Third-Time Loser

In downtown Caracas, where names are given to blocks and street corners (rather than to streets), is a block known as Cipreses-to-Velasquez. There one day last week, during the early-morning bustle of market-bound housewives, the political police closed in on the grill-windowed colonial house numbered 12/1. After a thundering fusillade, the cops charged upstairs and captured Alberto Carnevali, 36, commander of the underground resistance to Venezuela's provisional President, Colonel Marcos Perez Jimenez.

Carnevali was the man most wanted by Pedro Estrada, the government's burly police boss. Since Estrada's cops killed Carnevali's predecessor, Leonardo Ruiz Pineda, on the streets of Caracas last October (TIME, Nov. 3), Carnevali has been the underground leader of Accion Democratica, the outlawed majority party. A governor and congressman in Accion Democratica's regime, Carnevali was jailed for ten months when the army took over in 1948, then exiled. He studied at Columbia University in Manhattan, later slipped back to Venezuela. Arrested again, he escaped from a government hospital aided by four A.D. agents disguised as interns.

Censorship screened details of his arrest last week, but the fact that some of the 13 men seized with him were students suggested that he may have been organizing the university and high school strikes currently plaguing Perez Jimenez' government. Even more significant was the presence of military officers among his interrogators at the Model Jail the day after his capture. Whether or not Carnevali had actually been subverting the army, Perez Jimenez' only real bulwark, the government was evidently taking no chances.

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