Published at: 10/07/2024 09:00 PM

(LATEST NEWS, July 12, 1962* Clarín)

• José Rafael Villegas, 17, a youth leader of the PCV, was shot down by a squad of Digepol agents on July 11, 1962, which constituted a political crime committed blatantly in the sight of bystanders and neighbors.
• The incident occurred at 9:30 at night outside the Granada Dancing Bar, located on Granada Avenue. His teammates, Manuel Gil and Porfirio Ramírez, were also shot down with automatic weapons by the agents stationed who surrounded the bar.
• The three injured young people were admitted to the Car Hospital as an emergency. Rafael José was admitted without vital signs.
• Most of the press, attached to the official Digepol report, reported that the boys were inside a vehicle parked in front of the nightclub “in a clearly suspicious attitude”.
• This vehicle, brand Chevrolet, license plates DR-19-97, model 60, received more than 50 bullet wounds from the Digepoles.
• Although the front pages of most of the press echoed the police report, the graphics show that José Rafael fell face down, unarmed, with multiple bullet punctures in his chest and back.
• The crime of the Dancing Bar was a massacre and photographic evidence shows that none of the three boys were carrying weapons, so they deny the version about projectiles, guns and political propaganda allegedly found in the raids carried out.
• At 9:00pm, Digepol's patrol radio remotely followed the young people from the first stretch of Avenida Real del Cementerio to the El Tejar Restaurant, where they were ambushed.
• None of the eyewitnesses supported the Digepol report, which reported an alleged “mass assault” perpetrated by Rafael José Villegas, Manuel Gil and Porfirio Ramírez, inside or outside the nightcluse** . **

THE CONTEXT:

• El Nacional and La Esfera, constantly threatened by censorship, the advertising boycott, the assault on their printing presses and the imprisonment of their journalists, dutifully published the false type of news, according to which the victim was killed and his companions seriously injured as “robbers”, “thugs” and/or common criminals, by the political police of Rómulo Betancourt.
• In those days of 1962, the shrapnel of the State security forces and armed gangs of AD, with rifles and automatic weapons, killed:
  • On June 6 to Ángel Linares Espinoza.
  • Julio Manzano was killed in Catia.
  • To José Antonio Vásquez La Torre in the Prefecture of El Hatillo.
  • That day, July 11, Esteban Padilla Pérez was murdered in a dungeon in the Petare Prefecture, and in Apure the police killed Carlos Novoa.
  • In September, students die: **Alfonzo Rodríguez, Jesús Osuna, Omar Ramones Prieto, José Manuel Rojas Figueroa (**in Plaza de Catia).
  • In October, the following were murdered: Luis Martínez Áñez (Black Horno), Vivian Hernández (Avenida San Martín), Elvina de Morales (La Vega), Rafael Clemente Acosta (San Antonio de Los Altos), J. Pfeifer, a German citizen shot by a rifle behind the San Carlos Barracks.
• Finally, by Presidential Decree No. 870, of October 8, constitutional guarantees were suspended throughout the national territory, until December 18, when another decree of indefinite partial suspension came into force.
• At that time, a command of legal lawyers, coordinated by David Morales Bello, began to take full control of the criminal courts.
• Slowly, the “Tribe of David” invaded the legal forum, through legal prosecution (lawfare) and the support offered by the government, they became known as “Perry Mason”; they didn't lose a single case, they were the nation's unbeatable criminalists.
• This law firm operated from the headquarters of DIGEPOL, where they prepared documents that were then validated through torture. Those forced confessions would form part of the summary that they would later bring to the judge in the case.
• By the end of that decade, 16,000 homes had been raided and looted, there were more than 1,500 political prisoners, and even today the number of victims of torture and disappearances, which exceed 11,000, has not been fully counted.
• When the official spokesperson of AD, Gonzalo Barrios, was approached by journalists to enquire about that bloodbath, corruption, barraganastos and other atrocities committed by State security forces, he evasively replied: “I haven't come to my house”, “I have no official information”, “I haven't read the press”, “I don't know anything about it”, “in this country it is stolen because there are no reasons not to do it”, “leave me alone”.

Mazo News Team