Marco Teruggi

On Saturday, July 27, six Chavista militants were murdered in the state of Barinas. This event is now known as the Ticoporo Massacre and is evidence of a sustained policy: the murder of grassroots Chavistas, hidden by the mainstream Western media.

The crime will be remembered as the Ticoporo Massacre. It happened on Saturday, July 27th at about 10:30 a.m. on the 12th kilometer of a highway in the municipality of José Antonio Sucre, in the state of Barinas, which is characterized by a flat landscape, where the earth seems to lie on its belly under a gigantic sky, there are estuaries, cattle, tall trees, and coffee at dawn.

The armed group arrived in a milk truck. They knew that they would not attract attention in this area, which is a transit zone for dairy vehicles. When they arrived, they pretended to be police officers and opened fire. How many shots? What weapons? The investigation is still open.

The six people killed were shot in the head. Their names were José Geraldo Rojas, Manuel J. Cordero Benítez, Alexi Ontiveros Mora, Eudes Rojas Peña, Kevin Navas, Rodríguez, Milaidis Navas González. They were Chavistas, militants of the Corriente Revolucionaria Bolívar and Zamora popular movement, humble people, from peasant families, from those corners of the country.

“It was a massacre, there is no evidence to show that there was a confrontation, nor was there any reason to have one, everyone was assassinated indiscriminately with treachery and planning,” explains Kevin Rangel, national coordinator of the Current. They left behind homes, families, children, tears and silence in the plain.

In addition to being part of the movement, everyone was also part of the Hugo Chávez Popular Defense Brigades, “an instrument that we created for political, productive, and territorial security tasks,” explains Rangel. The Brigades were formed in 2017, when the country, and in particular the municipality of Sucre, were subject to an escalation of armed violence by the Venezuelan opposition.

Violence is not new in that territory. It had decreased in the last year and a half. It returned in a blast: “There was a lot of preparation, those who acted are mercenary groups, with military training. It was a precisely planned operation.

The hypotheses

The municipality of Sucre is centered on Highway 5, which connects Barinas – a pass to the country’s capital – with the border states of Apure and Táchira. There are three central elements: economic, political and armed.

In the first case it is about the cattle ranchers, landowners, loggers, who had recently organized a road blockade to prevent the passage of food. Politically, this is an area where the opposition, as seen in 2017, embodied the most radical positions.

As for the violent dimension, there are armed groups, known as paramilitaries, who were protagonists, for example, in seizing the town of Socopó that same year, assault firearms in hand, burning and destroying a police station. All three components are interconnected.

The main hypothesis in the Ticoporo Massacre points to mercenary groups. “They were assassinated by a paramilitary group (…) it is under investigation, it will not go unpunished, they were executed, it is the violence imported from Colombia,” said Diosdado Cabello, vice-president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Psuv).

“The investigations are going to reveal the extent of the connection, whether it is local or not, but nothing is isolated. We always start from that, it could be a combination of many factors that could lead to an offensive against this municipality that is strategic because it connects the border with the capital of Barinas,” explains Rangel.

The clues are many, and, as always, have multiple dimensions: material perpetrators, intellectual authors, financiers. They occur, within a general context of the country: the new attempted coup d’état whose visible image is that of Juan Guaidó at the national level, as well as operators such as Mike Pompeo and Elliot Abrams in the United States, and Iván Duque in Colombia.

“This is the strategy of Colombian paramilitarism towards Venezuela, to position themselves inside, to build routes that allow them to place a strategic rearguard within the territory, and corridors for the supply of food and arms in the face of a possible aggression,” adds Rangel.

Assassinations and paramilitarism

Violence against Chavismo is not new and has manifested itself at different times and in different situations. One of the best-known scenarios has been the struggle for land: over 300 peasants have been murdered. In 2018, for example, six were assassinated, using the same modus operandi: landowners hired armed groups, paramilitaries or criminal gangs to murder them on command. Each death had a price.

Violent right-wing escalations have been another modality, as in 2017, when the opposition’s strategy was to persecute Chavistas. One of the most emblematic cases was that of Orlando Figuera, lynched and burned in an opposition guarimba (demonstration) for being a Chavista. It happened in broad daylight, in Caracas.

There is also the violence deployed inside the territories to attack the basic structures of Chavismo. In the case of the Ticoporo Massacre, Rangel states that it is “a message that they want to transmit to the movement, to Chavismo. They are actions that are done in this way to generate terror, demobilize, demoralize the revolutionary forces”.

As for the modalities of paramilitarism imported from Colombia, the case of the state of Táchira is significant. There, the protector of that territory, Freddy Bernal, maintains a policy to impede its advance and consolidation.

On July 6, for instance, members of the Venezuelan Army detained five individuals who carried three decapitated heads in a bag, along with pamphlets with threats to police officers and officials. They were part of the paramilitary band ‘El Clan del Golfo’, which operates from Colombia.

A policy

Chavismo is facing a permanent assault with two alternating stages: that of attrition, with emphasis on the economic dimension, and that of attempted extinction, where the different variables overlap. In 2019, an attempt was made to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro. Murders of Chavistas occurred on both occasions. A detailed list of murdered leaders of the PSUV and its base structures, of communal councils, communes, peasants, local supply and production committees, Bolivarian militia, reveals a sustained policy with the objective of striking a blow against one of the foundations and fortresses of Chávez: the territories and their popular organizations.

These assassinations include the paramilitary strategy developed in Colombia, the logics of the hybrid war designed in the United States that are at an advanced stage, the conflicts over land, the corridors, and what anti-Chávezism proposes as the model of a country: one where Chávez no longer exists. And Chavism is much more than a government.

The Ticoporo Massacre is under investigation. It will remain an episode of the low-intensity war against grassroots Chavismo, made invisible by the mainstream Western media, by the international narrative architecture that conceals opposition violence, its paramilitarized subways.

At this hour, in the immensity of the plain, those who were murdered are commemorated. The bodies are buried, the candles are still lit, the prayers will continue, just like the comrades of each of the martyrs – as they have already been remembered. It is the great will of the invisible Chavismo that never lowered nor will it lower its arms.