Published at: 13/03/2024 09:00 PM

• 60 years ago, on the day that Raúl Leoni received the Presidency of the Republic from the hands of Romulo Betancourt, all the working-class neighborhoods of Caracas were taken militarily. Traffic in the city center and besieged areas was blocked and de facto martial law was imposed on them.
• In a climate of high social tension, the dream of the inhabitants of January 23 was shaken early in the morning by the intense tabbing of machine guns that fired left and right as if to sow terror among the population.
• Betancourt handed Leoni over to a country in moral and financial bankruptcy. More than a thousand dead, thousands politically persecuted, and for the first time, international indebtedness was used, tying the country's economy to the interests of the world bank.
• While the bourgeois press swept the political carnage carried out under the carpet, Betancourt took care of leaving the jails crammed with political prisoners:
  • More than 1500 left-wing leaders, including constitutionally elected deputies and senators in free and democratic elections, were put behind bars.

• At the end of the Betancourt administration, parliamentarians from the Revolutionary Party for Nationalist Integration (PRIN), denounced in the voice of deputies José Vicente Rangel and José Herrera Oropeza, how the president broke the infamous record of political crimes committed throughout Venezuelan history:
  • During his term of office, 1200 were tortured and killed in just five years, under the policy of “shoot first, find out later”.

• Betancourt introduced the unprecedented practice of “not carrying a prisoner tied up”, that is, the shootings of political detainees in situ and the opening of concentration camps in the Guiana jungles of El Dorado and the Island of Tacarigua in Lake Valencia.
• Exactly the same day that Leoni took the witness to the overwhelming repression, it was two years since the brutal arrest and shooting of the 20-year-old Iván Darío Barreto:
  • This student was killed by members of the General Directorate of Police (DIGEPOL) in the hamlet of El Charal in the Portuguese state.
  • Both the brothers and relatives of Iván Darío Barreto were later arrested, having been subject to persecution and physical abuse.

Mazo News Team