Adhesion

"Think," said President Marcos Perez Jimenez, "of a country convulsed in political battle; of different parties, each trying to get votes by speeches filled with threats and defamation mixed with promises and offers of wellbeing; of streets in cities and towns painted and papered to the saturation point with posters designed to incite; of the populace abandoned to discussion and mental struggles, to screaming and tumult." It made a horrifying picture, but Venezuela's dictator was able to reassure his own people last week that they, at any rate, were in no great danger of free political discussion and debate. Instead, he energetically pressed his own no-party, me-or-nothing version of an election: a plebiscite set for Dec. 15.

In splashy newspaper advertisements, businessmen prudently lavished praise on Perez Jimenez' substitute for free elections. The semiofficial press carried supplements as long as twelve pages crammed with nothing but the names of citizens expressing their "adhesion" to the government. The President ordered all businesses in booming Venezuela to pay out their compulsory Christmas bonuses ($60 million this year) before the election not after.

The government's authorization of voting by foreigners, and its heavy pressure for everyone to vote, disturbed the 70,000 U.S. citizens who live in Venezuela, until the U.S. embassy got them off the hook by warning them that they could lose U.S. citizenship if they voted. Also troubled by the one-man election: university students, particularly in Roman Catholic schools, where resentment ran high against the jailing, ever since September, of Rafael Caldera, once the Christian Socialist presidential hopeful. But after a spate of student demonstrations a fortnight ago, most colleges are temporarily closed. "The agitators can only stir up students," said Pedro Estrada, chief of the Seguridad Nacional. "They cannot stir up the workers, because everyone is making so much money."

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