Dictator's Downfall

Marcos Peerez Jimenez made his biggest blunder by getting himself "reelected" President in a me-or-nobody plebiscite last Dec. 15. This cynical insult to the nation's honor drove air-force men to try a New Year's uprising. That revolt was crushed, but it touched off a rapid sequence of plots, civilian riots and student demonstrations that reached their inevitable climax last week.

Bells of Defiance. Triggering the last brutal round was a crudely mimeographed manifesto calling for a general strike. The strike showed sinews of strength from the start. The morning before the deadline, grocery stores were crowded by foresighted housewives laying in supplies; knots of grim-faced workers idled on street corners. Half an hour before strike time, steel shutters slammed down on store fronts, and the usual bumper-to-bumper downtown traffic dwindled away to eerie emptiness. Then, from steeple after steeple, bells clanged out the Roman Catholic Church's defiance of the dictator and the signal for the strike to start. Auto horns, usually muted under threat of a $100 fine, hooted in derisive chorus across the city.

In the street outside police headquarters, blue-helmeted cops jumped aboard open riot trucks and headed for the city's downtown squares. Armed with rifles, bayonets, pistols, machetes and tear gas, they blocked off the narrow cobblestoned streets leading to the squares to keep rioters from gathering. A shiny red truck whipped along one side of Plaza Bolivar spraying demonstrators with high-pressure streams of water colored with red dye, then circled the plaza of El Silencio, center of earlier riots. When the truck left there was silence, except for the clink of soldiers' bayonets. Then the noise of gunfire rattled across the deserted city, first from the northwest, where blocks of new middle-class apartments were going up, then closer to the colonial heart of the city as the rioters surged towards government headquarters.

Flaming bottles of gasoline crashed against buses; hard-pressed police squads fired deadly volleys into swirling bands of rebels, carted hundreds of demonstrators off to jail. Under the yellow stucco arcades of old buildings, the air was blue-grey with tear gas. At one point five schoolboys popped onto the roof of a building overlooking El Silencio, hurled stones at a police bus below. Six cops piled out, sprayed the tops of all the buildings with rifle fire.

No Bargains. From six other Venezuelan cities reports filtered into the capital of similar strikes and riots. Troops tried to enforce an emergency 6 p.m. curfew, but fighting blazed on into the night through echoing streets lit by blood-red neon signs. By now the cops and troops were firing wildly at shadows.

While the rioting was going on. Wolfgang Larrazabal, 46, chief of the Venezuelan navy, and eight other armed-forces officers met secretly at a Caracas military academy at 6 p.m., drew up an ultimatum giving the dictator until 10 p.m. to step down. To make the navy's position unmistakably clear, Rear Admiral Larrazabal (pronounced Lah-rah-sah-bahl) ordered nine destroyers to stand off Caracas' port of La Guaira with their guns trained on the shore. Army commanders, sickened by the sight of Venezuelan killing Venezuelan, joined the admiral's bid to end the fighting. Desperately, the dictator tried to bargain, but this time no one would listen. The military men stood firm: Perez Jimenez had to go.

A little after 2 a.m. an eleven-car caravan raced from Miraflores Palace along a four-lane highway towards Caracas' tiny, little-used Carlota Airport. In a silence broken only by far-off scattered shots, Carlota's runway lights blinked on. At 2:53 the four engines of a DC-4 sputtered into action; 15 minutes later the plane lifted west over the downtown section of the city. In a few minutes the plane's winking red light disappeared behind the mountains edging the city, and Perez Jimenez was gone, kited off after five years of one-man rule to exile in the Dominican Republic.

Revenge Reaction. At news of the dictator's downfall, Caracas became the scene of a strange mixture of wild celebration and savage fighting. Cheering crowds ran through the streets waving banners and screaming "Libertad!" at the top of their lungs. They raided the offices of the pro-Perez Jimenez newspaper El Heraldo, ransacked the building where the strongman had been declared winner of the plebiscite. They burst into the homes of the strongman and his officials, carried off furniture and set fires. Thirsting for revenge against Perez Jimenez' Security Police, they stormed through the narrow streets leading to the three-story police barracks. When they arrived a few political prisoners were being freed, and some of the cops were walking out with their hands held high in surrender.

The reaction was spontaneous, and reminiscent of Hungary's freedom fight. Howling with anger, the rioters fell on the hated Security cops, beat four of them to death. The rest retreated inside the building, broke out machine guns and rifles, and began firing for their lives. The battle raged bitterly for nine hours before the police fortress had been battered and set afire by army tank cannons; then the surviving cops surrendered and were trucked off to prison under army convoy.

Fury Spent. From the barracks, the mob turned on foreign embassies in which members of the ousted dictator's administration had sought asylum. They milled outside the Dominican embassy shouting insults at Perez Jimenez' friend, ousted Argentine Dictator. Juan PeroOn. They stormed the Nicaraguan embassy, found a Security Police official and shot him. After a day and night of looting, burning and hunting down cops, the mob's blood rage began subsiding. Larrazabal's emergency junta helped satisfy the rioters by abolishing the Security Police, arresting 196 of its chief agents. The junta promised to try them on charges of torturing or ill-treating prisoners, with special attention to a police inspector-general accused of presiding over electric shock and beating sessions in a formal dinner jacket. Cost of freedom in the week's casualties: 300 killed, more than 1,000 wounded.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.