Published at: 15/01/2025 09:00 PM

(LATEST NEWS, January 13, 1962)

• The 13-year-old student Alí Antonio Castrellón, who was studying fifth grade at a school in Lídice, was shot dead at point-blank range by an agent of the Caracas Municipal Police.
• The event originated at 1 in the afternoon outside block 57 of Lídice, where seven minors were playing, including a girl named Francis Reyes.
• Several officers arrived on a patrol. The boys, seeing that they were police officers, quickly ran to take refuge in their homes.
• When the Castrellón boy was looking for a way out of the alley, an agent came out, who, without giving him a loud voice and without trying to stop him, used his regulation weapon and shot the minor at chest height.
• The neighbors, believing that the boy was still alive, took him to the Emergency Hospital of Salas, but the death had occurred instantly because the bullet, caliber 38, destroyed his heart.

CONTEXT:

• The boy Ali Antonio Castrellón was murdered during the fourth year of the government of Rómulo Betancourt. Five years in which the doctrine of opening fire without giving a loud voice, without attempting a prior arrest and without questioning the people who were the subject of these police raids, was established.
• Thus, Betancourt ruled in violation of the Constitution and the Laws. It de facto abolished the legal principle of Good Faith, and therefore, anyone was considered a “suspect” and outside the law or a mobile target of police repression.
• Citing his paranoid anti-communist phobia, he built his own private cemetery with more than 900 dead in five years. All to ensure that Nelson Rockefeller's companies and the Creole bourgeoisie could enjoy the juicy profits from oil revenues.
• His successor, Raúl Leoni, whom Betancourt himself disqualified by calling him “abulic”, would exercise an even higher degree of repression and extermination between 1964-1969. During his administration, more than 3,000 Venezuelans were tortured, shot and disappeared.

Mazo News Team