Karen Palacios' Yamaha clarinet still rests where she left it atop sheet music of a Mozart concerto that she practised diligently the night before two strangers dressed in black lured her away in a luxury SUV.
The 25-year-old musician's captors duped her into believing she was needed for an interview with a victims' unit at the presidential palace. Instead, they drove her to Venezuela's most-notorious military prison, locking her up alongside the socialist government's top opponents for violating Venezuela's highly subjective hate law.
Her crime: posting a message on social media venting frustration at President Nicols Maduro's government over having been cut from the state-funded National Philharmonic, where she had recently debuted as first clarinetist.
"This is the first time I've started a thread," she wrote May 26 in a string of hard-edged messages that quickly went viral on Twitter.
"Today after the ninth presentation of 'Popol Vuh' I was informed that my contract wasn't renewed because 'I signed against the regime,'" she wrote in an apparent allusion to her support for a petition seeking to recall Maduro. "Now I ask myself: when they called to offer me a job why didn't they say one of the requirements was to think the same as them?"
"I beg God to forgive me but when I hear her play I no longer feel happiness. I'm filled with sadness," Prez said, recalling the anguished look on her daughter's face in two brief visits with her in jail. "I know she needs her clarinet. That's what hurts her."
Far from an innocent victim of a repressive regime, they accuse Palacios of crossing a line and inciting violence when on May 1 a day after Maduro crushed a military rebellion called by opposition leader Juan Guaid she sent messages to her few hundred Twitter followers expressing a desire "to read one sleepless night that Maduro fled the country, was killed, jailed or anything else that makes me happy."
While he says pressure, especially from international actors, can prove effective, for every cell that is cleared out, new detainees fill another one in what he likes to call Venezuela's "revolving door of repression."
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