Feeling fear is one thing. Feeling terror is another.

There was a night when I felt terror head-on in my own face. Many years ago when I was studying in medical school an event happened that none of us who live in the university city of the Venezuelan Andes will ever forget in our lives.

It was 6:30 pm on March 13, 1987, it just so happened to be birthday, but we had an exam the next day and I couldn't celebrate my birthday because I was busy studying with my classmates.

There in the city of the Andes we used to meet at the parks to study. I had my car, so together with my friends we went to “Las Heroinas Park” which becomes very crowded by students in the evenings.

I had to go to my house to look for something that I forgot, but while I was going to the apartment I turned on the radio and suddenly heard the musical touch that accompanies the narrators of the news, the sound that comes when the news are bad. I only heard that a student was in the university hospital in a very bad condition and I panicked! Something serious was happening.

One of the streets I go through to get to my apartment was closed and there were many students lighting tires and closing tracks. I kept running in my car, stopped at the apartment, picked up what I had to look for and ran down again. I kept the radio on as I went to the park where my colleagues were waiting.

When I arrived I told them what I saw on the street and what I still couldn't understand but the radio announcers were saying something about a wounded man and his condition. I also told them that something ugly happened because of the things that were happening near my apartment but that I didn’t know exactly what was going on. We stayed in the car listening to the news and shortly after that the announcer said that a student was seriously injured, that they subjected him to an emergency surgery, but the reality was that he had already died.

We saw each other's faces and, knowing in advance what this meant, we decided to go home. Because what always happens after something or someone harmed a student in the city of Merida, was always terrible. And so it was.

It was the longest night of my life. That day, March 13, many students were celebrating the completion of their studies, their graduation. On that occasion it was the turn of the students of the engineering school to celebrate. They made caravans with their cars and stopped and stopped their cars in many places to say goodbye to the places they frequented when they studied. It was something the entire city celebrated. And then, a student by the name of “Luis Carvallo” wanted to go to the bathroom, he got out of the car and saw a garage door by a house and decided to urinate there. The young man was making his withdrawal when the owner of the house came out, infuriated.

Just as the boy was leaving the site, the owner of the house shot him in the back, twice. Just one of the bullets embedded itself in the young man's spine, immediately falling lifeless to the floor. The other students pick him up, help him and take him quickly to the hospital, but the others who stayed…

Annoyed, they shouted, they tried to grab the murderer who shot the student boy. The man hid in his house.

Everything turned into a pandemonium in a second. The students who were still in class were warned that someone had just killed a graduate and the people who were in the university cafeteria arrived at the scene. Between all of them, rage controlling them, they broke walls, bars…

The people inside the house called for help, but the mob had already formed. The police arrived and was asked to safeguard the lives of the children and the wife of the man. They were taken from the house and the man was taken into custody.

But the students who moments before were celebrating were now lighting the house on fire. They burned the man's library, his car, his belongings, everything. He’s a lawyer, no book was left unburned. The walls were broken, the bars were taken off their bases and the walls that weren’t broken fell.

The student died. His worst mistake was urinating on the wall of a garage at a lawyer's home and the lawyer's worst mistake was shooting first, without saying a word to the student.

Those who were dazed by the news went out into the streets and, with the news that the boy had died in the hospital, they burned, looted, and destroyed everything they found. And to make matters worse for me, my apartment was just around the corner from where the lawyer who killed the young man lived.

I couldn't find where to park my car. Everywhere you could hear tear gas canisters exploding. Everyone was screaming, I was crying from the gas that I was breathing, but I had to go down to remove my car from the battle between the police and the students.

I took my car out of the front of the building, on the street, where I always left it, and parked it in the parking lot in front of the university. At that time of night, 10 pm, it was the safest place I found. Then I walked all the way back to the apartment and breathed again all the gas that was in front of the apartment, all this to safeguard my car.

I cried so much. For the smoke I swallowed, for the death of the young man, for the disaster that was happening in the city, even for my car that I had to abandon away from me, afraid that it would not be there tomorrow; protestors were destroying everything.

Disasters continued for several days in the city, for a week or so, with bloody riots and looting. Which led to an intervention from the “Guardia Nacional” (National Guard) that achieved absolutely nothing, battalions of military forces from other states arrived to try and stop the strong student and community protests, to the point that they tried to give a curfew to achieve calm in the city. Instead the city was militarized, but then other faculties throughout the country joined in carrying out riots in all the cities of the country in retaliation for the event that had transpired.

They gave this unfortunate historical event the name of "The Merida March." The student who died was the son of a professor at the science faculty of the student city. It was a very painful funeral ceremony for the student body and for the University of Mérida.

The lawyer's house was never again inhabited by its owners. The university students did not allow it, their attacks on the house were very thorough. Now it’s a historic place where all the students, every time they make their own graduation caravans, feel the desire to stop and pay their respects to the murdered student. For the most repudiated fact in the university city of the city of the Andes, for a senseless death, on the most important day in the life of every college student.

It was the worst birthday of my entire life. I still live in my memories the day a man murdered Luis Carvallo Cantor. March 13, 1987.