By Lisván Lescaille Durand

The gusts ruthlessly crossed the walls of a residence, located on Amazon. It was the house of Uruguayan journalist Luis Nelson Martirena, who was Prensa Latina’s correspondent in that capital (1965-1970), and his wife, Ivette Jimenez.

Both were members of the Tupamaros Movement and had two colleagues from that armed group in hiding in their residence.

A bloody repression at the time by the Joint Forces of Uruguay (FF.CC.) against the insurgents had been brewing for days, as a result of a betrayal that had revealed the exact location of the hiding places of part of the movement’s leadership in Montevideo.

Ivette’s cries asking for the fire to stop, “because they were completely unarmed” when the Uruguayan police operation began to capture Eleuterio Fernandez and David Campora, from the Tupamaros-National Liberation Movement, were unsuccessful.

At the age of 40, Martirena was riddled with bullets when he opened the door of his house. They left him to bleed to death. His wife was murdered with a shot to the mouth, according to the Sitios de Memoria Uruguay website.

The couple had two daughters who, luckily, were at school at the time of the police raid.

According to the official stories disseminated by the FF.CC., there was “an intense shooting between the belligerent forces,” but what happened there was the treacherous assassinations of unarmed people, according to witnesses Eleuterio Fernandez and David Campora, who survived the operation.

In addition to being Prensa Latina’s correspondent in Montevideo, Martirena had been the director of the Havana correspondent’s office from December 1970 to mid-1971.

The news of his horrendous death caused deep sorrow in Cuba, especially among his colleagues at the Latin American news agency, Prensa Latina.

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