Published at: 10/12/2025 09:00 PM

(El Nacional, December 9, 1972 and Al Margen, No. 21 December 1972)

• Hugo Alexander Alzolay, worker, poet, visual artist and chess player, 20, a second-year high school student, was shot between the eyes when a Metropolitan Police (PM) agent shot him 10 meters away.
• This happened while Alzolay was painting murals with slogans calling for the release of political prisoners on the corner of Morena Clara in the El Manicomio neighborhood in Lídice.
• The official statement from the Metropolitan Police (PM) management, without any hesitation, justified that the agent shot because the student was painting slogans on a wall.
• Hugo Alexander was the son of Rosa Alzolay, a nursing professional, a native of Caripe del Guacharo, edo. Monagas, who reported that his son, in addition to being a painter, poet and student, was not carrying out any illegal activity nor did he have a record that justified the excessive aggression of the metropolitan agent.
• The night before, on December 7, during a game of the eternal rivals Caracas-Magallanes, Hugo Alexander, together with other teammates, had the audacity to descend from the stands and walk the playing field of the University Stadium with the slogan “Freedom for political prisoners”. The next night he was murdered.
• Hugo Alexander Alzolay was a chess instructor for children and was responsible for distributing the newspaper Despertar, an information organ of the Revolutionary Organization (OR).
• That same day, in the state of Anzoátegui, Manuel Salvador García Rojas, an agronomist, was shot to death in an army hunting ward, on the Onoto-Zaraza highway, while traveling in a van with other people who were on their way to the town of El Chaparro in proceedings related to the death of a girl.
• Manuel Salvador protested the outrage and mistreatment to which he and his family member were subjected by military personnel, and that's when a burst of rifle, shot at point-blank range by an Army Hunter, ended his life; despite the fact that he had been given the order to continue and the search had ended.

Context:

• These two crimes occurred when “The Pacification” was established throughout the country during the first government of Rafael Caldera.
• Caldera continued the war declared by Rómulo Betancourt against the students when he came to power in February 1959.
• It was Caldera I who, in addition, during his administration, carried out the dismantling of the guerrillas through the double face of the “Pacification Policy” and the overwhelming police violence against the student population.
• That morning, Operation Vanguard took place in Caracas, which killed several students and young workers from popular neighborhoods, shooting first and then finding out.
• Hugo Alexander Alzolay and Manuel Salvador García Rojas were two of the many pacified in that five-year period of double standards and false social-Christian morality, which continued to resort to the excessive use of police force and student repression as State policy.

Mazo News Team