Published at: 25/06/2025 09:00 PM

(Popular Tribune, June 22, 1973)

• Precisely, June 24, marks the 89th anniversary of the workers' massacre at the San Felipe Cinema in Mene Grande, the oldest oil field in Venezuela, located in the eastern part of Lake Maracaibo, when the Oil Workers Union held an extraordinary meeting at night.
• That night in their specific organization for the defense of their interests as wage earners, they deliberated on the attitude they should take in the face of the wave of unjustified dismissals in the oil fields due to the recent strike.
• It was then, when a platoon composed of more than twenty soldiers, under the command of a lieutenant named Sánchez Bello, surrounded the place and took up position outside the cinema, after firing a volley of rifles into the air, as if to cause collective panic and confusion, causing, in effect, the consequent alarm situation, with a tragic result of five workers dead and four seriously injured.
• Victims of that firing squad and that indecent military, in the service of the Caribbean Petroleum Company, were: Jesús García, Pedro Pérez (with a bayonet crossed in his back), José del Carmen Mendoza, José Omar Pérez and a young minor named Jesús Oropeza.
• The bodies remained on the floor until the next day. There was no authority then to carry out the uprising of the deceased or to make a summary inquiry.
• The crime of oil workers was to disobey the order to return to work, to demand improvements for the Working Class and to declare their disagreement with the recent Public Order Act or Lara Law (referring to its author Alejandro Lara Núñez), whose rigor and implementation had highly repressive and disastrous legal consequences for workers.

Mazo News Team