Latinnews Archive

Andean Group - 2 October 1981

VENEZUELA: Police enjoy a 'licence to kill'

In July 1978, lawyer Ramon Carmona was gunned down in a Caracas street in broad daylight. Subsequent investigations revealed that the four assassins were members of a special group known as Los Gatos, which had been set up by the then director of the Policia Tecnica Judicial (PTJ), Manuel Molina Gasperi. When the scandal broke, Molina Gasperi was promptly sacked, and later arrested, when it emerged that he had allowed key suspects and witnesses to leave the country.

Since then, a big effort has been made to clean up the image of the PTJ, the plain-clothes branch of the Venezuelan police, which was set up shortly after the fall of dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez in 1958. Its ostensible role is to give a special back-up service to the uniformed Policia Metropolitana (PM). However, a series of recent scandals involving both forces, and the bitter rivalry between them, have led some observers to wonder whether the changes since 1978 have been much more than cosmetic. In an editorial last month, El Diario deCaracas suggested that the only way to clean up the PTJ would be to abolish it.


Critics of police conduct tend to blame the government for covering up or making excuses for police excesses. This, say the critics, merely makes them more arrogant and impervious to bad publicity. They point to the rumpus created in 1979, when evidence came to light of widespread ill-treatment of Colombian indocumentados, illegal migrant workers who flock over the border in their thousands to work on the ranches and farms of Zulia, Tachira and Merida. Cases of robbery, extortion and murder were described in the Caracas press, and almost led to a serious diplomatic incident with Colombia (LAPR XIII, 16).

A recent spate of scandals involving the PTJ and PM suggest that little has changed since then. Two 'crime syndicates' have been uncovered in Maracay and Merida, apparently run by the PTJ. A few weeks earlier, a PM agent had been found guilty of strangling three young boys for becoming 'too friendly' with his teenage common-law wife.

The Maracay 'crime syndicate' came to light in April this year, when businessman Nelson Alvarez was kidnapped on his way to work by four men in a car which later turned up in a PTJ parking lot. The car had been in PTJ hands for some time without the owner being informed. Later that day, the body of PM agent Alejo Marcelino Galvis was discovered in a gully outside Maracay, with a bullet in his head.

The two incidents were apparently unrelated, but were subsequently linked by the lawyer acting for Galvis's widow, who suggested that he and Alvarez either knew of, or had reason to suspect, the involvement of a group of PTJ agents in a BsSm robbery in Maracay. The lawyer, Luis Gamboa Gomez, and two ex-PTJ agents who backed up his theory, later took refuge in the Mexican embassy in Camcas. A warrant has since been issued for the arrest of the three men, on charges of divulging information which, according to Venezuelan law, can only be disclosed when the case comes to trial. Journalists of the Maracay newspaper, El A ragueno, were also warned off the story.

Six PTJ agents are now in detention pending investigation; the charges against them include other robberies besides the BsSm theft, and eight murders.

In Merida, evidence began to emerge in August that PTJ agents had 'disappeared' at least five young men over the last year or so. It is still not clear whether the victims were suspected of ordinary crimes, or if political motives were involved. In the past, political 'disappearances' and deaths in detention have been associated with the political police, Disip, and military intelligence, DIM, but the PTJ also has a record of political involvement.

* Carmona case rocks Perez government: LAPR XII, 41 & 43; Trotskyistdies in Disip cells: LA X, 30 & 31.

Peru's high command

The death in a helicopter accident in June of the army commander, General Rafael Hoyos Rubio, has left the following situation in the upper reaches of the army command:

	current/latest	retirement
	post	date
Div Gen Otto Elespuru Revoredo	army commander	Jan 82
Div Gen Luis Cisneros Vizquerra	chief of army staff	June 82
Div Gen Ramon Miranda Ampuero	inspector-general of army	Jan 82
Div Gen Francisco Miranda Vargas	chief of staff, combined
	general staffs of armed forces	Jan 83
Div Gen Carlos Briceno Zevallos	third military region
	(Arequipa)	Jan 84
Div Gen Julian Julia Freyre	second military region (Lima)	Jan 85

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