Published at: 09/04/2025 08:00 PM

(LATEST NEWS, April 6, 1989)

• On April 3, 1989, as part of a protest held at the Manuel Palacios Fajardo High School, over the violation of the student ticket, youth leader Gonzalo Jaurena Abásalo was a fatal victim of police brutality.
• In front of the demonstrators, Gonzalo Jaurena was kidnapped by agents of the Metropolitan Police (PM) in the morning hours. An hour later, his dead body was left by a patrol outside the Magallanes Hospital in Catia.
• Gonzalo Jaurena, an electronic engineering student at Simon Bolivar 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 responsible for the death of journalist Verónica Tessari and more than 200 inmates during the massacre at the Catia Retén (27-11-92).
• 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 thousands of students murdered by state security forces between 1958 and 1998.
• His father, Héctor Jaurena, family members and fellow fighters undertook a lengthy judicial process in order to bring justice to the material perpetrator of the murder.
• However, the intellectual authors, the co-responsible authorities, the immediate and mediate hierarchies in the chain of command, which reached the President of the Republic, remained unpunished in the face of the murder of this student.

Mazo News Team