Early to Rise

Militant conspirators chose a dark hour just before dawn last week to attack the regime of picturesque President General Juan Vincente Gomez, famed 70-year-old Dictator of Venezuela.

As dawn neared, a battalion of Federal troops quartered near the Presidential palace in Caracas mutinied under the leadership of Chief-Conspirator Captain Rafael Alvarado. Two brother officers who would not join the mutiny were shot dead. Then, having tasted blood, the battalion rushed out at double quick march to seize the large supplies of arms always kept at the San Carlos Barracks.

By a quirk of fate, the commander of the barracks, General Eleazar Lopez Contreras, had slept poorly and was up at an unusually early hour. . . . In the nick of time, just before the revolted battalion rushed up, General Contreras succeeded in organizing a defense to the barracks. Bullets spotted for two hours. . . . The Gomez men won.

So definitive seemed the victory that President Gomez relaxed the usual rigid Venezuelan press censorship and permitted publication of all details. This was in sharp contrast to his conduct last month in suppressing for days all news of demonstrations by students who marched through Caracas shouting, "Down with the tyrant Gomez."

Rival Venezuelans, having submitted to Gomez for 20 years, now seem to want a change. Their decision to submit or to revolt is important to U. S. business because Venezuela has become in recent years the second largest oil producing country in the world--the U. S. being first.