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

(DIARIO DE CARACAS, February-March 1989)

• The first days of March 1989 were the days of hot pursuit carried out by police forces in all popular areas of Caracas.
• Agents of the government's “special apparatus” of repression took to the streets to look for those who were already marked before the social earthquake of February 27 and 28 of that year.
• A month later, due to the impact of the recent events, a two-year-old girl, residing in La Pastora, stuttering and very nervous, was hiding in every corner of her house saying: “I am hiding from the soldiers who come and kill us”.
• Proof of this was the case of Crisanto Mederos, a sculptor, poet, polyglot, mason and popular painter living in that town.
• Four uniformed officers entered his house, for two hours they searched room by room, lifted the cement boards in the garden, as if looking for something... or one on the list. Then, in a corner of the house, where this visual artist lived, three gunshots were heard.
• Crisanto Medero, 37, was shot down. They took him away dead. His identity documents and the clothes he was wearing never appeared, but his body was labeled with the number 252, on one leg, and on the other an 813 that read: “Unidentified, not delivered”.
• Lucía Mederos, his sister, arrived at the morgue just before he was transferred to one of the many graves excavated in the city by police officers. When they claimed his brother's documents, they reluctantly answered: “Be happy that we handed over the body to you.”
• This criminal police practice of forced disappearances was implemented during the dark days of the Caracazo. There were hundreds of people who did not participate in the looting, and who were searched house to house to apply this formula of selective extermination to them.
• 22 cases of shootings, hundreds of missing persons and approximately 500 innocent people murdered, victims of the “combing” carried out by the security forces of the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, were brought before the courts of justice. “Hairstyle” which in practice consisted of the application of the former “shoot first and find out later”.
• The armed forces and police were eagerly searching for “the rioters”, firing their combat weapons at apartments where entire families lived, receiving repeated discharges of powerful FN FAL and Punto 50 assault rifles, with a large number of ruined homes and the loss of hundreds of innocent lives.
• In the General Cemetery of the South, the mass grave known as “The Plague” was opened. On that occasion, “death pits” were also reported in El Valle, Ocumare del Tuy, and “La Tumbita” in La Vega.
• There were thousands of unnamed deaths that were not recorded in the records of the deceased that were listed on a daily basis in the General Cemetery of the South. As well as the cemeteries of Guarenas, Guatire, Los Teques and La Guaira. Not to mention mass graves or death pits improvised by police forces.

CONTEXT:

• The specter of popular rebellion and general discontent had been haunting every corner of Venezuela for years. The government was well informed of the social repercussions that shock measures or “macroeconomic adjustments” could trigger.
• At the beginning of that year, the social shock that followed 27F was widely predicted by authoritative voices in the fields of economy, sociology, finance and the business world.
• “A serious social explosion” was described in detail in the 7-3-89 edition of the Diario de Caracas, by the economist and professor at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), Héctor Silva Michelena, brother of the philosopher Ludovico Silva.
• However, the Pérez government chose to turn a deaf ear to the general outcry and prepared, in response, the machinery of police repression by reinstalling “El Hampoducto” in the mobile colonies of El Dorado. In addition, between the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Internal Relations and the Government of Caracas, repressive measures were orchestrated to contain what was clearly seen to be coming.
• Coincidentally, on February 19, Henry López Sisco, who as a result of the El Amparo massacre had been “retired” from his position as General Commissioner of the Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP), was returned to that body to act at ease as a police “Rambo” during “El Caracazo”.
• For 12 days, the ruling minorities of the Punto Fijo Pact took out the Armed Forces and police forces to massacre. In a desperate attempt to wipe out the demonstrators in the street. Without realizing that what happened then was the trigger that began the Bolivarian Revolution, whose just expression would be manifested three years later on February 4, 1992.

Mazo News Team