Published at: 13/11/2024 10:00 PM

(NEW POPULAR VOICE, November 8, 1968)

• During the period when Gonzalo Barrios acted as minister of repression (1966-1968), the worker-peasant leader Luis Rafael Tineo Gamboa disappeared.
• On November 7, 1968, thanks to the complaints made by the deputy José Vicente Rangel (JVR). Three years after his disappearance, the remains of Tineo Gamboa were found in the hamlet called Las Lajas or Altos de Ipure in San Antonio de Maturín.
• In a session at the Congress, JVR reported that the leader Juan Bautista Álvarez, a resident of Caicara de Maturín, was arrested there, shot and disappeared. To date, there is no news of his whereabouts.
• Luis Rafael Tineo Gamboa was arrested by the army's “hunters” officer, Edito José Acosta Ordaz, on October 25, 1965, in the Piedra de Moler hamlet and from there taken to the TO4 Antiguerrilla Operations Theater, located in Cachipo, edo. Monagas.
• There, for several days, he was subjected to the most abominable tortures. Seeing his executioner that he could not extract any relationship from him, he made him dig a pit half a meter deep; while still alive, he ordered to cut off his ears, nose, hands and genitals, and then bury him alive, covered with gigantic stones.
• The insistent demand of his relatives and comrades, together with the complaints of JVR and the writer Guillermo Meneses, led to the location of his remains, as reported in the newspaper Nueva Voz Popular on 8-11-68.
• In the presence of a judge and a prosecutor of the Public Prosecutor's Office, his body was dug up and taken to the Manuel Núñez Tovar Hospital, where forensic doctors were able to verify the veracity of the brutal torture and shameful causes of his death, at the hands of agents of the government of Raúl Leoni.
• His remains rest in Caripito, Bolívar municipality, his hometown, where he worked as a winery owner, peasant leader and worker.
• The executioner, Edito José Acosta Ordaz, deployed against his victim all the cruelty and methods of torture learned at the School of the Americas.
• During the 1950s, Luis Rafael Tineo Gamboa, participated in Caripito in the clandestine fight against the government of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Later, he joined the Regional Committee of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), in solidarity with the insurgency activities of the Eastern Guerrilla Front, led by Américo Silva, of whom he was a friend and collaborator, beginning his work organizing peasant and workers' fronts.
• Due to the constant reports of scoundrels, he had to be taken out of Caripito and transferred to Ciudad Bolívar to carry out other missions, until he was captured on October 25, 1965.
• In that year, Manuel Israel Estrada, Joel Belmonte and Morocoima were also kidnapped, tortured and disappeared in the Santa Rosa hamlet, near Caripe del Guácharo, all companions of Américo Silva and Luis Rafael Tineo.

Mazo News Team