Published at: 26/03/2025 08:00 PM

(ELITE, April 22, 1967; EL CARABOBEÑO, March 22, 1967)

• On March 21, 1967, during the Government of Raúl Leoni, the lawyer, radio broadcaster and leader of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), Bartolomé Vielma Hernández, disappeared.
• Four years earlier, the renowned lawyer had been arrested, during the Government of Rómulo Betancourt, for his political militancy and participation in El Porteñazo.
• Vielma Hernández was last seen at the Theater of Operations No. 5 (TO No. 5) located in Yumare, edo. Yaracuy, by Rosa Elena Petit, sister of guerrilla leader Dimas Petit Colina, who spoke personally with the missing father of the family.
• His wife, Haydeé Ríos de Vielma, a medical student at the University of Carabobo, toured all the Theaters of Operations or anti-guerrilla camps, as well as the cells of the General Directorate of Police (DIGEPOL) and the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces (SIFA). He was also present in the editorial staff of several media outlets.
• Faced with the refusal of the police forces to recognize this disappearance, he stated: “He thought that the same thing could have happened to Professor Alberto Lovera, who all the police forces and government bodies denied knowing his whereabouts and then appeared dead, as has happened with many political prisoners in open violation of Human Rights.”
• In fact, Vielma Hernández has been missing for 58 years and to this day, after almost six decades, her relatives and children are unaware of her whereabouts.
• After countless procedures, and after complying with all the provisions of the law, in 2007, 40 years later, he was officially declared dead by a court of the republic, without being able to know or punish the perpetrators of such an abominable crime.
• However, calling him officially and legally deceased is an ironic understatement when, without a doubt, that smiling boy from Puerto Cabello, happily married and father of two daughters, was savagely tortured and murdered, and then waited for a judicial declaration of his absence. As if it were an absolute vacancy for a position that can never be held.
• When he disappeared, his eldest daughter Barthide was six years old, and the youngest, Vilma Vielma Ríos, was three months old. Both grew up with the unfathomable emptiness left by a missing father, during the era of adeco-Copeyan terror that mourned thousands of Venezuelan homes.

Mazo News Team