Published at: 27/08/2025 09:00 PM

(WHAT'S HAPPENING IN Venezuela, December 3, 1965 and EL MUNDO, December 8, 1966)

• On August 23, 1965, the teacher, theater actor, broadcaster and adult literacy teacher César Burguillos was seen alive for the last time, who was crammed, together with four other colleagues from the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), in a small room next to the Municipal Council of Carúpano, edo. Sucre, known as “La Cava”. To this day, he is still missing.
• That day, his wife, Carla de Gracia de Burguillos, went to bring him food and a change of clothes, just as she had done every day since he was illegally arrested outside the radio station La Voz de Carupano, where he served as a staff broadcaster.
• At that time, he was informed by a DIGEPOL official, Lieutenant Sarmiento, that he had been transferred to the Cachipo Anti-Guerrilla Camp, known as the Theater of Operations No. 4 (TO 4).
• The kidnapping of the literacy teacher was carried out a week earlier by agents of the armed bands of Democratic Action (AD), officials of the General Directorate of Police (DIGEPOL) and the Armed Forces Intelligence Service (SIFA).
• His cellmates, in the makeshift prison of La Cava, were Fidel Campos, Octavio Romero, Gabriel Andarcia Rosas and José González. Everyone testified to the veracity of the facts and to the transfer to that extermination camp, where César Burguillos was finally subjected to brutal mistreatment, shot and disappeared.
• Carla de Gracia, together with her three children; Eurice, 4 years old; Ezequiel, 3, and Argimiro, a year and a half, then dedicated herself to touring the offices of SIFA, DIGEPOL, the Urica anti-guerrilla camp, in El Tocuyo, edo. Lara (T.O. No. 3), as well as La Pica Prison and T.O. No. 4 in Cachipo, edo Monagas.
• To this day, she, still alive and old, and her three children, survive without having found the whereabouts of the distinguished and heroic literacy teacher.
• Burguillos was shot in the town of Caño Cruz, Carúpano, edo. Monagas.
• In Cachipo, César Burguillos, like many others, was first confined to the so-called “Rats Room”, where he was subjected to continuous moral harassment and methods of psychological degradation. He was later taken to the Tent of Truth, where he was hanged upside down, kicked and beaten. He was eventually shot and disappeared.
• These procedures were supervised by U.S. military officials, experts in torture, who indicated where the beatings should be carried out on the body and what methods of annihilation should be used in each case (source: Diario El Globo, The Pentagon Papers, November 20, 1996).
• Forced disappearance was the most common of the practices of political persecution, systematically applied to thousands of people not grateful to the government of Raúl Leoni, a modality perpetuated by the subsequent rulers of the Fourth Republic until 1998.

Mazo News Team