Koki search posters spread by Venezuela last July. LEONARDO FERNANDEZ VILORIA (Reuters)
The dangerous Venezuelan criminal Carlos Revete, alias El Koki, has died in a police operation that has lasted three days.
Officials from the special forces of the Bolivarian Police and the Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations Corps began a confrontation on Sunday in Las Tejerías, in the central state of Aragua, some 70 kilometers from Caracas, in search of the gang member, who had managed to escape last July from a police raid in his neighborhood, Cota 905, in the west of the Venezuelan capital.
The death of the criminal was confirmed this Tuesday in a tweet by the Minister of the Interior and Justice, Remigio Ceballos.
“Operation Indio Guaicaipuro II 2022 remains active, in Aragua State, with new arrests and after armed confrontation against police forces, alias El Koki, Carlos Luis Revete, was killed.
We continue to search for his accomplices."
According to information from journalists from the police source, Revete's body was transferred to the Caracas forensic center at noon on Tuesday.
Clashes in this rural town began on Sunday.
It is presumed that El Koki had taken refuge in this mountainous area, where he had built alliances with another criminal nicknamed El Conejo who dominates the area.
The police managed to dismantle sentry boxes, the checkpoints that the gangs put up to protect their territory, but other findings of the operation are unknown.
El Koki, 43, controlled a mega-gang in Caracas that was dedicated to vehicle theft, drug trafficking and kidnapping.
With more than 60 men, he managed to expand to other neighborhoods near his Cota 905 kingdom and control a territory where some 700,000 people live.
Last July, the government of Nicolás Maduro sent more than 3,000 officials in a new attempt to capture him.
A week of anxiety with intense shootings that left 33 dead, including several victims of stray bullets, did not find the leader of the gang.
But since then the police have taken over the place and maintain control of the area.
While fleeing from him, El Koki crossed the border and it was said that he was sheltered in the city of Cúcuta (Colombia), but now it has been proven that he was already in the country regrouping his criminal organization.
In 2012 the government implemented a kind of unofficial truce with some of the most dangerous gangs in Venezuela.
In the so-called “peace zones”, in exchange for the police not entering, criminals received financing to start legal businesses, a measure that was counterproductive because it gave criminals more oxygen.
El Koki's gang was one of the beneficiaries of that pact for a while.
Although Revete had an arrest warrant for the murder of several policemen, he was never imprisoned.
In 2015, at Cota 905 of El Koki, the first People's Liberation Operation was carried out, a series of military and police raids against crime, denounced for human rights abuses and violations and added to thousands of extrajudicial executions by the that the government of Nicolás Maduro has been singled out, weighing down a huge record of serious human rights violations.
That time there were 15 deaths, most of them innocent.
The United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission investigated these raids and found that El Koki had bribed police officers to give him advance notice of the raids.
After he fled in July amid a massive police operation, he became a political target for the government, which linked his activities to the opposition.
Freddy Guevara, representative of the opposition Unitary Platform in the negotiations in Mexico, was arrested days before the operation began.
The head of the Chavista Parliament, Jorge Rodríguez, assured that Guevara, among other opponents, "had trained and armed the El Koki gang to overthrow the government."
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