Published at: 19/03/2025 08:00 PM

(EL CARABOBEÑO and NOTI TARDE, 18-19-20 and 21 March 1995)

Thirty years ago, on March 16, 1995, Richard López Plas, a 21-year-old Agronomy student at the Central University of Venezuela in the center of Maracay, was murdered by state police officers during a student demonstration outside the Pedagogical Institute.

In this police attack, young students Alicia Carrero and Anabel Franco were also injured.

Richard López Plas was in intensive care for two days as a result of a metra shot by the state police's sub-inspector, César Mogollón Hernández, which lodged in his brain.

This was a common practice in the Fourth Republic. The police forces, when it came to suppressing student demonstrations, exchanged plastic pellets for sticks, nuts or spark plugs, with lethal effects on their victims.

• A few days before, Miguel Enrique Colina, a student at the Industrial Technical School of Maracay, was murdered by agents of the same police force.
• Those were the days of the government of Rafael Caldera II, when he demagogically released his Letter of Intent to the Venezuelan People to guarantee his commitment to the People.
• After taking power, this proposal went down in history as a misleading electoral offer, insofar as, upon arriving in Miraflores, he immediately signed the Letter of Intent with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in the presence of its president Michel Camdessus.
• Subjecting all of Venezuela to the dictates of the IMF, to devalue and then privatize, at derisory prices, all profitable State companies and reduce them to their smallest expression.

Mazo News Team