The Worthless Promise

The conservative, landholding Arcaya family of Venezuela dates back more than four centuries; historians have called their original family seat, a fine colonial residence in Coro, the oldest two-story house in the hemisphere. Snowy-haired patriarch of the family is Pedro Manuel Arcaya, onetime minister to Washington, who at 82 still works in his famed private library (150,000 volumes in ten languages). His sons and nephews are lawyers or professional men, trained in the universities of Spain, Venezuela and the U.S.; his daughters and niece are society figures. One of the lawyers, nephew Ignacio, is also a politician, president (i.e., national chairman) of the middle-road Democratic Republican Union (U.R.D.)--a fact that has spelled bad trouble for the Arcayas.

In the national election of 1952, the U.R.D. inflicted a humiliating defeat on President Marcos Perez Jimenez' government party. The strong man--pausing only to recount the vote's in his own favor --angrily exiled Ignacio and three of Pedro Arcaya's children for good measure. Aristocratic Don Pedro and his wife were not bothered, but the ouster of her children so outraged Senora Arcaya that she took to spending hours on the telephone denouncing the dictator to her society friends. One Christmas the elder Arcayas found their phone, ripped out and tied with a red ribbon, on the doorstep.

Perez Jimenez' declaration early in February of an amnesty for political exiles excited and heartened the homesick expatriate Arcayas. Son Carlos and daughter Ana flew to Manhattan from Madrid. Eager but doubtful, they conferred with son Mariano, a Park Avenue lawyer. On advice from home, Ana went to Caracas and arrived unharmed. Carlos, a scholarly, nonpolitical lawyer, was picked to make the next test. The New York consul gave him a visa and General Perez Jimenez' word on the honor of the army that he would not be mistreated.

One morning last week Carlos stepped from a plane and set foot again on Venezuelan soil. Later the Arcayas waiting in Manhattan received a cable from a friend in Caracas: SPANISH MERCHANDISE DETAINED IN CUSTOMHOUSE. The cryptic message meant that Carlos had been jailed on arrival. A phone call next day confirmed it.

The broken promise plainly indicated that the amnesty was conceived from the beginning as a trap. Having failed to catch bigger game, it was sprung on Carlos Arcaya, presumably to wring from him information about other exiles.

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