Published at: 13/08/2025 09:00 PM

+ OTHER MISSING VICTIMS OF REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY

(Correo del Orinoco, August 9, 2011 + PRIMICIA, April 31, 1998)

• On August 9, 1973, Noel Rodríguez Mata, a 27-year-old boy, was transferred from Caracas to the torture and disappearances center located in the TO (Theater of Operations) anti-guerrilla camp No. 4, Cocollar Fort near Cumanacoa, edo. Sucre.
• The forced disappearance of Noel Rodríguez occurred after his arrest in Caracas, on July 29 of that year.
• His murder occurred in the so-called “Tent of Truth” of the Theater of Operations No. 4, from which no one left alive.
• The news of his death shocked all public opinion and especially the university student community of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) where Rodríguez Mata was doing his political work.
• His parents, Gregorio Rodríguez and Zenaida Mata de Rodríguez, aware of the appalling torture to which he was subjected and which caused the death of their son, went on an indefinite hunger strike, demanding that the government hand over the body.
• However, the Social Christian government turned a deaf ear and from that day on, the UCV economics student joined the long list of disappeared persons, victims of the “pacification policy” of the government of Rafael Caldera I.
• For that government, “if there was no body to show, there was no body of crime”, denying that Noel Rodríguez had ever been imprisoned. Thus, the then Minister of Internal Relations, Nectario Andrade Labarca, allowed himself to make gross and tacky jokes before the press, alluding to the absence of the body.
• Noel disappeared on September 26, 1969. The agents of the Copeyan terror believed they had perfected their method of total annihilation. Only that Rodríguez, like Professor Lovera, refloated from the waters of State terrorism 39 years later, on January 13, 2013.
• The innumerable list of murders and forced disappearances in post-dictatorship Venezuela exceeded by a ratio of 1 to 500 the number recorded during the dictatorship of General Pérez Jiménez.
• In the three successive governments of Rómulo Betancourt, Raúl Leoni and Rafael Caldera, the number of missing victims alone rose to more than 1,500.
• The summary of these political crimes is described by Ángel Raúl Valera in his book “The Dogs of the Pentagon” and by José Vicente Rangel in his article “From Pygmalion to the Distinguished Ledezma”, published in El Nacional on March 13, 1981. The bibliography is extensive.
• Between 1952 and 1957, as a matter of historical verification, 20 documented deaths of the dictatorship can be quantified.
• Between 1959 and 1999, in eight “democratic” governments, more than 11,000 victims of State policies regarding enforced disappearances, murders, torture and systematic violation of human rights can be documented.
• The analysis of the two investigations mentioned above also shows that in those 40 years of Representative Democracy, for the first time, the figure of the “disappeared” emerged in Latin America.
• During those four decades of terror, the Wall Law, the Escape Act and the imprisonment, torture and murder of women and children were released in Venezuela
• Political crimes and humiliations committed against women and children that did not occur before or during any other government.
• Also taking into consideration that after the overthrow of General Isaías Medina, during the so-called “adeco triennium” (1945-1948), concentration camps and new methods of torture were institutionalized, such as the electric pick, the ring, the ice pot, the tigrito, the electric jargon and drowning in latrines.
• It was in those three years that the armed lobbyists of Democratic Action (AD) were formed for the first time, whose first victim was the governor of the edo, Aragua Anibal Paradisi, who was shot by factious supporters while traveling from Maracay to Caracas to support the ousted president Medina on October 18, 1945.

Mazo News Team