Published at: 06/03/2024 09:00 PM

• In October 1977, the newspaper El Globo highlighted part of the psychological campaign that was unleashed on radio, press and television against Jesús Márquez Finol “Motilón”, consisting of blaming him for any violent act that occurred in the country.
• All this in order to prepare the matrix to justify the consummation of his murder, which occurred on March 1, 1973.
• However, the journalists of the events did not fail to highlight the details of the cruelty with which the crime was perpetrated. His body had 45 bullet wounds, several of which were to the skull.
• Motilón was surrounded by 15 dissipates when he was lying on the pavement. Little could be defended against an armed command of this nature. It was shot down on a sidewalk on Los Jabillos Avenue, near Andrés Bello Avenue.
• This political persecution was later extended to his relatives, who were intimidated by police forces during the alleged delivery of the body. He was kidnapped and the act of burial led by agents of the government of Rafael Caldera.
• The relatives were forced to sign the delivery certificate and, later, transferred by a SIFA commission to La Carlota and then by FAV plane to Villa del Rosario, in the state of Zulia.
• There, the kidnapped body was handed over to a National Guard commission, which proceeded to bury it under an extravagant deployment of forces involving integrated commands from the PTJ, SIFA, DISIP, Municipal Police and National Guard.
• Eyewitnesses to the shooting denied the official version of the Ministry of Defense, according to which there was a confrontation.
• The press of March 3, 1973 interviewed witnesses and neighbors, who pointed out that “the man, riddled with bullets, got out of a vehicle, walked down the sidewalk and when he was at the height of the Duna Palace Residences, three cars stopped: two Volkswagen and a green Nova, from which 15 men armed with guns and machine guns got out.
• Then there were cries: Run him! , now kill him! and immediately there were numerous machine gun bursts.
• Since 1960, a political persecution had begun against Jesús Márquez Finol, when he was part of the MIR. This culminated in his abrupt arrest, on December 1, 1966, when the government of Raúl Leoni opened a file full of falsehoods and facts in whose material and intellectual authorship he never participated.
• Since the file was found in the Supreme Court of Justice, it was unable to sentence it due to lack of evidence. But during the period of the investigative statement, he was subjected to severe torture.
• During the five years he spent in prison, he was transferred to different prisons in the country: Cuartel San Carlos, Cárcel Modelo and the Rafael Caldera Concentration Camp. In those years, both he and his family members were subject to multiple harassment and humiliation.

Context:

• Under the terms of Rafael Caldera's Pacification Policy, the terrorist incident Luis Posada Carriles, who personally led the police pack that executed Márquez Finol, was already operating in Venezuela, in broad daylight on public roads and in full view of those present.
• The official version of the events tried to make people believe that he was armed. Eyewitnesses and neighbors said that he had only one envelope in his hands, which he threw into the garden of the Duna Palace building. Later experience demonstrated that this package contained papers related to student protests.
• Márquez Finol was born on August 14, 1936; he was the son of Laura Rosa Final, a seamstress, and Máximo Márquez, a mechanic and driver. As a student at the Liceo Simón Bolívar in San Cristóbal, he rose up against the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. He then studied Economics at the University of Zulia (LUZ), while becoming certified as a radio announcer. There he took over the AD secretariat, which he resigned to join the ranks of the MIR.
• In 1963, he climbed the mountains, to the Ezequiel Zamora Front, which was located on El Bachiller Hill, and later he was in the Antonio José de Sucre Front. In Caracas, he founded the urban cell Nguyen Von Troi, in honor of the Vietnamese revolutionary shot by the U.S. army on August 15 of that same year.
• He was married to Gladys Azuaje, with whom he formed a family. As a result of this union, María Luisa, Hildemar, José Manuel and Gladys Carolina were born.
• Thanks to a whistleblower, on December 1, 1966, his apartment was raided and arrested along with eight people gathered there. Then for five years he was spent walking through different prisons in the worst unsanitary conditions. He participated in a spectacular escape at the Military Hospital and, since then, the government of Rafael Caldera has carried out a sustained hunt and a smear campaign through all possible mass media to justify his subsequent execution.
• In those five years (1969-1974) of the first social-Christian government and following the same pattern of persecution, stalking, siege and extermination, they were “pacified”: Ángel María Castillo (“Pancho Alegría”), Esladia Vázquez, Argelio Reyna, César Augusto Sánchez, Marvin Sánchez, Carlos Reina, Francisco Alberto Caricote Agreda, Plinio Iván Rodríguez Acosta, Álvaro Hernández, Aurelio Trocelt Calma, José Vitoria Gutiérrez and Pedro Manuel Centeno Gómez.

Mazo News Team