Published at: 20/08/2025 09:00 PM

(PANORAMA, August 19, 1966)

• On August 18, 1966, the 21-year-old youth leader**, Nelson Alejandro Cabrera Córdova**, was shot down by a death squad from the General Directorate of Police (DIGEPOL).
• The young member of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) was ambushed by police agents during an alleged robbery of a security transport unit of the Venezuelan Airport Line (LAV), in the city of Maracaibo, edo. Zulia.
• At the crime scene, officials planted several weapons that had allegedly been stolen from the arsenal of the Judicial Technical Police (PTJ), three years earlier.
• After the mortem, a series of weapons were placed on the body of Cabrera Córdova, and he was accused by the then Regional Director (Zulia) of DIGEPOL, Gabriel José Páez, and his immediate boss Gonzalo Barrios, Minister of Internal Relations, of belonging to a clandestine gang carrying out an attack on an official vehicle of the LAV.
• And case closed, no further investigation was carried out. DIGEPOL never spoke out or gave an official report on the crime; the death of Cabrera Córdoba was covered up under a cloak of impunity and government complicity. Those were the years of Raúl Leoni's government.
• Nelson Alejandro Cabrera Córdoba was born in Caracas on November 9, 1944, studied high school at the Gustavo Herrera High School and belonged to the PCV. At the time of his assassination, he was an activist of the Venezuelan Revolution Party (PRV).
• The policeman Gabriel José Páez, in reward for the murder of Cabrera Córdova, was promoted to Director General of DIGEPOL, and was therefore in charge of searching the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) and the home of the rector Jesús María Bianco, on December 16 of that year, taking more than 700 students arrested. It was the third time that this university campus was the victim of an authoritarian eruption.

Mazo News Team