Published at: 03/09/2025 09:00 PM
(EL MUNDO, December 6 to 11, 1966)
1. Between December 6 and 11, 1966, the list of missing persons in Venezuela was published for the first time, by police agents of the government of Raúl Leoni.
2. In total, there were 97 people who were arbitrarily arrested and whose families and friends never knew where to find them, until today.
3. The practice of Forced Disappearance in Venezuela comprises one of the most shameful periods in history, especially because it was done in the name of democracy.
4. Massacres, murders and torture of a large number of compatriots who, in a popular movement associated with the left demanding freedom, sought to defend their rights against Adeco-Copeyan, pro-North American sectarianism.
5. Statistics documented with data, testimonials and verified sources do not lie about the truth of the torture and disappearances that occurred between 1958 and 1998. More than 3,000 people are still missing in Venezuela.
6. Period in which Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni imposed the practice, for the first time in Venezuela and Latin America, of the figure of the disappeared.
7. Forced Disappearance is defined, according to El Mundo as: “the extrajudicial detention of a dissident from the dominant regime by a public order official who does not identify himself as such and is transferred to places of detention in isolated places in various regions of the country, known as the Theater of Operations (TO), an instrument used to torture, assassinate and disappear victims... The forced disappearance of people has been used as a procedure of repression and intimidation of the population by authoritarian political regimes or dictatorial, in order to subdue, weaken and even extinguish their adversaries”.
“Forced Disappearances is the term used when a person is arrested or abducted by the State or by officials operating on their behalf, hiding any information about the victim. In this way, violating the right to life and freedom, respect for physical integrity and diversity of thought, not only of the victims, but also that of their families,” he continues.
8. This is, without a doubt, one of the darkest stages in Venezuelan history, since the right to life was broken and violated during these years due to the large number of forced disappearances for political reasons.
9. Also, the physical disappearance of the adversary is presented as a political weapon, whose purpose is to terrorize the population and weaken left-wing political organizations.
10. This description is supported by the words, which in his press article entitled “The Disappeared of the Sixties”, wrote Moisés Moleiro, in the newspaper El Globo of October 22, 1996, in which he refers to the Theaters of Operations (TO) as follows:
“In Venezuela, five or six Anti-Guerrilla Operations Theaters, called TOs, were established, all numbered. In them, torture was the usual practice. Personnel from the Armed Forces Information Service (SIFA) and the then General Police Directorate (DIGEPOL), exercised it under the supervision of American soldiers” (Source: Forced Disappearance in Venezuela (1960-1969), author: Agustín José Arzola Castellanos).
Mazo News Team