How to Get a Quorum

After the first two days' returns in the November election showed the opposition Democratic Republican Union (U.R.D.) far in front, Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez brazenly ordered a "more correct" count. Last week he was able to announce that his official party had won a sweeping majority in the new constituent assembly. Only one electoral problem remained in the way of his expected election as President by the assembly next month, and the colonel dealt firmly with that.

So many seats, especially in Caracas, had been certified to the U.R.D. and COPEI opposition parties in the two days of free vote-counting that the boss's majority fell short of the two-thirds needed to assure a quorum for assembly business. The dictator took characteristic action to make sure that members of the parties from which he had snatched victory would not boycott the new assembly.

U.R.D. Chief Jovlto Villalba and five colleagues were summoned to the office of Perez Jimenez' Minister of Government. After a two-hour session during which Villalba stoutly refused to commit U.R.D. assembly members against a boycott until after a party convention in January, secret police seized the six men at the minister's door, held them incommunicado overnight, and next morning shipped them by government plane to Panama. Handed their passports in mid-air by the pilot, the U.R.D. leaders were dumped at Panama without money, a change of clothes or even their toothbrushes. Protesting this "fascist stratagem," Villalba bitterly refused to predict that U.R.D. assembly members left in Venezuela would dare stand up to Perez Jimenez after such a show of force.

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