Published at: 18/06/2025 09:00 PM

(4 Crimes 4 Powers, author: Fermín Mármol León and Semanario Punto, March 19, 1973)

• Any kidnapping is abominable, but the story of the most unequal justice and the most flagrant impunity, for kidnappers, children of the rich and the severest punishment for political activists, children of the poor, was made public in two events that occurred during the first government of Rafael Caldera.
• For the first group of suspects in the kidnapping, torture and murder of the 13-year-old boy Carlos Vicente Vegas Pérez, there was privileged legality. The Society of Accomplices was present.
• For the second group of young students, left-wing militants, who handed over the kidnapped industrialist, Carlos Domínguez, safe and sound, there was a death penalty.
• In fact, on June 1, 1972, Domínguez “The King of Tin Tin” was kidnapped. The next day, 2-06-1972, the engineer and professor of Liceo Andrés Bello, José Rafael Bottini Marín and Ramón Antoni Álvarez, both members of the left-wing group PUNTO CERO, were found dead on Avenida Páez del Paraíso, who were kidnapped by agents police officers two days earlier and accused of going to collect the ransom.
• On 3-06-72, The Victory Massacre occurred, where seven members of the organization PUNTO CERO were shot down. Both butchers were run by Luis Posada Carriles.
• Eight months later, on February 22, 1973, a group of rich children kidnapped, mutilated and beat the 13-year-old boy Carlos Vicente Vegas Pérez in the wildest and most unprecedented way. Younger son of architect Martín Vegas Pacheco and Trina Pérez Machado de Vegas.
• The motive was to settle a debt, immediately paid, to Colombian drug trafficking agents, so they asked the distressed parents for the figure of Bs.150,000 (U$D 34,883.72).
• They drugged the boy Carlos Vicente, tied him up, bandaged him and put him in the suitcase of a car to take him to a hiding place. On the way, he died suffocated by inhalation of carbon monoxide. Before he died, he was severely beaten and his skull was fractured.
• Later, the murderers threw the body into a ravine on the Centro Regional Highway, where it appeared on March 1 of that year.
• The society of accomplices and the hiring of large law firms managed to turn the kidnapping and murder of the boy Vegas Pérez into a police crab, well explained in the book “4 Crimes 4 Powers”.
• “The Vegas Case” became another major scandal, protected by the Fourth Republic's regime of impunity. A chapter that revealed the complicity in drug trafficking of a generation of crooks from Alcurnia, belonging to the clan of the Masters of the Valley.
• Among the material and intellectual authors of the kidnapping were the sonorous last names of: Nicomedes Zuloaga (son), Diego Baptista Zuloaga (cousin of the former), José Luis “Caramelo” Branger, Alfredo Parilli Pietri (nephew of the First Lady of the Republic), Julio Morales, Javier Paredes and Diego Rísquez, among others.
• Two other cases of inequality before the law and impunity, referring to political magnates of the time:
  • That same year, a son of former defense minister, General Ramón Florencio Gómez, ran over a family on Libertador Avenue, leaving two people dead. The case was shelved and the murderer, in a degree of guilt, went to live in Spain.
  • On that same date, a son of David Morales Bello, head of the judicial mafia, ran over a person in El Paraíso, who was killed. He was also exonerated from charges and sent to live abroad.

Mazo News Team