Published at: 21/08/2024 09:00 PM

(Panorama, August 31, 1985 + Diario de Caracas, May 2, 1986)

• On August 7, 1985, the 15-year-old minor Rafael Antonio “Macho” González went missing. This young man suffered the same fate as many others, who in police custody were victims of extrajudicial executions in the state of Zulia when Omar Barboza was governor.
• To sabotage the investigations, the judges ordered the wells to be sealed and the walls where the shootings had been carried out to be demolished. Witnesses were persecuted, journalists were threatened with death, private investigators were jailed, and all press publications in this regard were ordered to be suspended.
• However, his body appeared two years later on a farm, 45 minutes from La Cañada. It was possible to verify that the young man was executed, on the same day of his kidnapping, by a shot in the back of the head fired by an employee of the farm in the presence of the police officers who arrested him.
• When the bones began to appear in different death pits, the then governor of Edo. Zulia, Omar Barboza, insisted in his predicament that they were “cow's head bones deposited by slaughterhouses”.
• When forensic doctors determined that they were not “cow bones”, but human remains with less than six months of death, the then Director of the PTJ, Pedro Torres Agudo, insisted on another fallacious version that they were bones with more than 10 years of burial.
• The investigations were able to continue thanks to the insistence of his mother Olivia de González, and the deputy to the Legislative Assembly for the Movement for Socialism (MAS), Luis Homez, as a result of which the remains of five other victims of police abuse who disappeared inside the wells under the same circumstances were located.

Mazo News Team