was going to spend the night out. If he was still in the street after dark, he would usually spend the night at Gloria Gudichely’s, his godmother. As a grownup, Javier decided he wanted to be baptized as a Catholic. Lesvia never believed in the divinity of priests and used to solve her affairs with God without intermediaries. But she gave her son the freedom to choose his preferred religion. Perhaps because of his classes at the military school and the Don Bosco school, Javier chose to be a practicing Catholic. Javier went to church twice per week in La Lagunita, in Filas de Mariche, which Lesvia has only visited once in her life. Javier used to do community work with the parish. He was in the fourth semester of Electronic Engineering at Instituto Universitario Nuevas Profesiones and used to invent new devices in the family‘s dentist equipment factory: he designed the first resin light-curing lamp in Latin America and was working on a new laser scalpel when he was killed. Everybody in the neighborhood knew Javier, because he also used to repair everything from computers to washing machines for his neighbors in his spare time. And one of them knocked on Lesvia‘s door on Saturday, August 2nd, at 8:00 in the morning, to tell her that her son had been arrested the night before. “My neighbor lied to me, because he knew that Javier had died and he did not dare to tell me. And I thought it was true, that Javier had been arrested, so I started looking for him”. In November 2008, Lesvia Josefina Carmona de Bonilla, 46, a mother from the age of 15, described the judge each step she took on August 2, 2003 until she found her son’s body in the morgue of the Legal Medicine Institute of the Forensic and Criminal Investigation Agency in Caracas. She visited all police stations near her house, then the hospitals. At the Perez de Leon hospital in Petare they told her that there was a young man, deceased, who matched the description of her son, but it was not him. When she was leaving the hospital, a security guard showed her Javier‘s identity documents. “Go to the morgue in Bello Monte”, said the man as Lesvia took the ID from his hands. “The person who talked to us in the morgue advised me not to see him, that his dad should come. But
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he could not come, so my cousin identified the body. They told me later that I had to go to the PTJ so I could claim the body, which was the only thing I wanted, to have to my son with me. I could not understand why Javier was there. I did not want him to be there. He should not be there”. After the procedures, the paperwork, Lesvia lost consciousness for a few hours. All she could remember afterwards was a few phrases. Things that her neighbors told her during Javier‘s wake. That there was a police operation. That it was planned in a liquor store. That they were looking for six thugs. That one of the thugs was wearing beige trousers and a gray shirt. That the police got confused. They were so confused, that the evening news that Sunday, August 3, showed the director of the Sucre Municipal Police, Elio Salazar, reporting the death of a criminal named Javier Pasero Carmona, 25, who was killed Friday night in Filas de Mariche during a gunfight with his men. ** Whenever Javier greeted Mr. J1, he took off his hat as a sign of respect. “Bless me, uncle”, he used to say to him, taking his cap off, which he wore all the time. Mr. J was not actually his uncle, but everybody thought Javier was his nephew. Mr. J, who owned a liquor store on kilometer 21 of the Petare-Santa Lucia road, was shot seven times during an attack against his business by neighborhood gangs. He was injured in one hand, his chest, his foot, his arm and abdomen, and one of the bullets hit his wife, went through her mouth and was lodged in her head. No authority did anything about it. A friend of his, who co-chaired with him the neighbors‘ association, Mr. W, said to him that he had contacts, that he knew a head inspector of the Sucre Police who could take charge of what justice was unable to do. Late in the afternoon on August 1, 2003, W arranged a meeting with inspector V in the deposit of Mr. J‘s liquor store. V was then the head of 1
The names of the witnesses have been changed.
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