Published at: 17/06/2026 09:00 PM

(Popular Tribune, 14-07-73; Latest News, 04-06-76 and 2001, June 1989)

• On February 13, 1962, during the second anniversary of his government, Romulo Betancourt, dispensing with the constitutional norm that enshrines the inviolability of the Right to Life (Art. 58 of the C.N.) , announced that he had given express orders to the police forces to “shoot first and find out later”. Thus laying the basis for the behavior of State Security agencies in what would be known as the “Betancourt Doctrine”, which governed all subsequent governments until 1998 (source: The People's Party, author: Moisés Moleiro).
• Later, before finishing his speech, he proclaimed: “I have arrested more than 1,500 leaders of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV)... and they will continue to be imprisoned.” Denying with this sentence and for decades any possibility of Amnesty for political opponents.
• Not content with that, once again going over the constitutional provision, he proceeded to arrest all the deputies to the Congress of those two political awnings and some of the Democratic Republican Union (URD). This regulation provides that parliamentary immunity must first be raided before the corresponding chamber for a duly proven crime (same source).
• Between 1973 and 1989, Venezuela earned revenues of 265 billion dollars, equivalent to 18 Marshall Plans used to rebuild devastated Europe after World War II (source: Arturo Uslar Pietri).
• It is worth saying that 265 billion U$ is equivalent today to 567 billion U$, enough to turn Venezuela into a model of sustainable social economy at the service of the great majority for the next three centuries. The Marshal Plan only used 14 billion U$ over five years.
• However, that decade of the greatest influx of economic resources from a Venezuela, by then free from coercive sanctions imposed to strangle its production, must go down in history as the years of waste, looting, the era of greatest social turbulence, of overwhelming police action and general impoverishment of the population.
• Venezuela, despite the billions of dollars it earned in those 19 years, was dominated by high rates of police crime, white-collar organized crime by political parties, the common underworld, hunger, social fragility and an unpayable foreign debt that even swallowed 40% of the national budget as a result of interest and debt service.
• The sharks of RECADI and the Workers' Bank of Venezuela (BTV), just to give two emblematic examples, continued to sail unpunished in the sea of corruption in which the country was shipwrecked and impoverished millions of families.
• In those days, one after the other, the red pages of police chronicles followed one after the other, where uniformed agents paid by the State and common crime unleashed a bloodbath that some analysts and experts described as “a low-profile civil war”.
• To the decade 1959-1969, where Betancourt and Leoni authorized the practices of:
  • throwing live people into the void from helicopters in mid-flight (Víctor Soto Rojas)
  • the “Wall Law” or shooting
  • the “Law of Escape”
  • The Vagos y Malefantes Act

the Forced Disappearance of Persons

• • the unspeakable torture and harassment of the Theaters of Operations (TO)
  • the installation of the Concentration Camps in Tacarigua and the Mobile Colonies of El Dorado; the selective assassinations of university leaders and the organized massacres against students and left-wing factors in the 70s and 80s followed. Among the lightning massacres, the following were named after the place where they occurred: El Amparo, Yumare, Cantaura, Tazón, El Vallado, Los Totumos and El Caracazo.
• Thus, taking advantage of presidential power and abusing the power granted to him by the National Constitution, from the large platform installed in El Silencio, Betancourt shouted through the loudspeakers placed around the crowd, the order to transgress the Right to Life to any “fellow citizen”; since then, for forty years, the crimes of Most atrocious state in our history. The Magna Carta, the fundamental instrument of the republic, was painted on the wall, it was practically a dead letter and “Shoot to Kill” the slogan of the current governments.
• As the spiral of government violence increased, three important fractures occurred in Democratic Action (AD), in which the best cadres of that party (MIR, PRIN and MEP) fled. As a result, the headquarters of these new organizations were also looted by armed government gangs, and some of their militants were annihilated.
• In the midst of “The Dance of the Thousand Millions”, newspaper reviews from the press of those decades (Latest News, 2001 and Popular Tribune) revealed the behavior of the authorities responsible for ensuring peace and citizen security, being in turn a thermometer of the high degree of crime that existed during the 70's and 80's, when life was worth less than a pair of shoes.

Mazo News Team