Published at: 11/03/2026 09:00 PM

(Diario de Caracas, March 7, 1989; SIC magazine No. 513, April 1989; 2001, March 5 and 6, 1989; Ciudad Valencia, February 27, 2020)

• While bodies continued to pile up in the morgues of Caracas, Guarenas, La Guaira, Los Teques, Maracaibo, Barquisimeto, Mérida, Maracay, Valencia and other cities, the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez chose to hide the truth of the more than 5,000 dead killed during the first four days of “El Caracazo”, giving high importance to the visit of that man, Carlos Mount-Baten Windsor, today Carlos III of England, to Venezuela.
• On March 6, 1989, in La Casona, the presidential residence, the “jet set” from Caracas came together. Just as the city was engulfed in tears and the search for thousands of missing persons, 500 guests squandered several dozen boxes of the best Scotch whiskey, champagne and Russian caviar. In La Casona, people drank, and in the neighborhoods, police raids fired millions of projectiles against a rebellious town that carried food, electrical appliances and other basic necessities to their impoverished pantries.
• The estimated real number of bullets the government fired in those fateful days exceeds 4 million rounds of ammunition. This indicates that the massacre lasted much longer than five (5) days and the lives taken by agents of the Army, the DISIP and the Metropolitan Police (PM), exceed the number prudently calculated at 3,600 dead.
• According to General Elio García Barrios, the official account was suspended when it exceeded 5,000 victims. This was confirmed by the Human Rights Defender, Father Juan Vives Suriá, who was present in the office of the Ministry of Defense where the order to stop was given.
• In a testimonial from Ciudad Valencia, entitled “4 million bullets were fired at an unarmed people”, an American citizen, John Bryant, an exceptional witness living in a poor neighborhood in Caracas, said: “The shadow of Vietnam is for the United States what for you is the shadow of “El Caracazo”.
• John Bryant lost his father in the Vietnam War, which marked his destiny as a committed pacifist. He was working as a grassroots volunteer in the Christian communities of Petare at the time of the massacre. He was an exceptional witness to how the population suffered a series of restrictions, food shortages, raids, persecution, imprisonment, murders and forced disappearances. In turn, witnessing how, in those days, many soldiers shot their FALs in the face of people for the sole crime of carrying a bale of food, a pallet of beef on their shoulders or a television in their hands.

Mazo News Team