Beatriz Salas has counted 2,767 days since her last conversation with her son, Hugo Marino, 64 years old. "Mom, I'll call you, old lady, I'll call you tonight." That phrase, on April 19, 2019, at midday, marked the last communication with the Venezuelan diver.
Hugo's whereabouts have been unknown since he arrived at the Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía on a flight from Miami to attend to operational commitments for his company, Sistemas Electrónicos Acuáticos (SEA). The firm, based outside the country, operated with specialized technology for locating and rescuing aircraft that crashed at sea and recovering black boxes from the ocean.
In Venezuelan territory, Marino had participated in expert assessments such as the crash of a military aircraft in Nueva Esparta, technical cooperation in the search for the Argentine submarine ARA San Juan, and coordination related to the aircraft in which the son of former minister Miguel Pérez Abad died. Despite that technical profile and his distance from political activism, state security forces carried out a detention without a public judicial order, one that has received no official recognition after nearly 7 years.
A source confirmed his stay in the Dgcim
The initial confirmation of the clandestine arrest came from a childhood contact of the diver's wife, who held a position within the state apparatus and verified, using his ID number, that the military contractor remained held in the cells of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (Dgcim), at the Boleíta headquarters, east of Caracas.
A sister of his spouse went to that facility to deliver basic supplies using a handwritten list provided by the guards. "The first time they accepted the package of clothes and food, but on the second visit they said he wasn't there, and since then no one else has seen him," said his mother Beatriz Salas in a telephone interview with Efecto Cocuyo.
Salas says they learned of a secret hearing at Court 31 of Control in Caracas, presided over by Judge Pérez Alvarado, thanks to the fact that at that time his case was being handled by the Foro Penal. According to her account, the lawyers learned that he was charged with the crimes of treason and terrorism, but shortly afterward the file disappeared from the court's records without the defense ever being able to access it.
"They closed the case and made the file disappear because there are very powerful people who don't want this to be known," said his mother, who lives outside Venezuela.
Closed doors at the institutions
Salas explains that the family's lawyer in Caracas, Guillermo Heredia, has tried to request information from the Attorney General's Office and the Public Defender's Office, but neither office responds to the requests. For her, the recent changes of names at those institutions did nothing to change the state's silence.
"The prosecutor and the public defender are like vases that serve only as decoration, because they changed the names but the circumstances remain intact," she said.
Beatriz recalls that the only official mention of her son on record occurred by chance during a television broadcast hosted by journalist Vladimir Villegas, who asked a question of the then head of the Public Ministry, Tarek William Saab, seconds before a commercial break. "Villegas asked him before the break and he answered that he had some prosecutors assigned, but after the commercial break they never touched the case again, and later (Tarek William Saab) blocked me on his social media," she said.
Family hypotheses
Among the hypotheses that Hugo Marino's circle considers about the background of his detention, his mother points to unofficial versions linking the case to possible investigative work at sea. These assumptions point in particular to the air crash in which the son of former minister Miguel Pérez Abad died.
However, Hugo's mother insists that she cannot be sure whether those versions are true or whether Hugo traveled to get involved in that case. What she does know is that the former minister called her house one Sunday, worried about the whereabouts of the small plane, and that her son published a message on Twitter shortly afterward saying he had something important to discuss with him.
"The investigator from the Search and Rescue Service who was looking into why that plane crashed also killed himself shortly afterward in another air accident; you connect the dots and think my son knew something they didn't want him to say, but I wish I had certainty about what he went to investigate, because formally he was only going to see his office," she said.
Salas says they turned to lawyer Tamara Sujú to take the complaint to international bodies and open a case in Italy, taking advantage of the European nationality her son inherited from his father. She says that both Luis Almagro and Michelle Bachelet came to demand proof of life in Caracas, but not a single response ever came from the official offices.
Her most recent attempts have been aimed at the opposition leadership abroad. "I have written to Dinora Figuera so that she puts Hugo's disappearance on the negotiating table, but she doesn't answer me," she denounced.
A broken family
Beatriz was left practically alone with Hugo after losing, within a matter of months, her other daughter and her husband, to whom she was married for 54 years. Since then, the diver took on the absolute protection of his mother, a bond she remembers every day.
"He used to say that I had become his eldest daughter; he was the son I talked to, the one I conversed with, my great support, and they took away part of me," she said.
The disappearance completely changed life in that household. Her daughter-in-law had to go out to work, and her eldest granddaughter, 26 years old, had to leave university to help with expenses, while Daniel, Hugo's youngest son, now 15, grew up without answers about his father's absence.
"Hugo was an excellent father who was always attentive to his children; no one knows the tremendous damage they do when they make someone disappear, because they take the person and take the family along with them, you live it."
As the years passed, Salas's anguish turned into fear, especially after learning of cases like that of the mother of political prisoner Víctor Quero, who searched for her son without knowing he had already died in state custody.
At 83 years old, with difficulty moving around and expecting nothing from Venezuelan institutions, the woman asks only for a clue that will give her peace before she dies.
"To whoever has information about Hugo, I ask that you give me peace of mind, and I will keep it to myself; I only want to ease this pain of not knowing what they did to him or where he is."