55 Command of the Aragua Police and a sergeant in the same office suggested to them that they shouldn’t leave since there was strange activity going on around Eduardo José Landaeta Mejías. There was no investigation regarding the alleged presence at the Central Police Command of the officers who participated in the extrajudicial execution that caused the death of Igmar Alexander Landaeta, who were at that Command asking for Eduardo José on the night before he was killed. Many of the procedures and much of the information sought by the officials in charge of the investigation were not carried out or sent. In this situation, either the requests were not repeated or were repeated years later. This was the case with the bullet trajectory, post-mortem fingerprints, and testimony regarding the planimetric survey, all of which are relevant for reconstructing the facts. Most of the officers summoned by the CSOP did not appear to make statements, and they were not told of their duty to collaborate in investigating the truth or informed of the penalties that their failure to appear could entail. 277. Before analyzing the criteria with respect to a reasonable period of time, the Commission emphasizes that Venezuela did not submit any arguments to justify the 15 year delay in the investigations. 278. Secondly, the Commission notes that the victim in this case was one person, whose identity could easily be determined, the facts were immediately known by the State, and the respective authorities had free access to the scene of the events. Consistent with the criteria of the Inter-American 307 Court, the Commission feels that this case was not particularly complicated. 279. In any case, the Commission notes that the failure to shed light on the facts, to conduct an investigation, and to punish all those responsible reflected the already detailed acts of omission on the part of the agencies that were responsible for the investigation. In particular, the Commission emphasizes that the case was totally inactive for periods of more than six months. The Commission notes with concern the fact that no steps were taken during the years 2000, 2001, and 2002 and from 2002 on it was Mr. Ignacio Landaeta Muñoz, Eduardo José’s father, who drove the investigation, asking that tests be conducted and denouncing the procedural delay. 280. Based on the foregoing considerations, the Commission concludes that the State failed in its duty to conduct a diligent and reasonably timely investigation regarding the death of Eduardo José Landaeta Mejías. This means that his next of kin had no effective judicial remedy in which the truth could be established, punishment could be imposed on the masterminds and perpetrators of the crimes, and appropriate reparations could be obtained. 3. The failure to investigate the interrelationship between the deaths of the Landaeta Mejías brothers and their linkage with the context 281. In addition to what has been established in the preceding sections, the Commission emphasizes that the investigations were conducted in isolation and individually. None of them seriously analyzed the interrelationship between the deaths of the two brothers, based on the evidence described in the corresponding section of this report. Nor did they analyze the facts in the light of the context of similar situations that occur quite frequently in Venezuela and that, in a large number of cases, continue to go unpunished. In that sense, the Commission feels that the institutions responsible for directing the investigations were responsible not only for taking the appropriate steps according to logical lines of investigation but also for determining whether in the instant case there was a link between the deaths and 308 whether those deaths reflected the pattern of extrajudicial executions existing at the time. The failure to 307 308 I/A Court HR., Vargas Areco Case. Judgment of September 26, 2006. Series C, No. 155. para. 103. In a similar vein, see: I/A Court HR. Case of Escué Zapata v. Colombia. Merits, Reparations and Costs. Judgment of July 4, 2007. Series C, No. 165. para. 106: “It is vital that the complexity of the matter, the context and the circumstances in which it occurred and the patterns that explain its commission must be taken into account when carrying out a due diligence in the investigative procedures.”