Published at: 12/03/2025 08:00 PM

(TRIBUNA POPULAR, March 8, 1962 and EL NACIONAL, March 3, 1962)

• On the night of March 2, 1962, at 7:30pm, the 29-year-old leader of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), Luis Aquiles Bellorín Morgado, was assassinated.
• The incident occurred in the Plaza de Lídice, La Pastora sector, where Luis Aquiles was struck as another of the many victims of the policy implemented by Rómulo Betancourt to “shoot first and find out later”.
• In that place, he was hit by three bullets fired by agents of the armed gangs of AD, from a black car, AF-1649 plates waiting for him to be ambushed.
• The vehicle belonged to the General Directorate of Police (DIGEPOL), inside which were six people armed with pistols and machine guns.
• That night**, Bellorín, ** was walking unprepared with his friend Morella López, in order to buy groceries at the bakery, when he was shot four times from the vehicle.
• The first shot hit his leg, the second shot missed the mark, the third hit the back and the last shot hit the head.
• Government agents quickly fled and as they left, they fired several machine gun bursts into the air to spread panic among the witnesses present.
• Morella López was left alone with the body of her friend lying on the sidewalk until she managed to transport him in a taxi to the Emergency Room Post where he died.
• Luis Aquiles Bellorín was widely recognized as**** combative leader of the Communist Youth of Venezuela, actively participating in the overthrow of the dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
• He was born in Lídice on May 12, 1933. He was a member of the Regional Committee of the PCV of La Pastora and a labor leader at the Jesús Yerena Psychiatric Hospital.
• 49 years later, on October 27, 2011, during the administration of Commander Hugo Chávez, the La Pastora Comprehensive Diagnostic Center was inaugurated under the name of CDI AQUILES BELLORÍN”, thus honoring the memory of this martyr of the Fourth Republic.

Context:

• On the same day that Bellorín was cowardly shot down, the young student Jacinto Ambrosio Arnassus was also murdered by Digepol agents, in the Prado de María sector.
• On that same date, March 2, 1962, Iván Barreto Miliani and Miguelito Torres were arrested, tortured and shot, in the mountains of El Charal, edo. Portuguese, by members of the Piar Battalion. His remains have yet to be found.
• Three years earlier, on August 2, 1959, Romulo Betancourt ordered police forces to shoot at a demonstration of thousands of unemployed workers and workers in Plaza La Concordia, leaving 4 dead and 19 injured.
• On February 13, 1962, during the celebration of his third year of government, at a rally held in El Silencio, he categorically ratified his order to “shoot first and find out later”.
• Meanwhile, Standard Oil, owned by Nelson Rockefeller, had earned net profits in Venezuela of 22,442 million bolivars (5,219 million U$D) by 1962. Betancourt did not dare to raise taxes on such astronomical dividends.
• During this five-year period of looting (1959-1964), more than half of all Standard Oil's global profits came from Venezuelan oil wells.
• Betancourt, always complacent with transnational corporations, was never willing to talk, listen or give a truce to the hunt for left-wing youth, unhappy with growing poverty, repression and the absence of Social Justice for the People.

Mazo News Team