Published at: 15/04/2026 09:00 PM

(Diario de Caracas, February 4, 1992; El Globo and 2001, November 24, 1992)

• At the time of Antonio Ledezma, at the head of the government of Caracas, kidney patients, elderly people, peddlers, journalists and students were severely repressed and some were imprisoned.
• On the morning of February 3, 1992, more than 200 retired elderly people from the Venezuelan Social Security Institute (IVSS), raising the tricolor flag, banners and flyers, gathered at the corner of Santa Capilla on Urdaneta Avenue, with the purpose of marching to the Miraflores Palace to demand payment of outstanding debts by that institution.
• Antonio Ledezma, to prevent older adults from accessing the presidential palace, ordered the presence of the Metropolitan Police (PM) Special Brigade, whose agents threw tear gas bombs at the elderly, some of whom had to be assisted by the imminent suffocation, while others were severely beaten and imprisoned for the crime of demanding their rights.
• In this same political line of maximum police repression, Ledezma is responsible for the death of journalist Verónica Tessari, who died after a year of agony after being hit by a tear gas bomb thrown in the skull by agents of the PM of the then governor of Caracas, on March 19, 1992.
• Against the elderly, peddlers, kidney patients, journalists and demonstrators, Ledezma deployed his police force accompanied by La Ballena, responsible for sweeping away and stifling the demonstrations of any political or social demand.
• To this end, he used the archaic legal frameworks of the Vagos and Malefantes Act as an instrument to suppress, with imprisonment, the elderly and renal patients or exile for political demonstrators.
• On the morning of November 26, 1992, the elderly and renal patients were trying to arrive at the doors of the Miraflores Palace to demand the payment of overdue pensions and emergency dialysis, respectively; once again Ledezma ordered the PM to attack them, who only found police links in response to their requests.
• A day later, on November 27, the Catia Retén Massacre occurred, where more than 200 inmates were brutally murdered after Ledezma ordered the prison doors to be opened so that those deprived of their liberty would go out in a stampede and use public force to shoot them down.

Mazo News Team