The Lesson

The downfall of Venezuelan Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez last week drove home a lesson: prosperity is no substitute for liberty, and even the best-fed men will fight for freedom.

From the beginning of his strongman career in 1948, Perez Jimenez believed the reverse. "My country," he liked to say, "is not ready for democracy." He took the profits of Venezuela's oil-fed prosperity, lavished them on jobmaking monuments, public buildings, superhighways, military officers' clubs. Although he left the country's illiterate peasants and day laborers in hovels, he perched a luxury hotel, a glittering restaurant and an eye-popping skating rink on top of a mountain, connected them to Caracas and the sea with a soaring system of cable cars, then started boring a tunnel under the mountain. With such elaborate pump-priming to ensure economic wellbeing, he felt safe in crushing political independence. Who would want to pay the hard price of freedom so long as the government provided full employment and full bellies? Such glib judgments were proved hollow last week as Venezuelan rebels faced Perez Jimenez' machine guns without flinching in the streets of Caracas.

The Venezuelans' triumph was a source of hope throughout the Americas' free countries, a warning jolt to Latin America's last few strongmen (see box). Argentina, struggling to clean up the mess left by Juan PerOn, could face its first free post-PerOn general elections this month without the nagging threat of interference from the ousted dictator operating in plush exile in Perez Jimenez' Caracas. Colombia, lately rid of Dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, could get on with its rebuilding, proud of having set a good example and with fresh assurance that democracy holds the brightest promise. And the U.S., deeply involved in developing Venezuela's fabulous oil reserves, would be free of the necessity of doing business with one of the hemisphere's most cordially detested dictatorships.

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