On Saturday morning, when Hilda Páez arrived at the morgue to claim the body of his son, a dozen mothers, sisters and wives with handkerchiefs and masks, were upset about the disappearance of their relatives‘ bodies. Alí, her husband, had to enter the deposits and move the corpses around with his bare hands to find Richard among them. “Thank God at least I could find my son‘s body”, says Hilda. The group of women who started gathering and protesting every day at the doorsteps of the morgue eventually founded the Committee of Relatives of the Victims of the events of February and March 1989 (COFAVIC). Many of these women could not retrieve the bodies of their relatives. “Our only choice was to demand justice, we couldn‘t just stay home, so we decided to come together and create COFAVIC. We felt we had to sacrifice our lives for our children. The people who died during the Caracazo were worthy human beings.” ** From the morgue, Hilda and the other relatives of the Caracazo victims went to the streets and squares, demonstrating and telling everyone about the magnitude of the massacre that had occurred. Until that moment, the official casualty figures were at 276, and the government did not admit the existence of the mass graves. But during the first four days of the uproar, more than 300 corpses were brought to the morgue in Bello Monte. The workers at Cementerio General del Sur and neighbors of the area told the story of how trucks full of corpses drove up to La Peste escorted by soldiers and how they threw the bodies inside plastic bags in a large hole. After doing this, they covered the grave with cement and built a sidewalk. The women of the COFAVIC put their best effort into finding out what was inside the mass graves. “There were many people missing, poor people. We had to go through many procedures to dig up the bodies from the graves; we went to the Ministry of Health and to the Ministry of Defense because the case file was under military justice. All the files were there and we worked very hard to make them public and processed by civil justice.” Nevertheless, one year after the tragedy, even the media had neglected them.
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On the first anniversary of the Caracazo, in April 1990, Hilda and the women of the COFAVIC decided to chain themselves to the doors of the Miraflores Presidential Palace in order to draw the attention of politicians and the mass media. “The police arrived, they started to throw tear gas bombs at us and I didn‘t know how to get out of the chains. But finally, it was all over the 12 o‘clock news. People really saw the news.” A few months later, the General Prosecutor Office issued the order of exhumation and the court set the date, November 26, 1990, to begin the process, to be conducted by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, the same team that identified the mortal remains of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The women then moved to La Peste. First, they put up a tent and later built a house so they could “stay all day long watching over our dead relatives”. “Our dead relatives”, says Hilda, in plural, regardless of the fact that her son was not among the missing persons, but buried in a plot of municipal land in La Guairita Cemetery. On November 28, 1990, two days after the exhumation, the first human remains appeared in lot number six at the Cementerio General del Sur. Out of the 130 corpses found, 68 were victims of the Caracazo. ** In 1995, COFAVIC started the procedures to file the case with the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights in order to denounce the violations of rights committed by the Venezuelan State between February and March 1989, during its attempt to stop the social uproar known as the Caracazo. After countless procedures, responses and retorts, on June 7, 1999, the IACHR brought charges before the Court requesting a statement declaring that the Venezuelan State had violated the right to life, individual freedom, personal integrity and the judicial rights of the 46 Venezuelan citizens who were victims of these events. Later, on November 11, 1990, the Court ruled in favor of the claimants and ordered to open a procedure of reparations and costs. On August 29, 2002, the Court ruled that the Venezuelan State had to
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