Published at: 25/03/2026 07:00 PM

(ELITE, April 22, 1967; EL CARABOBEÑO, March 22, 1967)

• The National Constitution of 1961 —article 58— established that: “the right to life is inviolable, no law may establish the death penalty or apply it”, and the third paragraph of article 60 of the same, prohibited “in a strict manner incommunicado and subjecting any citizen to torture”.
• On March 21, 1967, during the government of Raúl Leoni, he was arrested, leaving his legal office, and later disappeared by agents of the General Directorate of Police (DIGEPOL), the lawyer, radio broadcaster and leader of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) Bartolomé Vielma Hernández.
• Vielma Hernández was last seen at the Theater of Operations No. 5 (T.O. No. 5), located in Yumare, edo. Yaracuy, by Rosa Elena Petit, who was desperately looking for her missing brother Dimas Petit Colina. She spoke at length with the recently arrested lawyer.
• His wife, Haydeé Ríos de Vielma, a medical student at the University of Carabobo, toured all the Theaters of Operations or anti-guerrilla camps, as well as the cells of DIGEPOL and the Armed Forces Intelligence Service (SIFA) during the intense search she carried out. He was also present in the editorial staff of several media outlets.
• Faced with the refusal of the police forces to recognize this disappearance, he stated: “He thought that the same thing could have happened to Professor Alberto Lovera*, who all police forces and government bodies denied knowing his whereabouts and then appeared dead, as has happened with many political prisoners, in open violation of the* Human Rights. ”
• In fact, Dr. Vielma Hernández has been missing for 59 years and to this day, after almost six decades, his relatives and children are not aware of his whereabouts.
• After countless procedures and compliance with all the provisions of the law, in 2007, after 40 years, he was officially declared dead by a court of the Republic, without being able to know or punish the perpetrators of such an abominable crime.
• However, calling him officially and legally deceased is an ironic understatement when, with all certainty, that smiling boy, a native of Puerto Cabello, happily married and father of two daughters, was savagely tortured and murdered, and then waited for the judicial declaration of his absolute absence. As if it were an absolute vacancy for a position that can never be held.
• The day she “swallowed it up”, her eldest daughter Barthide was six years old and the youngest Vilma Vielma Ríos was three months old. Both grew up with the unfathomable emptiness left by a missing father, during the era of adeco-Copeyan terrorism that mourned thousands of Venezuelan homes.
• Four years earlier, the renowned lawyer had been arrested, during the government of Rómulo Betancourt, for his political militancy and participation in El Porteñazo.
• For Raúl Leoni, what was enshrined in the 1961 Constitution, on the inviolability of the right to life and the strict prohibition of torture, was a dead letter. With his government began the long list of hundreds of missing persons.

Mazo News Team