Published at: 02/04/2025 08:00 PM

(La Esfera, March 1965 + ÉLITE Magazine, March 27 and April 03, 1965)

• Raúl Gómez Peñalver, founder of Democratic Action (AD) in Ciudad Bolívar, was responsible for receiving the first 200 machine guns out of a game of 2,000 that were negotiated, in 1960, for the armed gangs of his party.
• Years later, disenchanted by corruption and by Betancourt's indifference to combat the advance of this scourge, he retired from AD, not before denouncing what was happening.
• He stated: “It was as if a blindfold had been removed from my eyes... I know I can leave my skin on any corner, but I declare this out of love for Venezuela. I am in good health, so if I die now, it's because AD kills me (...) AD did buy weapons to combat the army, I received 200 machine guns”.
• Gómez Peñalver also commented: “Honestly, according to my conscience, I don't think I'm committing any felony. Those weapons were to combat the National Armed Forces. Well, the FANS have been constitutionalists.”
• He also added that “this means that, with more than 600,000 unemployed, without sources of production, with waste, corruption and robbery, those weapons that were originally thought to serve to defend the Government of the People, are now going to serve to kill the People... I declare this at all risks”.
• Another former AD leader, and then an active member of the PRIN in the edo. Monagas, the pharmacist Luis Beltrán Marcano, ratified the complaints by declaring that Maturín was the scene where the caches of weapons were received for use against citizens.
• Marcano made public the seriousness of the matter and how the entire machinery of Monagas was being armed to act against the armed forces.
• Regarding the trafficking of machine guns, rifles, revolvers and pistols to arm AD militias, the magazine Élite No. 2061 and 2062 and the newspaper La Esfera of March 18, 1965 revealed that 3,000 of them had been smuggled to equip the armed gangs of AD.
• For his part, the Head of the Parliamentary Fraction of AD, Jesús Ángel Paz Galarraga, sabotaged all requests for investigation, instead, that the owners of The Sphere and Elite be investigated and imprisoned, as in fact happened.
• The arsenal smuggled by the Betancourt and Leoni governments to equip the AD Special Apparatus consisted of 900 MADSEN and ZK machine guns, 1,500 Belgian FN-30 rifles, countless small arms... and the 3,000 submachine guns that entered through Maiquetia as “spare parts for cars”.
• For this operation, AD offered a bribe of 50 bs to the customs official, for each machine gun, if during the act of customs recognition he let them pass as spare parts for cars. The official refused to lend himself to the serious maneuver and was removed from office by higher orders from the Ministry of Finance.
• Surreptitiously, Carlos Andrés Pérez unexpectedly traveled to the United States, hiding from the sight of press envoys. Evading, at all costs, being interviewed, claiming that he was taking advantage of the San José Day holiday, to go to rest in the northern country.
• By the date of this publication, exactly 60 years ago, “democratic” governments had murdered in the streets, or shot and disappeared in rural areas, more than 2,000 people, holding 1,500 political prisoners in concentration camps, dungeons and jails. State crimes more numerous than those committed during the military dictatorships of Juan Vicente Gómez and Marcos Pérez Jiménez, in which forced disappearance as such did not predominate.
• In the archives of the Political Police (National Security), between 1948-1958, there are 580 people who were “invited to leave the country” for political reasons, another 500 are on the list of those who resorted to self-exile, without the dictatorship granting them all the necessary facilities and resources. This was the practice that prevailed then.

Mazo News Team