Venezuela

on the World Today

IN the national election of November 30, Venezuela’s voters ran up an overwhelming majority against a military junta government which ostensibly held control of the situation. It was one of the few times in Latin American history that such a strong showing had been made by an opposition group. But a counterphase immediately followed. Near midday on December 1, the government imposed a blackout on news of the election returns and took over the counting. As a result, the junta was able to announce on December 2 that its own Independent Electoral Front party had 570,123 votes against 473,880 for the major opposition party (called the Democratic Union for a Republic) and 138,003 for a Catholic-led Christian socialist coalition known as Copei.

This was a hefty reversal of obvious polling trends even by standards of the Caribbean republics. The last official figure, released on December 1, with more than a fourth of the ballots counted, had given the U.R.D. party 294,000 and Copei 89,000 to the government party’s 147,000. And late in the afternoon of December 1 the New York Times, in a telephone talk with a private source in Caracas, learned that the U.R.D.-Copei vote had been unofficially tabulated at 656,000.

The government had to act fast. On December 2 the three-man junta resigned to the ranking officers of the Venezuelan armed services (which had created it four years earlier), and before the day was over, the top brass named Colonel Marcos Pérez Jiménez, dominant junta member, Provisional President.

Shortly afterward it was announced that in the 103-man Constituent Assembly which the November 30 election was called to choose, the government party had won 49 seats to 25 for the U.R.D. and 7 for Copei. There was no doubt that with an adroit use of its counting facilities in the electoral districts the Pérez Jiménez regime would rig itself up a working majority.

The road ahead for the new Provisional President looked easy. The army, for the moment, feeling the weight of popular distaste for a military regime, appeared to be more solidly united behind its outstanding colonel than it had been behind the junta. The rigged majority in the Constituent Assembly reasonably guaranteed that at any convenient time after its scheduled opening session on January 10, the legalistic forms could be carried out to elect Pérez Jiménez Provisional President by a civilian vote.

A general strike was attempted but failed, and the opposition appeared to have no more formidable resistance to offer than a crackle of irreverent witticisms in the dark corners of bars and cafés. Most of these had to do with the question, What made Pérez Jiménez a thief?

The stock answer, with variations, was: He was so confident of winning an election that he went crazy and held an honest one. So when the vote knocked him back to his normal attitude, he had to steal it.

A long-term revolt

The big anti-government vote on November 30 strongly indicates that Venezuela, like half a dozen other Latin republics from Argentina to Central America, is deeply launched on a long-term revolt. It is a revolt by a rural peasantry living on bare subsistence standards. It is also a revolt by a fastgrowing class of low-paid, impoverished city and town workers against the control of the state and the country’s resources by an immensely rich aristocracy. It is a protest, nonviolent for the present, against the military strong-arm methods and the constant political trickeries with which the controlling group has denied the Venezuelan people an effective voice in their government and prevented them from claiming a share of the national prosperity.

Above and beyond political objectives, the popular movement expresses a demand for rapid improvements in living standards. The Venezuelan masses would naturally like their living conditions to compare favorably with the lavish ones they have learned about from Hollywood movies, American social betterment programs conducted by Point Four technicians and the Rockefellers, and the luxuries displayed bv the oil-royalty and new-business millionaires, the large landowners, and the government grafters who compose the homegrown aristocracy.

In open and underground phases this kind of protest has now been under way in Venezuela for more than seven years. It began with a military coup in October, 1945, on behalf of a new but fantastically growing political party called Acción Democrática. The coupists, who incidentally included the present dictator, Pérez Jiménez, promptly installed an exceptionally competent, mildly leftist party leader, Romulo Betancourt, as Provisional President, and Acción Democrática ran the government for the next three years. During that time it gave the Venezuelans enough political liberties so that the movement has never died.

Acción Democrática, for instance, held a free and strictly honest election for a Constituent Assembly in 1946. The next year the Assembly produced a Constitution which provided universal suffrage for all Venezuelans, men and women, guaranteed a secret ballot and control of polls and vote-counting operations by joint electoral boards of all contending parties, and made both registration and voting compulsory. To make voting easy for Venezuela’s several thousand illiterates, different-colored ballots were supplied for the different political parties.

In this sort of election late in 1947, Acción Democrática’s candidate, Rómulo Gallegos, a professional educator and an outstanding South American novelist, won the presidency by a majority of more than 70 per cent of all the votes cast. Gallegos and a constitutional Congress took office in February, 1948, and busied themselves at once carrying out Acción Democrática’s plans for long-range agricultural and irrigation development, road building, low-cost public housing, and a greatly enlarged public school system.

Toward the end of the year, however, President Gallegos tried to bring the military into constitutional subordination to the civilian government and was tossed out of office in November, 1948, by a military coup which set up a ruling junta, suspended Congress and the Constitution, outlawed Acción Democrática as a political party, exiled Gallegos and Betancourt and most of the members and ex-members of their cabinets, and either jailed or drove out of the country hundreds of local and congressional leaders belonging to Acción Democrática.

For the four years since then, the junta has ruled by the harsh methods of Latin American military dictators, flavored with rigid censorship of political news and frequent waves of police terrorism. Every form of public disturbance or commotion was used as a pretext for getting tough with members of Acción Democrática. Discoveries of bomb caches and barrack disorders in the provinces usually led to dozens of arrests and the liquidation of a few “resisters” by gunfire.

Under the circumstances Acción Democrática went underground. But apparently, except for its jailbirds, exiles, and a few minor leaders who were won over as government stooges by the junta’s favors, it thrived under persecution and tightened its secret lines of organization.

So when Pérez Jiménez felt himself forced last summer to order the Constituent Assembly elections — in order to regularize his position and to give the Venezuelan government a pleasant democratic façade for the Tenth Pan-American Conference scheduled to meet in Caracas during 1953 — he found himself in a considerable quandary as to what to do about Acción Democrótica’s manifest voting strength.

The underground organization was outlawed, to be sure, from taking part in the elections as an official party, but there was no way to disenfranchise nearly a million A.D. members who had voted for Gallegos in 1947. The junta did not even know who they were.

The junta’s local officials in every part of the republic had spent four years building up the goxernment’s Independent Electoral Front party by favors to joiners and petty persecutions of opponents, and the junta’s boss-man relied on the old Latin American adage that an iron-fist regime in office can’t lose. On the opposition side, the U.R.D. movement was obviously growing but did not yet seem strong enough to be genuinely formidable. Copei was a middle-sized minority party which could supply a neat appearance of opposition in the Assembly but was not sufficiently opposed to the government on basic issues to make serious trouble.

Pérez Jiménez evidently accepted the tip, carefully spoon-fed to his secret police and intelligence agents by the underground, that the A.D. rank and file would show their disgust withe regime by casting blank ballots. But as the possibilities of a secret ballot procedure dawned on A.D. leaders, orders crackled out to the Acción Democrática over the underground radio to vote for Copei in the two states where it was strongest, and everywhere else in the republic for U.R.D. The big anti-government majority which forced Pérez Jiménez to reverse the election results was rolled up by the outlawed underground.

The army’s apparent union behind the new Provisional President should be regarded as highly tentative. For to every officer with political ambitions or an urge for quick promotion, the November 30 election conveyed the tempting information that a coup in fax or of Acción Democrática and the U.R.D. party which fronted for it would have nearly two thirds of the Venezuelan people behind it. If such a coup should encounter last-ditch resistance from the hard-boiled Pérez Jiménez and the beleaguered aristocracy, the result could be a civil war as vicious and prolonged as the one which has been going on for three years across Venezuela’s borders in the neighbor republic of Colombia.

Will Venezuela nationalize oil?

A struggle on such a scale would endanger more things than the peace and order of Venezuela. The U.R.D. party platform during the election campaign, for example, demanded for Venezuela a more than 50 per cent share of the revenues of American oil interests in the republic and of the half-billiondollar iron-mining industry noxv being built up in the Orinoco valley by the Bethlehem and United States Steel Companies. It also demanded that 50 per cent of the republic’s oil output be refined in Venezuela and 50 per cent of the iron ore production be put through the milling processes there.

Mario Briceno Irragorry, U.R.D.’s candidate for Provisional President in the Constituent Assembly, called for nationalization of both oil and iron ore interests on the pattern of Bolivia’s recent seizure of privately owned tin properties.

The tensions of a full-scale social war within the republic could hardly fail to sharpen these demands and transform them into major objectives of a people’s revolt. The obvious close connections between the oil interests and the Venezuelan wealthy aristocracy would make the foreign investments a natural target of a violent revolutionary movement.