VENEZUELA:
Wound Still Gaping 20 Years
after ‘Caracazo’
By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS (IPS) - As José Luis reached the bus stop, he saw a
crowd of furious local residents smashing shop fronts, cars and
telephone booths. Without giving it much thought, he threw himself
into the mob that broke into a small supermarket, triggering the
worst social uprising and biggest massacre in the last 100 years in
Venezuela.
It was the morning of Monday, Feb. 27, 1989 in Guarenas, a dormitory
city 30 km east of Caracas, where people enraged by a sudden hike in
bus fares went beyond simply protesting in the streets and began to
riot and loot stores.
"I was 17. I joined in, to be part of the chaos and the rage of
people against everyone who was speculating," recalled José Luis,
who is now an established mechanic.
"But people then began to loot when they realised that provisions
were going to be scarce, and that the police would just take
whatever we didn’t carry off," he told IPS.
The rioting spread from Guarenas and other outlying districts to the
centre of Caracas, as it overlapped with demonstrations by students
and workers. The heavy television coverage of the protests that
Monday morning acted as a call for disgruntled Venezuelans to take
to the streets.
The rioting and subsequent crackdown lasted a week. The clampdown on
the protesters and looters was harsh after Tuesday the 28th, as the
military was called out on the streets in several major cities and a
curfew was set – measures that had not been used in Venezuela in
several generations.
The end result: hundreds of people killed, around 2,000 injured and
more than 150 million dollars in damages to shops and businesses.
The "Caracazo", the name given to the week of violence, is seen as a
turning point in Venezuelan society, which had been caught up in an
illusion of social harmony, according to sociologists and other
analysts.
The bloody incident marked the start of a shift in the political
scene, which saw the waning of the influence of the country’s
traditional parties and trade unions.
"It was the biggest 20th century massacre in Venezuela. No other
popular movement has led to so many deaths," sociologist Tulio
Hernández told IPS.
The Committee of Families of the Victims (COFAVIC) that emerged
after the Caracazo has documented more than 500 people killed in the
greater Caracas area.
Social and political scientists describe the Caracazo as an eruption
of rage after more than a decade of deteriorating living conditions
in Venezuela.
The last straw was an abrupt rise in bus fares, adopted in the wake
of an increase in gas prices announced just after President Carlos
Andrés Pérez (1974-1979 and 1989-1993) took office on Feb. 2, 1989.
Unable to afford the new bus fares and facing serious difficulties
in making it to their jobs in the second half of the month,
commuters from outlying areas around Caracas were the first to erupt
in anger, followed by thousands of people in slum neighbourhoods,
vandals, and even police officers themselves.
Pérez, a social democrat, had raised gasoline prices as part of a
broad package of structural adjustment measures agreed with the
International Monetary Fund (IMF).
His long-time rival, two times president Rafael Caldera (1969-1974
and 1994-1999), a Christian democrat, stated in 1992 that "the poor
smashed the glass front of the IMF building with rocks. Hungry
people cannot be asked to defend democracy."
With the police and National Guard unable to restore order, Pérez
called out the army on the night of Monday, Feb. 27, and the troops
brutally cracked down on the rioters, who were acting without clear
objectives or political leadership of any kind.
It is true as well, as journalists witnessed at the time, that the
army also attempted on a number of occasions to at least impose
order among the chaos, having looters stand in organised lines that
filed in and out of supermarkets and stores, and ensuring that they
only took food and did not cause damages.
"It was the first breakdown of the institutional pact under which
democracy had functioned since 1958, a kind of collective decision
to break with the prevailing state of law. But it was also a great
national failure, a fight without winners, which remains a huge open
wound," said Hernández.
"Justice and truth are still lacking," lawyer Liliana Ortega, the
founder of COFAVIC, told IPS. "Despite a sentence against the
Venezuelan state by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, no one
responsible for the excesses by the security forces has ever been
put in jail."
In November 1999, after current President Hugo Chávez took office,
the Venezuelan state acknowledged its responsibility and paid
reparations to the families of the 66 victims in the cases of
killings and disappearances at the hands of the security forces that
were studied by the Inter-American Court.
But the prosecutions against those who were allegedly responsible
for the bloody repression are still in the "investigation" phase.
"Nor have the families of people who were shot and buried in common
graves obtained identification of their remains, and their bodies
have not been given back to us for proper burial," COFAVIC activist
Maritza Romero told IPS.
Her 24-year-old brother, Israel Romero, who worked in the
construction industry and was active in sports, left home on the
morning of Mar. 1, 1989 to use a public telephone in Baruta,
southeast of Caracas. But he was shot by one of the metropolitan
police and National Guard patrols as they drove by.
"We took him to the hospital, and he lived for a few hours after the
operation, but died that night," said Romero. "Another of my
brothers identified his body in a pile of corpses, but the guards
did not hand it over, arguing that the curfew was already in force.
The next day, when we came back, they said they had thrown his body
into a common grave."
Common graves were opened in the municipal cemetery of Caracas,
where COFAVIC, with the support of religious and human rights
groups, recovered more than 60 bodies, which it added to its list of
466 people killed in the Caracazo.
"It was a good thing that the state admitted its guilt, and backed
that up by paying compensation. But the truth must be uncovered by a
serious investigation, those responsible must be brought to justice,
and the remains of our loved ones should be handed over to us, so we
can bury them and close this painful chapter," said Romero, wiping
away a tear.
"The Caracazo is still an open wound," said Ortega, who also
complained about the impunity that surrounds the murders of young
people, a daily occurrence in Caracas, one of the most violent
cities in the world.
According to human rights organisations, less than five out of 100
homicides lead to a conviction and sentence.
To help overcome that problem, Ortega proposed Thursday that the
government establish and head up a broad "Coalition for Truth and
Justice", charged with clarifying high-profile killings by the
security forces committed over the past two decades.
She cited the Caracazo; the case of El Amparo, where 14 fishermen
were killed on the border with Colombia in 1988, falsely accused of
being Colombian guerrillas; the killings of at least 150 inmates in
prisons around the country; and the supposed disappearance of people
at the hands of the secret police during the landslides in Vargas on
the Caribbean coast near the capital, in 1999.
"It should be a broad, inclusive coalition, make up of people from
the state and from organisations that have defended human rights for
decades, that would build on the experience of truth and
reconciliation commissions set up by other democratic countries in
Latin America and allow Venezuelans to improve our own democracy by
making good on this debt to truth and justice for our people," said
Ortega.
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