Published at: 24/09/2025 09:00 PM

(El Nacional and El Universal, September 20 and 23, 1993)

• On September 19, 1993, 32 years ago, the three-year-old boy, César García Villarroel, was shot dead in the intercostal region by members of the National Guard (G.N.) , when he was returning from an amusement park, with his parents.
• On a day marked by student protests and police repression, a GN platoon shot at several people who were gathered on the ground floor of Block 4 in Lomas de Urdaneta, where the García Villarroel family lived.
• The victim's parents, Julio García and Mercedes Villarroel, charged the deceased minor. While they were gunned down by the national guards to prevent them from running to their aid and reporting the homicide. All this at the doors of the aforementioned block.
• That Saturday night, at 9:00 p.m., that GN platoon carried out an operation in the area, which was recorded in the news book of the Metropolitan Police (PM) module.
• The victims' lawyer, Tarek William Saab, Human Rights Defender, denied the official version of a confrontation between metropolitan agents and the GN, and he also formally requested the authorities that the case be referred to the ordinary criminal jurisdiction, since it was a crime of qualified homicide.
• Strangely enough, when the hearing was held to recognize the uniformed murderer, through a mirror, he was not present in the round of suspects. This national guard was one of those who aimed at the father with the dead child in his arms.
• A clear sign of a cover-up on the part of the accidental government of Ramón J. Velázquez, who maintained that “military courts were going to be even more ruthless than ordinary civilian courts”; something that never happened.
• The accidental government tried, in every event, to divert the trial to military jurisdiction to cover with impunity the infanticide committed by officials who deployed force of arms against the People, following higher hierarchical orders.
• These were the days of the governmental paranoia that the defenestrated President Pérez established before his dismissal.
• Ramón J. Velázquez accidentally assumed the presidency for eight months, heir to all the repressive barbarism of his predecessor, Carlos Andrés Pérez. Police repression installed to attack the uprisings and shocks produced by the People, in support of the soldiers of the 4F, the 27N and the MBR-200.
• Velázquez did not shy away from this criminal practice, so his government was the protagonist of several palace scandals and police abuses.

Mazo News Team