Published at: 19/03/2025 08:00 PM

(LA EXTRA, March 14, 1964)

• On March 14, 1962, a victim of agents of the General Directorate of Police (DIGEPOL), he was shot down in the mountains of El Charal, edo. Portuguesa, the 19-year-old Iván Barreto Miliani.
• In that ambush, Iván Barreto was surprised when he was carrying a gas pipe on his shoulder.
• A burst of machine gun, fired in the back, tore off his jaw, and he died on the spot.
• Barreto used the pseudonym Crescencio Pérez, in honor of a Cuban guerrilla who was in the Sierra Maestra with Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
• Barreto Miliani was born in the town of San Cristóbal de Torondoy, in the state of Mérida, in 1942. He moved to Caracas and began studying Petroleum at the Chaguaramos Industrial Technical School (ETI), located next to the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). He was resident in the Simón Rodríguez Urbanization.
• He began his political militancy in the Communist Youth of Venezuela (JCV) from an early age, he participated in the student mobilizations of 1957 against the dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
• When Rómulo Betancourt took office in 1959, as a result of the New York Pact (AD-URD-COPEI), a wave of repression began against popular demonstrations, including “The Massacre of Concord”. It occurred when protesting the elimination of the Emergency Plan, designed by the Governing Board of Admiral Wolfang Larrazábal, to reduce the high rate of unemployment in the country.
• It was then that Iván Barreto, like many young people, had no alternative but to climb the mountains to fight against a white-collar dictatorship, whose representatives applied repressive methods never before seen in Venezuela.
• On the date of the publication of the assassination of Iván Barreto in La Extra on March 14, 1964, the government of Raúl Leoni was installed, who to begin his term of office ordered the military cordon and strafing of January 23”, Lídice, Catia, Pinto Salinas and Lomas de Urdaneta.

Mazo News Team