal, on May 4, counted 457 political prisoners.

Before she died, after months of searching, Carmen Navas was able to say goodbye to her son. After demanding the exhumation of the remains to confirm his identity, she organized a discreet funeral in a cemetery in eastern Caracas. "God give me strength," she whispered during Friday's mass. It was his last public appearance.