Published at: 03/04/2024 09:00 PM

• 35 years ago, on April 3, 1989, as part of a protest held at the Manuel Palacios Fajardo High School, on January 23, for the violation of the Student Pass, youth leader Gonzalo Jaurena Abásalo was the victim of police repression.
• Gonzalo was murdered by Corporal II of the Metropolitan Police, Alexis Ramón Piña Demey, who was the material perpetrator of the crime under the protection of senior government officials for eight years, until in 1997 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for qualified homicide.
• During those eight years of impunity, Alexis Piña also served as an escort for the governor of Caracas Antonio Ledezma (1992-1993). In addition, he was head of the Metropolitan Police (PM) and co-responsible for the deaths of students Belinda Álvarez and Verónica Tessari.
• That day, the official report given by the General Commander of the Metropolitan Police tried to trivialize the crime by reporting that “this is a fortuitous case that occurs during a normal patrol of unit 0824, of banking institutions in the western area.”
• The official version of the capital's government was far from reality. Witnesses said that Gonzalo Jaurena was kidnapped by the PM in the morning hours. An hour later, his dead body was left by a PM patrol outside the Magallanes Hospital in Catia.
• The analysis of the facts and forensic expertise revealed that Gonzalo was beaten inside a police cage, where he was tortured and shot at point-blank range.
• The autopsy denied the government's official version.
• All this happened just one month after the social outbreak called “El Caracazo”, during the second government of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989-1963), where the IMF's neoliberal policies and repression reigned.
• Ángel Palacios, then president of the Simón Bolívar University Student Center, denounced that, “in practice, the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez is imposing the death penalty on students.”
• Gonzalo Jaurena Abásalo belongs to that long list of students murdered by the State Security Corps between 1958 and 1998. His father, Héctor Jaurena, family members and fellow fighters undertook a lengthy judicial process in order to bring justice to the material perpetrator of the murder.
• However, the intellectual authors, the authorities responsible for the instructions given, the immediate and mediate hierarchies in the chain of command, which reach the President of the Republic, still remain unpunished in the face of the loss and memory of this student.

Mazo News Team