Julio simón

An editorial and mixed reality project that documents 11 cases of crimes against humanity committed by the Venezuelan government during the 2014 and 2017 protests.

What follows is deeply personal, but the methodology (translating complex stories into accessible visual narratives) is the same approach I bring to commercial work.

I led all aspects of this project: research and content curation from the UN report, narrative structure and information hierarchy, editorial design and visual direction, photography collaboration and art direction, and augmented reality integration for 3D reconstructions of events.

In September 2022, a UN Human Rights Council report concluded that "since at least 2014, the Venezuelan Government and its security forces have planned and executed serious human rights violations, constituting, in some cases, crimes against humanity."

This project is a visual re-edition of that report, designed to make it accessible beyond academic and institutional circles. The goal wasbroaden its reach and remember the victims.

On a personal level, this was my graduating project in Spain, completed four years after leaving Venezuela in the aftermath of the 2017 protests.

It's born from helplessness, frustration, and a sense of responsibility to hold people accountable.

The challenge was answer "what's happening in Venezuela?" in the clearest, most visual way possible.

No one reads a 400-page report, but that report is the first (and so far, only) piece of evidence filed with the International Criminal Court that could bring justice to the victims.

The full title translates to "Without Anyone to Comfort You: A Visual Reconstruction of 11 Cases of Crimes Against Humanity During the 2014-2017 Protests in Venezuela."

"Without anyone to comfort you" comes from an old Venezuelan salsa song. 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 / So that you'll realize that if you're cheated, it hurts."

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That's the song a national guard sang to a woman who came to a detention site looking for her 13-year-old daughter. The UN mission reports that the girl was being illegally detained and sexually abused by security forces just for being near a protest.

That's the level of systemic cruelty Venezuelans were subjected to, and it reflects the solitude, despair, and helplessness felt by many during those years.

The UN’s investigation comes after years of begs for help from inside venezuela. In a hard state-wide censorship across media, journalists and photographers played a key role in recording evidence used in these and many other investigations.

So to better illustrate the events that unfolded I reached out to many photo journalists, reporters and even amateur photographers that captured venezuela around those years.

Some of them were kind enough to let me use their pictures for this project:

• Leo Álvarez
• ‍Alejandro Cegarra‍
• Claudia Paparelli‍
• Carlos Ramos‍
• Iñaki Zugasti‍
• Félix Espinoza

I remember the despair and dismay across Venezuela during those years. After leaving, I kept getting frustrated that no one seemed to know—or care—what was happening inside the country.

The need to convey those feelings became the cornerstone of the project's visual direction.

The cover photo was taken by photographer Carlos Ramos in the midst of the 2017 protests.the child’s eyes are asking for help.

He’s deep into the combat zone, fighting for something that started long before he was born, yet he feels the need to fight for it.

Many of the victims of the investigation, even the ones that are not featured on this project, range from 13 to 30-years old. That youthness mixed with fear of losing hope was a more-than-common look out in the streets.

There’s also the striking similitude to the “eyes of Chávez”: a pseudo pop-art icon made after his death to be put on high billboards and on top of buildings to “watch over his legacy”.

Essentially the same frame, yet two very different messages connected to each other.

Were not be for chavez, his policies and the subsequent maduro’s government, that kid would have been playing somewhere instead of having to cover himself in antiacid to reduce the gas’ effects on him.

The back cover features the names, dates and locations of 11 of the cases investigated, as well as the names of the photographers and journalists that lent me their material for this project.

There’s also a hand-drawn seven-star arc in the middle, a nod to venezuelan flag pre-2008 that became an icon for the opposition.

In the 2014 and 2017 protests, it was painted into the DIY shields the protestors were using to protect themselves from the security forces

The UN's Fact Finding Mission report forms the backbone of this project. However, their report covers various crimes across different timelines in Venezuela, from 2014 to 2019.

For scope and narrative clarity, this project focuses on crimes committed during the 2014 and 2017 protests, plus the necessary context to understand them.

The project is structured in five sections:

A) The Fact-Finding Mission.

This is all about the mission and their work: who are they, why were they summoned, what are they trying to find out and how.

It explains the political and legal significance of this report inside and outside venezuela, including the realm of the international criminal court.

B) What’s happening in Venezuela?

It’s really hard to answer that witout having to go into a 45 minute speech, but here’s a chronological breakdown of key social and political events that led to the protests where the alleged crimes agains humanity were commited by the government.

It also dissects the roles of state agencies and security forces, which inevitably played a part in the crimes investigated, to establish a clear chain of command and attribute individual accountability.

C) The Protests

A maximized view of the 2014 and 2017 protests to grasp their scale and significance, as well as to establish the violent patterns held by government and security forces across both movements.

D) The cases investigated

The Mission pieced together each case through victim and family interviews, examination of legal documents, and the reconstruction of events using social media and media footage.

In all of them, the mission reckons that at least one of this crimes were commited and executed by state or security forces:

• Forced disappearances
• Arbitrary detentions
• Extrajudicial executions
• Torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment

To make it more accessible, I've reordered the text so it reads chronologically and added animations, maps, diagrams, illustrations, and images where needed.

Each one of the 11 cases is told via the same narrative and overall visual structure:

• A cover page with the case’s title, location and dates.
• A timeline of national or local events related to the protests during that or previous days.
• A timeline of the events that led up to the actual crime.

• A page dedicated to each of the case’s victim(s). including their name, age and occupation.
• The D.A’s investigation and the judicial processes that followed.
• The Mission's conclusions regarding each case.

So it could be easier to follow along, I included different forms of media to this narrations, including:

• Satellite images of key places
• Social media posts from the victims or goverment officials
• Headlines and articles from local or international media outlets

• Images from photojournalists
• Illustrations of weapons or torture systems
• Animations in augmented reality of the events.

In some cases, The investigations are so detailed, that i was able to recreate some of the events using augmented reality and 3d animation.

In these cases the animations make it clear that the official version of the events does not match the evidence found by the council.

There are seven target images spread across some of the cases. when scanned with an app, a 3d animation is kickstarted on top of the page.

E) Responsibility

Presented as the mission’s findings, here’s where personal and institutional responsability is laid down.

The mission concludes on the physical and intellectual culprits of torture, unlawful detentions, disappearances, and executions as well as asserting violent patterns executed as state policies.