Published at: 08/10/2025 09:00 PM

(El Nacional, Clarín and Latest News, October 7 and 8, 1963)

• “MY GOVERNMENT WILL NOT GIVE OR ASK FOR BARRACKS” (Latest News, October 8, 1963)”, with this ruling, in the best style of his usual anti-democratic arrogance, Rómulo Betancourt justified the repressive onslaught that left 10 people dead, plus 400 arrested and hundreds injured.
• Under these orders, the areas of the Asylum, San Agustín, Propatria, Pedro Camejo and Petare were assaulted and militarily cordoned off.
• After being declared a military zone, in Lomas de Urdaneta, a 9-year-old girl, Marisela Durán, was hit, while she was sleeping, by a police bullet that instantly blinded her life.
• After being shot by the police, 19-year-old student Jesús Romero Meléndez, a resident of Sucre Avenue, house number 138, was admitted to the Catia Peripheral without vital signs. He was a URD youth leader.
• Construction worker Juan Zambrano received a machine gun blast in his stomach that kept him in agony for several days, until he died on October 5, 1963.
• In Petare, 19-year-old student Raúl Villanueva Pasarello died as a result of several shots fired at him by police officers from a patrol car when he failed to answer his voice aloud. His classmate, Luis Antonio Martell, was arrested and disappeared during the shooting (Clarín, October 5, 1963).
• Mrs. María Luisa Pérez de Romero fell in Pedro Camejo, when several projectiles fired from a police patrol destroyed her face and chest, causing her instant death (El Nacional, October 7, 1963).
• In Lídice, on the night of October 6, 1963, there were three dead, ten gunshot wounded, one missing and more than a thousand arrested, when the city of Caracas was subject to police raids and military operations to quell widespread riots throughout the city (Última Noticias, October 7, 1963).
• That first week of October 1963, the 19-year-old Roberto García Urbano was also assassinated by police officers.
• In Maracay, edo. Aragua, the 19-year-old student Enrique Matos, was murdered on the night of Friday, October 4, 1963, when military personnel shot at a vehicle that disobeyed a loud voice (El Nacional, October 5, 1963).

Context:

• The first week of October 1963, at the end of his government, Rómulo Betancourt decided to close office by giving a coup d'etat to the Constitution of 1961.
• He ordered the lifting of parliamentary immunity of constitutionally elected deputies and senators by universal, direct and secret ballot. Everyone went to the dungeons of the San Carlos Barracks or to their concentration camps.
• Political persecution intensified against hundreds of comrades from his own party who disapproved of his sectarian and anti-democratic nature.
• Members of the AD Youth, peasant and trade union leaders did not escape this wave of terror. Everyone was the subject of this hunt in the best McCarthyite style.
• Soon after, during the first week of November 1963, the wave of repression continued, and they were victims of the police pack:
  • Rodolfo Osal, student.
  • Agustín Sevilla, 16 year old student.
  • Adalberto Barroeta, 35 years old, doctor.
  • Carlos Humberto Barreto, 16 years old, student.
  • Hugo José Cortés Ocanto, 19 years old, student.
  • José María Rivas Martínez, 19 years old, student.

Mazo News Team