Published at: 30/04/2025 08:00 PM

(The Armed Struggle in Venezuela, author: Pedro Pablo Linares)

• April 17, 1965, during the Government of Raúl Leoni, the peasants Delfín de Jesús Arias, Francisco Hernández and Nicolás Sánchez Vargas were arrested, tortured and shot.
• This massacre, committed by Army uniformed personnel, occurred during the Long and Definitive Extermination Operation, in the hamlet of El Silencio, between the towns of Chabasquen, Córdoba and Villanueva, in the Edo. Lara.
• The three of them were savagely tortured by government executioners without obtaining any reports.
• Finally, after being literally destroyed by torture, they were shot in the house of Evaristo Andrade.
• On April 1 of that year, a military convoy of 800 armed men arrived in that mountainous area of the Edo. Lara, where the guerrilla brigades of the Simon Bolivar Front operated.
• Faced with the government's inability to contain guerrilla outbreaks, a systematically defined extermination plan was deployed there to shoot and disappear both guerrilla fighters and the civilian peasant population suspected of being collaborators.
• The peasants, supposedly linked to the guerrillas, were killed and disappeared on the spot or taken to one of the tents of the anti-guerrilla corps to apply drastic methods of torture to them beforehand.
• The inhabitants of the hamlets El Molino, Los Ejidos, El Olivo and Cardonal suffered the same fate. In El Tocuyo, high school student José Antonio Perdomo “Michelin” was shot in the street and in broad daylight, among many others.
• This was the way the governments of the Punto Fijo Pact imposed State terrorism, unleashing campaigns of terror, siege, looting of hamlets, arrests, torture and murder of hundreds of innocent peasants, the vast majority without any political affiliation.

Mazo News Team