Published at: 28/01/2026 09:00 PM

(See, 22-05-2004; Latest News and The Impulse, January—April 1966)

• On January 23, 1966, during the second year of Raúl Leoni's administration, Iván Daza “Comandante Roque” and Alberto Paramaconi Laya were arrested, tortured, shot and disappeared, at the hands of armed bands of Democratic Action (AD) in the vicinity of El Tocuyo, Lara state.
• The armed gangs of AD, with the support of the government of Lara state, agents of the General Directorate of Police (DIGEPOL) and the Intelligence and Information Service of the Armed Forces (SIFA) were working together to detect and prosecute important youth cadres of the Communist Party of Venezuela (JPVC), whom Romulo Betancourt had declared war since 1945.
• These government herds also had the permanent advice of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a transnational apparatus for political persecution, to which the lists and photos of all the leftist leaders who were arrested, executed and disappeared should be reported.
• On January 23, 1966, Iván and Paramaconi were on their way from Las Adjuntas via Sanare to do political work when they were arrested. Among the executioners accused of his death are Generals Heraclio Anzola and Camilo Vethencourt.
• Two months after the disappearance of Commander Roque, the newspaper El Impulse de Barquisimeto, dated April 4, 1966, reported that his father was arrested by order of the governor of the state of Lara, after requesting that the body of his son be handed over to him, of whom he heard he was tortured and shot at the end of January of that year.
• Also, in a previous edition of October 24, 1964, El Impulse had published on the front page: “A military convoy of 800 men left for the guerrilla zone of the state. This is the 'Long and Definitive Operation'”.
• The mountains where Iván Daza and Paramaconi Laya operated were surrounded and combed by Army personnel known as “hunters”, whose officers were trained by the “Rangers” or “Green Berets”, at the School of the Americas.
• In training and training courses, the Rangers emphasized the same methods of detention, torture and extermination practiced against the peasant population in the Vietnam War.
• The purpose was to go into the mountains by “combing” them in order to exterminate everything that moved, it was necessary to shoot first, the prisoner disappeared and then justified by means of a rigged war report.
• The result of these raids was the massacres committed against villages and rural villages located within the radius of action of the Theaters of Operations (TO), to cut off contact, support and supply lines between armed groups and the peasantry.
• During these tasks of total annihilation, the hunters had the presence and advice of American military personnel.
• Thousands of peasant families abandoned their properties and conucos. As displaced victims, they fled to other corners of the country to avoid being massacred by the extermination policies frequently applied by the government of Raúl Leoni against anyone suspected of collaborating with dissidents in his government.
• Sixty years ago, Iván Daza and Paramaconi Laya were disappeared by the gorilla herds of the Raúl Leoni government, with no trace or news of their whereabouts until today.
• Commander Roque orphaned a little two-year-old daughter, named Livia, in honor of the “Red Virgin” Livia Gouverneur, who fell at the hands of murdered Cuban baptisteries on November 1, 1961.
• His young life partner, Irma París, became a widow, nourishing in his daughter, Livia Daza París, the memory of this heroic father whom he never knew.

Mazo News Team