Luis Guillermo Espinoza

Approximately 1 in 500 people are born with hearing loss or lose their hearing during childhood; the risk of suffering blindness is 5%, and the chances of surviving a gunshot wound to the brain are barely 9%. All these odds applied to the case of my son, Luis Guillermo Espinoza, who, while still only a child, was murdered by the Nicolás Maduro dictatorship after being shot in the head—leaving him blind and deaf in one ear during the final two months of his life.

My name is Zulmith Espinoza. I am the mother of Luis Guillermo Espinoza, a young man of only 15 years old who was murdered by State officials during a protest against the government. Since he was five, I took him to his football practices; he grew up to be a passionate athlete. He would dedicate his best goals to me, shouting: “This is for you, I love you, Mom!”

Luis Guillermo understood that Venezuela was going through a difficult situation, where our economic reality—like that of millions of Venezuelans—was not the best. He dreamed of a better country, one that could offer him opportunities for personal growth and quality of life. For this reason, Luis Guillermo decided to protest for his rights. During the second demonstration he attended, he was caught in the heavy repression of the Guardia Nacional Bolivariana. It was a difficult night; I was very worried about his safety, but he arrived home the next morning. When I saw him, I didn’t know what to do, but I expressed my disapproval of what he had done and forbade him from attending another protest.

He immediately replied that he was “the resistance” and would continue protesting as a way to express his disagreement with the regime; his only motivation was to live in a free country. Shortly after, Luis saw a video on social media showing a young protester who fell, and as he stood up, a National Guard officer shot him in the back at point-blank range, showing no mercy.

That impacted him, and he promised me he would not march again.

On June 5, 2017, the opposition had called for a nationwide “sit-in” (plantón). That day, I woke up early, as usual, to prepare food and go to work. Before leaving, I went into my son’s room and kissed him goodbye. As I left for work, I felt a great unease that he might go to the protest instead of school. However, I remembered the promise he had made and went to work.

At the end of the day, before arriving home, I ran into my brother, who asked me to get into his car because Luis was at the San Diego hospital; he had been wounded in the protest.

When we arrived at the clinic, the doctors informed me that my son was in critical condition due to a gunshot wound to the head and that they needed to perform a CT scan. They did not have the necessary equipment, so he was transferred again to the Central Hospital of Valencia.

The CT scan showed that Luis had a foreign object in his head, which was causing the loss of his sight and hearing in his right ear. Once admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), the doctors determined that Luis needed surgery to reduce the cerebral edema, so they decided to operate.

My son remained in an induced coma for 21 days, and when he woke up, he could not speak due to the tracheotomy. I used to play music for him through his one functioning ear to make his days brighter, and I would tell him about football matches.

In two months and eight days, we faced a new obstacle: the hospital crisis. The facilities lacked medicine, supplies, food, and even the basic paperwork needed to treat my son. We had to provide everything he required.

Luis became infected with 11 different bacteria, to the point where maggots appeared in his right ear. The situation was so precarious that he didn’t even have access to food; many times, the nurses would return the meals I brought him, already spoiled. His condition worsened every day; he suffered from malnutrition, and several times he was disconnected from his machines. I pleaded with the nurses to teach me how to feed him myself, but they would not allow it.

Added to all this, Luis was guarded by heavily armed officers as if they were watching a criminal. When he was moved from the ICU to a regular room, Luis Guillermo suffered his first cardiac arrest. I had to perform CPR myself because the nurses did not know how to carry out the procedure. When he was readmitted to the ICU, he suffered from hypothermia and four respiratory arrests, which finally caused his death on August 13, 2017.

Twenty days after my son’s death, in search of justice, I went to the Prosecutor’s Office handling his case. The prosecutor informed me that the autopsy found no evidence of a bullet—even though the previous CT scan had confirmed a bullet lodged in my son’s brain.

The CT scan proving the bullet’s presence had been lost at the hospital. I tried to request a copy from the clinic, but they claimed there was no record of the patient. I asked the prosecutor to intervene, but it took three years for them to even request a copy of that scan.

Once I managed to obtain the case file, I found a statement from a minor who was an eyewitness. He recounted how Luis Guillermo was wounded: they were at the protest when they were intercepted by GNB officers, who forced them to kneel alongside three other youths and threatened to kill them. They pointed a gun at my son’s head and told him they were going to kill him.

My son pleaded for his life; he became terrified and ran. Fleeing out of fear was reason enough for an officer to consider my son a threat and shoot him in the back at close range. The witness says Luis’s blood splattered on his face and that the GNB officer kicked my son while he lay on the pavement.

My process of seeking the truth involved personally bringing witnesses to appointments. When I finally convinced one who feared for their life to testify, I was told the statement was never incorporated into the file. To this day, there is no explanation why.

The system mocked me: one day they denied me entry to the Prosecutor’s Office for wearing a short-sleeved shirt; another day, because of the size of my purse. To my surprise, the guard blocking my entry was the same officer who had been watching my son at the hospital. Meanwhile, the GNB official reports denied their presence at the scene.

They told me the investigation stage could take up to 10 years. They took the person I loved most in the world—my only son—and my chance to be a grandmother. They killed him for dreaming of a better Venezuela, shooting him in the back while he ran in terror. I must keep fighting, longing for his murderer and all those responsible for trying to silence an entire country to be convicted.Guardia