This report identifies 10 of the victims of the massacre in La Vega. All have been executed according to versions of their relatives. Unofficial versions assure that 24 people died during the police raid
Some were killed while walking. Others were executed within their own homes. In the streets of Zulia, El Carmen, Independencia and Las Margaritas of the La Vega parish in Caracas, shots rang out, killing more than twenty people last Friday, January 8, when it was not yet noon.
“There was no shooting. They were the ones who went to kill in the houses, ”said one of the victims' relatives, who pointed out the officials of the Special Actions Forces (FAES) of the Bolivarian National Police (PNB) as the perpetrators of the deaths that occurred that morning in the first police massacre of the year in the Venezuelan capital.
According to an unofficial report, until the afternoon of this Saturday, January 9, 18 bodies from the La massacre had entered the headquarters of the National Service of Medicine and Forensic Sciences (Senamecef), known as the Bello Monte morgue. Vega. However, relatives indicated that the body of one of the victims was picked up by the authorities of the Scientific, Criminal and Criminal Investigations Corps (Cicpc) on Las Margaritas street in the early hours of Saturday morning and that he was still in the Hospital Dr. Miguel Pérez Carreño. "There they beat and ran a lot of women who wanted to know about their dead, because they cordoned off all of this until 4:00 am," said one of those interviewed.
Another source pointed out that the figure rose to 24 on Sunday, and according to human rights defender Marino Alvarado, from the NGO Provea, this would be the largest police massacre to take place in Venezuela.
Several of the relatives who spoke with Victim Monitor said that morgue officials informed them that they would not be able to watch their relatives, because the bodies would be taken directly to the cemetery. Some of the burials will be paid for by the state.
But La Vega was not only the scene of homicides on Friday. The massacre was preceded by a night of terror starring a group of men dressed in black and with long weapons who went up the hill at night and soon after they went down both by stairs and in vehicles around 9:00 pm . It was during their descent that they killed at least four people they encountered on the road. While some of the residents consulted attribute the actions to the FAES, others blame criminals who entered the neighborhood.
In the days before the police raid, residents of the La Vega areas where the events occurred had also identified the presence of collectives (armed civilians), who, as is known in Venezuela, tend to have links with the Government, wear black and wear build long.
"Social cleansing", not confrontation
One of the victims was the 32-year-old carpenter Yerikson José García Duarte, who was shot in El Hueco alley in the San Nicolás neighborhood of Los Mangos sector at 9:30 pm. He was in the street with a group of boys when the perpetrators arrived shooting at those they saw in the street. "Everyone ran, except for him who was sitting on the sidewalk, and that's why he couldn't run away," said a relative. García Duarte was shot in the back and chest and he received three more hits to the head. He had a 5 year old daughter.
The route of the men in black continued and down the hill, at about 9:45 pm, they met Raúl Antonio Lira Sánchez, a 25-year-old mechanic assistant from the Ministry of Habitat and Housing. He was at a birthday party at a house in the area and he went out on a motorcycle with a friend to find a bottle. But shortly after starting they were attacked and shot. He had at least six bullets in his body. His partner also died.
Victims of the La Vega massacre
Earlier, at 6:00 pm that Thursday, Eliécer Rafael Martínez Rojas, 23, who was working as a collector on a bus, disappeared from Los Cangilones street. His family members thought they had taken him into custody, because at the time of the attack he was talking on the phone and his interlocutor heard part of the struggle and the sound of the keys. However, they found his body at the Bello Monte morgue on Friday morning. The Cicpc assures that he found his body shot on the public highway at 7:00 pm on Thursday. They don't know what happened.
"I come from work and I'm going to rest"
“Have you already talked to that girl on the corner? Yes? So you already knew what happened to that poor boy. He was innocent. That's what a neighbor from La Vega says of Richard Alejandro Chile Cabello, a 20-year-old who was employed in a car wash in El Paraíso. On Friday, around 11:00 am, he would return from his work and on his way to his house on Calle El Carmen. Relatives related that an acquaintance saw him on his way and warned him not to go up, because "things were ugly upstairs." But he didn't listen to her. "No man, I come from work and I'm going to rest," she replied.
Chile Cabello's relatives found out about her arrest and murder because they came across her photo on social media. He appeared in a white shirt at the time of his arrest, while his corpse wore a blue and white jacket that he was not wearing. He was the third of seven siblings.
Julio Alexander Pino Moreno, 23, and Yeferson José Moreno Plazola, 28, were the breadwinners of a 13-person household. Both of them, who worked as carters in the Car Market, were killed by the FAES in two different places. They grabbed the first one when he was going down the hill along Las Margaritas street with his wife and with his 1-year-old son in her arms. They pushed her against a wall and handed her baby over to him, and he was forced to lie down. They killed him in front of his family.
Moreno Plazola, Pino Moreno's stepfather, was shot inside his house. According to the account of his family, several FAES officials forced their way into the house and removed women and children. Upon leaving, his body was taken away with a shot to the head. On that same street, relatives said, three other neighbors were also victims of the massacre. "They asked that they not be killed," said one interviewee.
Carlos Alfredo Hernández Hurtado, 17, dropped out of high school to go to work. Since he was 15 he worked in a butcher shop. On Friday morning he had left his house to buy cheese and then he was going to meet a friend from the area. When he was walking down Independencia Street, they shot him. “Anyone they saw with an ugly face, they put him in. The policemen were shooting like crazy, ”said a relative.
Another 17-year-old, Jonathan Useche, was taken from his house hooded by FAES officials. His body was on Saturday at the Bello Monte morgue.
In the same group
On the same day of the massacre, the murder of Nelson Enrique Villalta Talima, a 49-year-old music teacher and vigilante, who allegedly had been in the line of fire from the alleged shooting that took place on Friday in La Vega, was reported. The death of Néstor Duarte, who was assassinated in his house by FAES officials, was also reported. He was the father of a 14-year-old girl.
A 29-year-old relative of Richard Alfonso Francia Francia, a fruit seller at the Quinta Crespo Market, assures that the man was included in the list of victims of the La Vega Massacre despite the fact that his murder did not occur at the site. He, said the relative, was killed in front of the Hotel Novo Express in El Paraíso, with four shots. “The underworld killed him, because they took everything from him. Here he came to the morgue naked, "he said.
According to figures collected by the Victim Monitor, 182 homicides have occurred in La Vega parish from May 2017 to November 2020. Of these, 74 (40%) were committed by state security forces. The FAES are the police group that has left the most deaths in the area. In total, 38 people in La Vega have died at the hands of these officials in the aforementioned period.
The total death toll varies between 18 and 22, between Friday and Saturday of the second weekend of January this 2021, on the slopes and ravines of La Vega, one of the most populous neighborhoods in western Caracas.
During those hours, agents of the Bolivarian National Police (PNB) and its Special Actions Force (FAES) occupied the stairs and winding streets of this town, in an intense display behind criminal gangs and their leaders. Until the morning of Monday 11, only eight bodies had been recognized by their relatives.
According to police sources, all the deceased have a police record or record (which makes them, in the eyes of some, murders "justified" by their past).
The pattern of these summary murders at the hands of State agents is the same applied in other years by the so-called Operation for the Liberation of the People (OLP), a series of deadly raids in poor neighborhoods carried out to persecute criminals.
The risk, for anyone who crossed the road was to be mistaken for another.
Both the executions of the OLP, and those committed by Faes, (the Chavismo death squad) are in the investigation files for crimes against humanity sent to the International Criminal Court.
The other side of death
"My nephew was not a thug." "My brother went out to buy cigarettes." Phrases like these were repeated in the ears of reporters on the morning of this Monday, January 11, 2021 in front of the Caracas morgue, located in the Bello Monte urbanization. There, relatives of the men who died in the police operation carried out last Friday and Saturday in the La Vega parish in Caracas gave their version of the police deployment that left 24 deaths.
The authorities make complicit silence, while the mothers, aunts or sisters, claim in the congested forensic medicine.
In some of the photographs that circulate on the corpses of men who lost their lives in these operations, it can be seen that they have gunshot wounds on the thorax, one or two holes. This is coincidentally the same pattern denounced by family members and activists in many of the cases that appear in the report of the United Nations (UN) Independent International Fact-Finding Mission, which in December denounced crimes against humanity at the hands of agents of the Venezuelan State.
That report reads: “A former PNB / FAES officer interviewed by the Mission said that police officers refer to the murders as 'squaring the people'. This interviewee said that there is a 'triangle' from the victim's chest up 'where people are allowed to shoot'. This seems to indicate a lack of intention to use less lethal force to contain or arrest the alleged offender.
La Vega between cheese and bullets
The 17-year-old sister of Carlos Hernández, one of those killed in La Vega, said that her relative was buying cheese at a winery near her home and when she left the winery she was talking to a friend. At that moment, the woman said, the exchange of shots began between the police and criminals, and Carlos began to run when he heard the shots.
“You know how it is, you hear some shots and start running. He ran and an official shot him in the back. A single shot and they left him there, then they took him to the Pérez Carreño hospital where they wouldn't let me see him, ”he said.
On January 27, Carlos Hernández would turn 18 years old. His sister said that what happened over the weekend in La Vega was very unpleasant because “those officials did what they wanted with the people, many were taken from their homes to kill them. I couldn't find my brother, of course they changed his clothes. I went out to look for him with some clothes on and then I realized that his clothes had been changed. They even took a gold chain from him. Those officials killed anyone who wanted to ”.
War between gangs
Mailyn Useche, a resident of La Vega, heard the police were deploying a special operation because individuals from the criminal gangs of nearby Cota 905 also want to take the area of La Vega, but in the highest part to extend their reign of terror. Both sectors adjoin. He explained that his nephew Richard Alexis Chili was at home in his room watching a football game on the computer, when there was a knock on the door.
“My grandmother opened the door and the officials entered. Upon entering he was interrogated. They were seated on the furniture in the living room, he was in shores (shorts) and without a shirt. They take a picture of him themselves, ask him where he sleeps, he points out where he sleeps, the same policeman goes and looks for his clothes, makes him dress, takes him away, covers his face. My grandmother asks where they are taking him and they answered verification. They are taking it away. Then the photo appears where he appears on the floor, dead, "said Mailyn Useche.
The information they were given at the morgue is that they died in a confrontation with the police.
“I did not know that the confrontations were inside a house. Where are the weapons? ”Said Useche.
Death against the floor
The case of Luis Alejandro Ramírez Muñoz, 22, is no different. His body has two gunshot wounds. One in the left shoulder and one in the chest, a total of two gunshot wounds. But, there is something that speaks of the cruelty of at least this alleged execution. Ramírez Muñoz would have been on the floor, face down, surrendered, and thus they took a first photograph of him that was later leaked.
His aunt Yerky Ramírez, stationed in the Caracas morgue, asked for justice for her nephew, as she assured him that he was a young worker. In fact, he indicated that he had been working at the Sarem for more than two years as a computer technician. However, Luis Alejandro Ramírez Muñoz presents a police record or record, according to file / procedural record 144-18, dated December 1, 2018, for illegally carrying a firearm.
“In social networks there are photos where my nephew and other boys appear alive, the minor also appears lying on the floor, and now my nephew appears dead, I have the photo where my nephew appears in shores and without a shirt, and then they kill him and they put clothes on one of them. I was calm because they told me that they took out a dead man who had a jeans and my nephew was in shores. How are they going to change his clothes to say that he was a neighborhood scourge when my nephew was a worker? ”Stated Yerky Ramírez.
Dresses for the record
Shots in the chest, change of clothes: there are witnesses who saw how these young people were alive at the time of arrest and then their relatives had to recognize them in the Caracas morgue. Another fact that is similar to situations that have occurred in the past is that there will be no wake. From the Bello Monte morgue, the bodies will go directly to the cemetery to be buried.
The former director of Procedural Action of the Public Ministry Zair Mundaray, indicated that this is a common practice in the police agencies.
“It's what they call 'double tap', they put people in front, sometimes they grab them by the arms and give them one or two shots at the chest level and leave them there to bleed out, they know that death is quick . It is the same pattern. There it is shown that none of those dead were confronted, because when there is mobility, people are shot in various parts of the body as a result of that confrontation, persecution, etc. ”, he indicated.
Dead men are a dime a dozen and they all look the same. It's much of why I so rarely post them. I can't ever even remember if I've seen them before, haha
