Published at: 26/11/2025 09:00 PM

(El Nacional, September 22, 1996 and El Globo, November 20 to 30, 1996)

• After decades of silence, the Pentagon declassified the secret files on U.S. military activities in Venezuela and its intervention in the practices of torture, shootings and forced disappearances in successive governments of the Fourth Republic.
• As a result of these publications, El Globo held a forum on the methods of extermination applied by the Pentagon in Venezuela, to which General Oswaldo Sujú Raffo, former Inspector of the Armed Forces, was invited. When questioned about this matter, and to get out of the way, he declared: “If I knew that was the subject, I wouldn't have come... In this case, it would have to be the American embassy that shows what the torture and extermination courses were, and the lists of those who did them.”
• In response to these statements, María Teresa Tejero Cuenca, sister of the disappeared Alejandro Tejero Cuenca, responded to Sujú Raffo: “Political detainees were tortured to death and then disappeared... It is not only a matter of capturing the material perpetrators, but also those who gave the orders as intellectual authors of the systematic violation of human rights must be brought to justice in Venezuela”. Referring directly to General Sujú Raffo, present there.
• The latter, obviously annoying, withdrew from the forum, to which he was called to analyze the cases of torture and disappearances during his administration.
• After these publications, there was no room for doubt about the participation of the Venezuelan military in these genocidal practices and how they were trained at the School of the Americas, located in Fort Gulick, Panama.
• The first news about these courses appeared when the first intensive course on methods of torture, shooting and disappearance “Against Irregular Forces” took place.
• This was dictated, in five weeks, in the Panama Canal, by Pentagon agents, to train officials of the Venezuelan State's law enforcement bodies (newspaper El Impulso, Barquisimeto, June 2, 1962).
• Later, in 1996, during investigations into the torture and extermination manuals used by the governments of Raúl Leoni, Rafael Caldera I and Carlos Andrés Pérez I (CAP), journalist Mark Lane wrote a book, based on interviews, in which it is revealed that the controversial declassified Pentagon documents confirm how gringo experts continued to teach such extermination courses until 1991 (CAPII), specifying that the instructors were veterans of the Vietnam War.
• These courses, taught at the School of the Americas, were attended by soldiers and police from 11 countries, including Venezuela, a country where such procedures resulted in more than 3,000 missing persons, between 1964 and 1969 alone.
• Among other things, the purpose of such courses, as reported by the New York Times, was the creation of an inter-American army with a generalate located in Washington. In other words, the elimination of the Armed Forces throughout Latin America and the subordination of all their contingents to the military leadership of the United States.
• On that occasion, Tarek William Saab, as coordinator of the Committee on the Disappeared, stated: “This is not a witch-hunt but an attempt to make forced disappearances and torture known and recognized in order to determine the responsibilities and face the impunity that causes them. Crimes against humanity do not have a statute of limitations.”

Mazo News Team