So my brother in law is a trucker, he and his cousin got assaulted by what we call locally "road pirates" while transporting a precious cargo of mother's milk construction materials (yeah, Venezuela is a wonderful place to live, if you are really into Mad Max).
Anyway the scum bags that mug them told the both of them to stay quiet and lay low, that's it, don't give any information to the police about the crime, not even report it, or report it on another city. They went ahead and reported it on another city, there they were joined by the owner of the truck and my father in law. Then the local authorities told them they had to report it back on the place it happened, so they did. Then they showed them a few pics of some suspects, and they identified one of them, and it seems it got arrested. I guess for most of you all this would be pretty normal (this reporting the crime part), however if you live in Venezuela you should already know that you can't do that.
Basically 100% of the policemen in the country are corrupt, and even criminals themselves in their free time (and sometimes even while on duty), so reporting a crime and explicitly identifying a criminal might land your ass in trouble because it's super very likely you are identifying the very same parter of the police officer showing you the pics. Yeah we live on a detective movie from the 80's, with all the clichés and even the mullets...
So yesterday my father in law got a call saying that today there will be a hearing for this piece of shit that got arrested, and that if he's going to jail then they are going to kill the cousin and the owner of the truck, and their wives since they already know where they live.
Some friends that are in the police told him that this is pretty standard because they simply want to scare them so they don't go there and serve as witness for the trial, which would mean there will be no trial and the criminal would go free. Thing is that they got the number and God knows if indeed the addresses from the fucking police itself (read the corrupt percentage above) so we are all officially scared. Hoping it really doesn't come to anything but here you can't really know.