Sin Nadie Que Te Consuele is a 300+ page editorial publication that reconstructs 11 cases of crimes against humanity committed by the Venezuelan government during the 2014 and 2017 protests*.
Starting from the UN Human Rights Council's fact-finding mission report as the source material, I designed and produced the full editorial system: information architecture, data visualizations, augmented reality reconstructions of the events, and a complete art direction built around the weight of what was being told.
* As determined by the UN Human Rights Council's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela (2020).
Photography across the publication was contributed by six Venezuelan photojournalists who covered the protests and granted use of their work for this project: Alejandro Cegarra, Carlos Ramos, Claudia Paparelli, Leo Álvarez, Iñaki Zugasti, and Félix Espinosa. All photo rights belong to their respective owners.
* As determined by the UN Human Rights Council's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela (2020).
Photography across the publication was contributed by six Venezuelan photojournalists who covered the protests and granted use of their work for this project: Alejandro Cegarra, Carlos Ramos, Claudia Paparelli, Leo Álvarez, Iñaki Zugasti, and Félix Espinosa. All photo rights belong to their respective owners.
In September 2020, the UN Human Rights Council published the detailed findings of its independent fact-finding mission on Venezuela.
The report ran over 400 pages, documented 223 cases, and concluded that Venezuelan security forces had planned and executed serious human rights violations since 2014, some of them constituting crimes against humanity.
Sin Nadie Que Te Consuele is a visual reinterpretation and reorganization of that report. It was my undergraduate thesis at the Design School in Spain, four years after leaving Caracas.
Photo by Leo Álvarez.
Photo by Leo Álvarez.
The goal was to take the mission's findings, specifically the cases tied to the 2014 and 2017 protest cycles, and rebuild them into something a non-Venezuelan reader could follow, feel, and understand.
It resulted in a 300+ page book divided into five chapters, eleven cases narrated chronologically, data visualizations built from the same sources the mission used, and seven augmented reality sequences that reconstructed key events on top of satellite imagery of the actual locations where they happened.
The text and the investigation are the mission's. What I built was the system that made it readable: the structure, the visual language, the editorial logic, and every piece of design that turned a legal document into a story someone could hold in their hands.
I left Venezuela in 2018 when I was 19.
One of the things you first realize when you leave is that outside, nobody quite knows what happened, and fewer people feel it has anything to do with them.
The crimes documented in this report did not happen to strangers. They happened to a generation, my generation, young people the same age I was during the protests, from every background and class, who wanted a different future and were met with systematic violence.
I wanted to convey, through design, not just the information and the facts of what happened in those years in my home country, but also the feeling of helplessness and abandonment that Venezuelans have carried for a long time.
Concluding my design education while abroad and putting that knowledge to use felt like the right way to do something about that.
Photo by Carlos Ramos.
Photo by Carlos Ramos.
The original UN report was dense, technical, and exhaustive, built for institutions and lawyers. Necessary for legal purposes at the ICC, but impossible for a general audience.
The design challenge was how to take this complex investigation and present it in a way that a person outside Venezuela would actually read and understand, without simplifying what happened or looking away from it.
The answer was to reorder, illustrate, and bring every type of media available to make the information accessible.
The publication reorganized the mission's content into five chapters:
- the mission itself and how it worked.
- the political and social context that led to the protests.
- the scale and patterns of the protests.
- the eleven cases investigated in detail, and the conclusions on individual
- institutional responsibility.
Each chapter builds on the last, so by the time a reader reaches the cases, they already understand the system that produced them.
That feeling needed a name that carried it.
The title comes from a Venezuelan salsa song by Oscar D'León. Its chorus:
"For your bad behavior / You will regret it / And you will have to pay for all my suffering / You will cry and cry / With no one to comfort you."
That is the song Venezuelan National Guard officers sang to a mother who came to a detention site looking for her 13-year-old daughter, who was being illegally held and sexually abused for being near a protest.
The title is the publication's thesis. These people were abandoned, by their government and by the world.
The cover photograph is by Carlos Ramos, taken during the 2017 protests in Caracas. A child, face covered by a shirt to protect himself from tear gas, looks directly at the camera.
He is deep inside the protest, fighting for something that started long before he was born. Many of the victims documented in the publication were between 13 and 30 years old. That youth, that fear, that refusal to look away, is what the cover is made of.
The image also carries a second reading.
The tight framing of the child's eyes mirrors the visual iconography of the "Eyes of Chávez," a government propaganda image deployed across Venezuela for years on billboards and building facades, meant to project permanent presence and authority.
One is the image of a government watching over its people. The other is a child asking for help, terrorized by the legacy of those same policies. Same frame, opposite everything else.
The back cover extends the symbolism. Seven hand-drawn stars arranged in an arc reference the pre-2008 Venezuelan flag, the version with seven stars that predates Chávez's 2006 decree adding an eighth without a referendum.
That seven-star flag became an emblem of the opposition and appeared painted on the homemade shields protesters carried through the streets in 2017. The stars on the back cover are drawn in the same rough, hand-made style of those shields.
Together, the two covers hold both the abandonment and the resistance, which is more or less what the whole book is about.
The governing constraint was to carry the weight of the content without exploiting it. These are real people, real crimes, real families still waiting for accountability.
The design could not aestheticize that, but it also could not flatten it into a dry institutional document. It had to be readable enough to hold a stranger's attention and restrained enough to respect what it was holding.
To find that balance, I brought together several different types of media and content.
The photographs come from six reporters who documented the protests on the ground.
Their work allowed the world to see what was happening in real time, beating state media censorship, and was later used by human rights organizations and in some cases by the mission itself as evidence.
Inside the publication, they place the reader inside events that were happening, providing both context and proof that it all happened. This project wouldn't have been possible without them.
Data visualizations were built to take the statistics the mission cited in passing and make their scale visible.
A timeline of protests across 2017, annotated with the key sociopolitical events that drove each escalation, makes visible the direct relationship between government decisions and the surges of civil unrest that followed.
The visualizations use only the data the mission itself cited, nothing added or interpreted beyond what the evidence supports.
Satellite imagery and augmented reality handle the cases where spatial understanding changes what you see.
Several of the eleven cases turn on questions of position, distance, and sequence: where a shot came from, where the victim was standing, where security forces were positioned. That geometry is almost impossible to communicate in text alone.
Illustrations, press clippings, and social media posts from victims or government officials appear where they constitute part of the record, adding layers of context that the mission's text references but cannot show.
The mission's original report covered three contexts:
- selective political repression
- security and social control operations
- violations in the context of the protests.
This publication focuses on the third, the 2014 and 2017 protest cycles, because the victims in that context were overwhelmingly young people with no political affiliation, exercising their right to protest. People the same age I was during those events, from every background and class.
Their cases are also the most legible to a reader coming in without prior knowledge of Venezuelan politics, and the protest context generated the most audiovisual documentation, which made the storytelling possible.
Photo by Alejandro Cegarra.
Photo by Alejandro Cegarra.
The content was reorganized chronologically rather than by crime type, which is how the original report structures it. That decision made the cases easier to follow and harder to dismiss as abstract legal categories.
Each of the eleven cases follows the same internal structure:
- a cover page with the case title, location, and date.
- a timeline of local and national events in the days leading up to the crime.
- a chronological account of what happened
- a dedicated page for each victim with their name, age, and occupation-
- the investigation and judicial processes that followed.
- the mission's conclusions on responsibility for that case.
Within that structure, each case incorporates whatever combination of satellite imagery, photojournalism, social media posts, press clippings, data visualizations, illustrations, and augmented reality sequences the evidence calls for.
Five of the eleven cases include augmented reality sequences.
The trigger is a satellite image of the location where the crime occurred, modified to match the publication's visual system.
When scanned with the companion app, a 3D animation reconstructs the sequence of events from a bird's-eye view, placing the actors in the geography of what actually happened.
The sequences exist because in several of these cases, spatial reconstruction makes visible a direct contradiction between the government's account of events and the evidence the mission gathered.
I built the AR from scratch: 3D models and environments in Cinema 4D, figure animations through Mixamo and modified to match each case, full integration in Unity with Vuforia. Each sequence was designed to reconstruct a specific moment in a specific location as spatial evidence.
Knowing that a shot was fired from a certain direction, that the victim was standing in a certain place, that the security forces were positioned a certain way, shifts the reading from allegation to geometry.
The augmented reality does not add anything to the evidence. It makes the evidence's implications impossible to dismiss.
The result is a printed publication that through eleven verified cases shares a glimpse of the violence Venezuelans have faced in the last decades.
The mission's report alone shed a light on all of us, telling us we were not entirely alone in the world. This project comes as an extension of that: to not forget what has happened and continues to happen, to assign responsibility, and to hold a collective memory out into the world.
Twenty copies were printed as part of the thesis submission.
