[2] The indignation of the students had originated because during the electoral campaign, Chirinos visited the installations of the Agronomy and Veterinary faculty accompanited by Tiburcio Linares, who would become the Secretary General of the university, promising to improve the dining hall without raising the fee.
Edmundo Chirinos decided to personally call the viceminister of interior relations Cesáreo Espinal Vásquez and ask him to stop the passage of the students to the capital, without consulting his administrative team.
After the assembly in the Aula Magna, there was violent unrest on the Plaza de Las Tres Gracias, where various vehicles were burnt by protestors and there was a confrontation between them and the Caracas Metropolitan Police, in which one student died and many were detained by the National Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP).
In Mérida the city was completely overridden by the riots of the students of the ULA, who burned the district house of the Democratic Action party and attacked the governor's office; the protest caused several injuries among policemen, police and national guards, besides the suspension of classes for several days.
A group of student leaders of UCV met with Octavio Lepage and his vice-minister Cesáreo Espinal Vásquez, where the governor of Caracas, Carmelo Lauría, was also present, as well as the commander of the Metropolitan Police, Marcos Adolfo Pacheco.
(...) what happens in the national universities it is simply the representation of a very serious distortion of our education, but the fact that subversive agents want to take the occasion to carry out their purposes is a different matter, and the youth should not play the role of useful idiots.
Octavio Lepage also attributed the responsibility to minority leftist groups "who do not conceive of life without violence", criticizing the machine-gunning but considering the detention of the buses in accordance with the law.
COPEI called on the government to clarify the statements about the subversive groups involved in the shooting, requesting Chirinos to resign from the chancellorship and assume his responsibility before the students and the country.
[1] Although Chirinos' staff supported his decision, arguing that he had acted in accordance with the law in the context of the fact that the students had hijacked the buses, a group of sixty-four professors, including Nora Castañeda and Simón Sáez Mérida, most of whom had spoken in favor of Chirinos' election during the campaign, published a communiqué requesting his resignation under the following arguments: For the first time in the history of the university, a democratically elected chancellor resorts to extra-university forces to resolve conflicts in the community.
The distorting maneuver that pretends to present the facts as the result of alleged subversive activities, a convenient and hackneyed excuse to which government spokespersons permanently resort to avoid responsibility and hide the reality, must be prevented at all costs.
Edmundo Chirinos declared that the action of the National Guard had been unconscionable, defending himself by saying that in a single trimester his administration had been the most successful in the history of the university, considering it unfair to condemn him for the incident.