Published at: 30/07/2025 09:00 PM

DIGEPOL agents, handgun in hand, took the coffin by burying it in an unknown place

(LATEST NEWS and EL NACIONAL, July 29, 1965)

• Senator Luis Emiro Arrieta, elected by the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), died at the age of 55, a victim of the governments of Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni, who imprisoned him in subhuman conditions, causing a serious deterioration in his health.
• Despite the complaints filed, these rulers prevented the parliamentarian from having due access to medical treatment or being transferred to a hospital.
• Thus, two years and three months after his unconstitutional arrest, which occurred on April 16, 1963, he died in one of the dungeons of the Caracas Model Prison, on July 27, 1965.
• During the wake, the coffin containing the remains of the union leader was taken from the funeral home and kidnapped by agents of the General Police Directorate (DIGEPOL) and the Armed Forces Intelligence Service (SIFA), who arrested friends and family who came to accompany the widow and orphaned children.
• Those employees of the funeral home who tried to oppose the abuses and abuses carried out inside the funeral home chapel were also arrested.
• The widow, Trina de Arrieta, suffered a nervous breakdown when she saw how police officers, scrambling in hand, forcibly took her husband's coffin.
• The policeman Carlos Andrés Pérez was responsible for executing the death by the drop of the parliamentarian, who ordered the jailers to prevent access to medical personnel or their transfer to a hospital.
• Finally, when the relatives, after several complaints and press referrals, managed to get Leoni to allow the required care, Arrieta was already clinically evicted.
• When brought to trial, for the alleged crime of rebellion, he declared before the military court that “of all the accusations that Mr. Carlos Andrés Pérez makes to me, I can only accept one, and that is that I am a member of the Communist Party of Venezuela, a condition of which I am proud and that I will defend until the last days of my existence...”
• Senator Arrieta was one of the first victims of the coup d'etat perpetrated by Betancourt, when he dissolved the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) and the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), by arresting popularly elected senators and deputies, who were banned and consequently subject to political persecution and State terrorism.
• “El Capitan” Arrieta was a native of Maracaibo, Edo. Zulia. He was born on June 27, 1910 and began working at the age of 14 in the oil fields on the East Coast of the Lake, working first as a motorist until he obtained the title of captain of the Venezuelan Merchant Navy.
• He then joined the clandestine cells of the PCV-Zulia and, at the beginning of 1936, was one of the organizers of the oil strike that year.

Mazo News Team