In recent months, worrying cases of child pornography have come to light in the country and this has set off the alarms of police forces and citizens.
Yanitza Martínez // La Patilla Correspondent
The proliferation of videos with this type of content is explained in part by the economic crisis itself, since it represents a “lifeline” for unscrupulous people who earn money from the production of these audiovisual materials.
Without considering the consequences some Venezuelans, mostly inhabitants of popular sectors, have taken on the task of producing pornographic content and videos of human and animal abuse, which are then marketed through the so-called Dark Web or dark networks. With this illegal activity they obtain juicy income in cryptocurrencies.
Sources close to the computer area of the Scientific, Criminal and Criminal Investigations Corps (CICPC), point out that those behind these networks are part of a “kind of community” that use special codes to avoid being discovered.
The informants assure that this content is no longer uploaded to web pages, but rather they use dark networks which are almost impossible to detect or at least, for the investigative bodies in Venezuela which do not have sufficient human and technological resources to locate and uncover this type of content.
There Is No Monitoring
A CICPC source points out that this detective body does not monitor these types of cases as such, so they only act when moved by a complaint that leads to opening the investigation process.
In general, these complaints are made after the leak of some audiovisual material that has shocked people or that has gone viral through social networks.
Furthermore, our source commented that the video recorded in the “La Sábila” sector of Barquisimeto, in which four women are seen on top of a child abusing and torturing him, was material recorded more than two years ago and leaked some time later. When it went viral, the security forces acted against the protagonists of the video, but they could not go to the root of the network, since “it is almost impossible to detect.”
These dark networks cannot be accessed through search engines that are widely used by users (for example, Google), since they are made up of websites that hide their IP addresses.
Lara Leads
Lara state this year 2022 was rocked by several scandalous cases related to abuses against children and animals. It is necessary to remember an act of animal abuse that shocked the country, in which two men ran a jeep over a dog repeatedly.
This video, like the one recorded in La Sábila, was produced just over two years ago, but it went viral in 2022.
This practice, called “animal crushing”, consists of torturing animals in different ways and, in other cases, defecating and peeing over them.
These recent criminal activities have been more frequent in the country as a result of the complex economic situation that Venezuela is going through. This is how the criminal lawyer and Professor of Criminalistics at the Central University of Venezuela, Luis Izquiel, typifies this and adds that “social decomposition and impunity” are also factors that affect the emergence of this type of crime.
Gangs In Lara Are Dismantled
Since 2020, three child pornography networks have been dismantled in Lara State. One of these was dismantled last November in the “La Sábila” sector, where officials from the Criminal Investigation Directorate of the Bolivarian National Police arrested three women linked to the people who starred in the atrocious material that was leaked and went viral a few weeks ago where a child was abused.
After this unfortunate video went viral, the Attorney General of the Chavista regime, Tarek William Saab, reported that 20 people linked to this type of cases have been arrested in Lara.
The protagonists of the video of La Sábila supposedly are now living in Colombia. However, Colombian security forces managed to arrest Yenimar Rojas Linares, mother of the abused minor, in Cúcuta and she will be charged with the crimes of omission in sexual abuse, attempted homicide, distribution of pornographic material and criminal association.
Regarding this event, the Venezuelan authorities would have targeted Yelitza Elena Lucena, alias “La Chicho”, who would be the intellectual author behind the case of mistreatment of La Sábila, a community located north of Barquisimeto the state capital.
Apparently, “La Chicho” along with another woman, was in charge of receiving the “crush fetish” videos, which consist of crushing animals and children with their feet, and for which they pay between 10 and 20 dollars.
After paying for these videos, comes the commercialization in the depths of the Internet. These dividends are much juicier and more attractive for those who today have turned Barquisimeto into a Hollywood of pornography and animal crushing, transforming the “Ciudad de los crepúsculos” (The city of twilight) in the largest producer of this type of content in Venezuela, which continues to grow in the perverse market of the Deep Web.