The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice ordered the Public Ministry to reopen the criminal proceedings referring to the physical disappearance of Ramón Salvador Pasquier Suárez, a leftist leader whose body has not yet been recovered, according to sentence 0832 drafted by the magistrate Michel Adriana Velasquez Grillet.
Such reopening of the Pasquier file is ordered for the purposes of continuing the corresponding criminal investigation, to determine the criminal responsibilities of the perpetrators and participants in the act. This, in application of the Law to Punish Crimes, Disappearances, Torture and other Violations of Human Rights for Political Reasons in the Period 1958-1998.
Pasquier disappeared on November 26, 1965, when he was 17 years old. He was a 3rd year engineering student at the Central University of Venezuela. That day he was traveling from Caracas to Coro (Falcón), together with his companions Raúl Chirinos and Félix Farías.
And at a control point located in San Juan de los Cayos, soldiers wounded him with a firearm and transferred him to Detachment 55 of the National Guard located in Puerto Cabello.
To reopen that file, the magistrates proceeded to annul, via review, two decisions which declared that investigation as “res judicata.”
The annulled decisions were issued by the Maracaibo Permanent Military Court of First Instance (May 4, 1977) and the Maracaibo Permanent Court Martial (May 24, 1977).
The reopening of this investigation was requested by the Public Ministry in March 2016. For this reason, the Court ordered the Zulia Military Criminal Judicial Circuit to forward the file to the 8th National Prosecutor’s Office.
