Caracazo

Reading up on caracazo for a project and I came across this upsetting story, Chavez told:

“After the Caracazo I was working in Miraflores Palace…I was taking a postgraduate course in political science. I was coming back with my books to the little room in the White Palace where I slept. A young officer approached me suddenly. I didn’t know him very well. He said, “Major, I need to speak to you.”

“Well, let’s go to my office,” I replied.

The young man said, “Major, they say you are involved in a movement. They’re talking about a Bolivarian movement.”

He told me his tragic story about how he had been ordered to patrol near the palace during the Caracazo. He detained a group of kids who were looting a shop and took them to a sports court close by…He held them there but with no bad feeling….”I’ll release you soon, but you must stop looting,” he warned. He told me he’d planned to release them later in the afternoon, but then an order arrived from some commission that he had to transfer them to the Tiuna Fort or to the DISIP headquarters. He obeyed the order and handed them over to DISIP, the state’s secret police. They were loaded into a truck. There were about 12 or 15 kids….Half an hour later [he and his men] found all those kids in an alley. They had been murdered. He wept with rage when he saw them, and protested, but was told to keep quiet, told to keep his nose out of it. He finished his story, saying, “Listen, major, if you do have a movement, tell me, because if not, I’m getting out of here.”

This would be a good movie or play.