Stormed Rotunda

Venezuela's counterpart of the French Bastille is Caracas' vast, dreadful Rotunda Prison, into one of whose small cells there were sometimes crammed as many as 34 shackled prisoners. Last week the Government which succeeded the long reign of implacable Dictator Juan Vicente Gomez removed the last political prisoner from the Rotunda to a new prison nearby. The Rotunda was opened as a museum piece of past tyrannies. The public was cordially invited to inspect its square quarter-mile of horrors.

The Venezuelan public filed in politely, took one look, promptly went berserk. Men, women and children, whose kinsmen and ancestors had died in Rotunda, smashed everything smashable, lugged away everything movable, ripped locks out of dungeon doors, wrenched bars from window-slits. Exhausted by an orgy of rage against stone & steel, they filed out into the bright noon of Caracas.

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