Red Surge

Earnest, persuasive Communist organizers spread out through Caracas slums last week while Red intellectuals addressed classrooms and civic clubs. Their aims: trebling party membership, raising a $150,000 fund to finance party newspapers, and running an intensive "educational, political and ideological campaign among the Venezuelan masses." At a round-table meeting in Caracas, Communist Boss Gustavo Machado sat down cheerily with the leaders of Venezuela's four other parties. His aim: to get an important hand in naming a single unity candidate for President in the November election. Pouring into the political vacuum left by the January overthrow of Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, Venezuela's Communists saw a bright Red future ahead.

Infiltrating. Party membership stands at 26,000, plus a sizable number of secret members who are busily infiltrating the other parties. Cells are working hard in schools, unions and virtually every civic, professional and business group. A member of the Caracas city council is a Communist. So is a member of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the vice president of the Student Federation, the dean of journalism at Caracas' Central University.

Communists exercise decisive power in the daily press. Item: when known Communists were caught with a cache of Molotov cocktails near one of the points on Vice President Nixon's canceled tour of Caracas, every paper except the Roman Catholic La Religion kept the story out of print. But when one of the arrested anti-Nixon rioters explained that he had joined in for a frolic and had no Communist ties, the story got headlines.

A chief Communist weapon is smearing the U.S. and U.S. business. Newspapers trumpet wild charges, e.g., that the U.S. military advisory mission is plotting a coup. U.S. housewives on shopping trips have been heckled with shouts of "Yankee go home," and on Caracas' new Armed Forces Avenue, crude painted signs urge "death to the imperialistic Yankees." Venezuelan schoolchildren only seven and eight years old came out of one grammar school chanting memorized anti-U.S. slogans. In good-humored rebuttal, U.S. oilmen, who have kept Venezuelan oil flowing through dictatorship and revolution, are forming the SPCAID--"Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to American Imperialist Dogs."

Smiles & Hopes. For the record, non-Communist Venezuelan leaders are making mild protestations. Rafael Caldera, speaking for his Christian Socialist Copei, Democratic Action (A.D.) and the Democratic Republican Union (U.R.D.), politely turned down the idea of a Popular Front because of the Communist Party's "concept of state order and its international obligations." Last week A.D. Boss Romulo Betancourt said that his party "does not want Communist help," and Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal, chief of the five-man military junta, declared that he was a Roman Catholic and that "Catholicism and Communism are antagonists." But the politicians' deeds are less impressive. Machado's presence at the president-picking session, for example, was a Popular Front at work.

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