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

(What's happening in Venezuela, December 12, 1965)

• On December 4, 1965, the labor leader Juan Bautista Sánchez, 52, was arrested by a commission of the General Directorate of Police (DIGEPOL) that raided, without a court order, his house in the city of El Tigre, edo. Anzoategui.
• Juan Bautista Sánchez was pushed out of his house and without any explanation he was transferred to an unknown place.
• Hours later, the same Digepoles who arrested him, visibly nervous, showed up at the home of the victim's relatives, announcing that they could go and claim his body in the morgue of the Dr. Felipe Guevara Rojas Hospital.
• The same DIGEPOL agents who murdered Juan Bautista Sánchez then tried to obtain a search ballot to legalize the crime committed.
• However, District Judge Simón Rodríguez del edo. Anzoátegui, Manuel Martínez Gago, flatly refused to issue it, arguing that he would not become an accomplice to the crime or sign the search slip after the act of blood had occurred.
• The then Minister of Internal Relations, Gonzalo Barrios, and his police assassins, declared that it was “an extremist invention to discredit the constitutional government.”
• But the facts, always clear and consistent with the reality of what happened, proved quite the opposite.
• Every day, during the Government of Raúl Leoni, DIGEPOL tortured, harassed, raided without a court order, fabricated false evidence, and murdered “suspects” and arbitrarily arrested politicians.
• The unusual news of the violent arrest and brutal murder of Juan Bautista Sánchez provoked indignation in the humble neighborhood where he lived, as well as in the popular sectors and workplaces where he worked as a militant worker in the Venezuelan revolution.

Mazo News Team