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

(Popular Tribune, June, July and August 1970 + ALMARGEN, February 28, 1971 + Resolver, April 8, 2024)

• Starting on July 4, 1970, agents of the DISIP and a group of Army Hunters raided the Cabezones hamlet, in Santa Rosa, Barinas state.
• There, they attacked Rufino Urquiola, a peasant leader from Copei, but a dissident from the partisan line, in front of his relatives, his hands were mutilated, his genitals severed and then executed with death throws.
• All this, in front of his father, who tried to explain that he and his son were peasant leaders of the ruling party.
• For his part, Benito Torres was evicted, castrated and shot in front of the entire town.
• The DISIP officials, after cutting off the hands, genitals and ears of Rufino and Benito, handed them to a peasant woman present there and wiped the blood off her knives with her dress. Then they started shooting at the unhappy people until they were left without life.
• Both bodies were buried in mass graves by SIFA officials, with the intention of disappearing them. However, their families managed to exhume them and denounce the abominable acts of blood perpetrated by police officers.
• The complaints were investigated by a commission of senators from Adecos and Copeyanos, who after traveling to Barinas and verifying that they were not guerrilla fighters, withdrew from the investigation.
• A subsequent report by the Internal Policy Committee of the Chamber of Deputies was blocked by the Copeyan Hilarión Cardozo, who prevented it from being released to the press.
• In addition, 22 peasants from the Santa Rosa area were transferred to the anti-guerrilla camp TO de La Marqueseña, to be tried by military courts, some of which have not appeared to date.

The Context:

• During the first administration of Rafael Caldera, the pacification policy continued the disappearance of Raúl Leoni. The same alarms were set off for police kidnappings, they went to report them to the competent authorities and in the end they found the missing person dead in the cells of any repressive body, usually in an anti-guerrilla camp, when the “Law of Escape” did not apply to him or to have fallen during a supposed “guerrilla encounter”.
• Thus, at the beginning of July 1970, these were the victims:
• On July 9, 1970**, ** Armando Henríquez, the rancher who owned Hacienda La Veguita, a working citizen who was not involved in political strife, was kidnapped. At that time, the cattle farmer José Domingo Coronado was found dead. These complaints**** appear in the Panorama and El Universal newspapers of 10-7-70.
• On July 14, the newspaper Última Noticias headlined: “It's another form of intimidation”, referring to the deaths of the peasants Ascensión Higuera Miranda, Alexis Castro and Pedro Medina, who were killed in the process of recapture according to the contradictory statements of General Pardi Davila.
• On June 29, 1970, the first-semester medical student, Asdrúbal Leonel Ortuño, was kidnapped by police agencies in Los Teques, edo. Miranda.
• Luis Alberto Hernández, a student, was disappeared in the East of the country and the investigation into his whereabouts, before the Chamber of Deputies, was left unfinished.
• In this same context, Manu Militari was taken over by Cazadores the city of Cumanacoa, in the Edo. Sucre. There, at gunpoint, its inhabitants were subdued by force, searching hundreds of homes without a court order and violating the church compound in search of “communists”.
• This anti-guerrilla action carried out against the peaceful and unarmed population of Cumanacoa was denied by General Pardi Dávila. However, the Bishop of Cumaná, Mariano José Parra León, ratified the allegations and exposed the official's lies with convincing evidence.
• Another peasant martyr, Benjamín Montilla, a schoolteacher and rural leader from Copei, in Chabasquén, edo. Portuguese, she was also a dissident from the Copeyan party line. During the government of Raúl Leoni, he was arrested for being a “suspected” guerrilla collaborator. SIFA agents subjected him to torture, backlash and blows to the ears. They made him dig his own grave, and then a captain named Piñerúa gave him several bursts of Madsen machine guns. To simulate a false positive, he ordered the present troop to plant political pamphlets and flyers containing subversive content in the victim's pockets.

Mazo News Team