Published at: 08/04/2026 09:00 PM

(LATEST NEWS, April 6, 1989)

• On April 3, 1989, as part of a protest against non-compliance with the Student Pass, at the Manuel Palacios Fajardo High School on January 23, youth leader Gonzalo Jaurena Abásalo was the victim of police brutality.
• In the presence of the demonstrators and in broad daylight, Gonzalo Jaurena was kidnapped by agents of the Metropolitan Police (PM) in the morning. An hour later, his dead body was left by a PM patrol outside the Magallanes Hospital in Catia.
• Gonzalo Jaurena, an electronics student at Simón Bolívar University (USB), was dragged into a police cage and was beaten, tortured and shot at point-blank range.
• The material perpetrator of the shooting was Corporal II of the Metropolitan Police, Alexis Ramón Piña Demey, who was under the protection of Antonio Ledezma for years, until in 1997 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for qualified homicide.
• During those years of impunity, Alexis Piña served as an escort for the governor of Caracas Antonio Ledezma (1992-1993), head of the Metropolitan Police and co-responsible for the deaths of the student Belinda Álvarez and the journalist Verónica Tessari.
• Ángel Palacios, then president of the Simón Bolívar University Student Center, denounced: “In practice, the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez is imposing the death penalty on students.”
• Gonzalo Jaurena Abásalo belongs to that long list of students killed by State “insecurity” bodies between 1958 and 1998.
• His father, Héctor Jaurena, family members and fellow student fighters undertook a lengthy judicial process in order to do justice and put the material perpetrator of the murder behind bars.

Mazo News Team