All but overshadowed by rancorous debate over who provoked the April 12-14
                 removal of the president are the 18 people like Ochoa who were killed and hundreds
                 more like Recio who were wounded during an opposition march April 11.

                 In all, 38 slayings were officially recorded during several days of violence around
                 the coup, though dozens more are believed to have died.

                 Three men charged with homicide were released by a judge for lack of evidence,
                 outraging the families of victims. They were rearrested Thursday after the Supreme
                 Court overruled the judge's decision.

                 A bitterly divided Congress has yet to issue its report on the coup, including the
                 presence of rooftop snipers who fired on civilians, police and ambulance crews.
                 Efforts to create an independent "truth commission" have stalled.

                 The stories of Ochoa and Recio show no one was spared in a nation deeply
                 wounded by the events of April and deeply divided over the radical changes of its
                 populist president.

                 The morning of April 11, Cilenia Moreno watched her husband, Cesar Ochoa, trek
                 up a flight of narrow dusty steps from their hillside tin shack. Ochoa, 38, was
                 proud to be going to his $300-a-month job that day. He was defying a general strike
                 called by business and union leaders to protest Chavez's rule.

                 Ochoa didn't tell his wife he planned to join Chavez supporters after work in a rally
                 outside the Miraflores presidential palace. Perhaps it was because she despises
                 Chavez, and discussing politics always sparked an argument.

                 When he didn't come home, Moreno had a horrible feeling.

                 "I just knew he had joined the 'Chavistas,"' she says, sitting on a fraying couch. "He
                 loved Chavez. He'd get really mad whenever I said anything bad about him."

                 After waiting all night, Moreno made frantic phone calls to hospitals and friends.
                 The evening news confirmed the worst: Ochoa was among the names of those
                 killed the day before. She went to the city morgue, where she saw her husband's
                 body, ripped by a single bullet.

                 A co-worker of Ochoa's told her as much as he knew: The two were on a bus
                 heading home when they passed the palace. Security forces were struggling to keep
                 a huge opposition march from colliding with thousands of Chavez supporters.
                 Ochoa hopped off. That was the last he saw of Ochoa.

                 Prosecutors asked Moreno to produce a witness to her husband's shooting, but she
                 knows of no one.

                 "Someone has to pay for this," she says, absently straightening the hair of her
                 4-year-old daughter, Yorogelis.

                 Her other daughter, Anabel, 7, speaks up shyly. "We were on television," she says
                 wide-eyed. Reporters interviewed the family, Moreno explains. Her children don't
                 understand what happened.

                 In a dark corner of the room, a small snapshot of Ochoa, smiling in his crisp
                 waiter's uniform, leans against a pink carnation and a white candle.

                 Moreno buried her husband in his home state of Yaracuy in western Venezuela. The
                 couple had been saving to move there and escape Caracas' crime and constant
                 turmoil. Their shanty leaks. Stray dogs and chickens prowl the crowded ally. Police
                 patrol in bulletproof vests. Rains and mudslides recently destroyed 30 shacks.

                 It's only a few miles but a world away from Jorge Recio's home, where the
                 39-year-old free-lance photographer lies on a hospital bed three months after a
                 bullet shattered his spine.

                 Paralyzed from the waist down, he tells his story wearily. But his voice rises when
                 he assigns blame for the April 11 violence.

                 Recio is the son of a corporate executive. Most people in his upper-middle class
                 world blame the government for the deaths, but Recio blames the opposition, to the
                 dismay of his staunchly anti-Chavez father.

                 Recio hurried to Miraflores when he heard that opposition marchers were headed
                 there. He felt violence was brewing, and he wanted to document it.

                 Recio began photographing Chavez supporters throwing stones. A few fired guns.
                 He says they appeared to be aiming at Metropolitan Police officers shielding the
                 opposition marchers several blocks away.

                 The Metropolitan Police force, which reports to a mayor who opposes Chavez,
                 seemed to be clearing the way for the marchers, using a water cannon and tear gas
                 to disperse the Chavistas, Recio says.

                 He doesn't remember exactly when the snipers opened fire, only that bullets were
                 spraying down like hail. He took cover behind a newspaper stand with a woman
                 and her child, and remembers the little girl crying, "Mommy, I'm hurt." She had
                 been shot in the arm.

                 Using his camera as a shield, Recio raced the girl to a makeshift emergency center
                 that had been set up inside the palace.

                 He then returned to the street, a decision he now calls "stupid." From behind a wall
                 he snapped more pictures, including one of the bloodstain that the little girl had left
                 behind. Then he decided it was time to get out.

                 Someone shot him from behind. The rest is a blur: people helping him to an
                 ambulance; doctors operating; the fear of death gripping him; waking up to learn
                 that Chavez had been ousted.

                 A physical therapist works with Recio three times a week to strengthen his upper
                 body. Friends and family help him urinate every three hours. They also help him
                 bathe with a hose in the yard.

                 Newspapers and magazines are strewn about his small apartment, a sunny annex to
                 his parents' comfortable suburban home. One magazine has a report on the April 11
                 violence featuring Recio's vivid photos.

                 A television is tuned to Globovision, Venezuela's 24-hour news station. Recio
                 monitors political developments closely. He taped all 200 hours of congressional
                 hearings on the coup.

                 "It was criminal of opposition leaders to send the march to Miraflores," he says.
                 "Anyone could have predicted there would be violence. It's obvious that someone,
                 in a premeditated way, was looking for dead bodies."

                 After the April 11 shootings, dissident generals forced Chavez to step down -- a
                 move that provoked bloody street protests that swept the former army paratrooper
                 back to power a little over 48 hours later.

                 The streets around Miraflores are controlled now by Chavistas who repeatedly have
                 repulsed opposition marches.

                 Many Venezuelans are convinced the April 11 violence was planned _ either by
                 Chavez's opponents or by the president himself. One group of victims has filed a
                 complaint with the Supreme Court charging Chavez with crimes against humanity.

                 Few people seem to believe politics will ever allow the truth to emerge.

                 Recio has given up hope of resuming his photography career. He has a degree in
                 philosophy, so perhaps he'll become a professor, he says with a shrug, staring out a
                 window.

                 "More than the guy who shot me, I want to know who ordered him to shoot. But I
                 think that will be even harder to find out," he says.

                 Across town, Moreno blames Chavez for her husband's death. Maybe both sides
                 fired that day, she says, "but Chavez is responsible, because he let the situation
                 come to this."

                  Copyright 2002 The Associated Press.