Siege of Puerto Cabello

An uneasy peace settled over Venezuela after a week in which warring wings of the armed forces engaged in some of the bitterest fighting in Venezuela's modern history. Residents of Puerto Cabello, a city of 80,000 lying beside the nation's largest naval base 75 miles west of the Caracas capital, buried their dead and started to clean up their shell-pocked city. Official casualty figures for the military were 47 dead, 89 wounded. But unofficial estimates put the toll, including civilians, at more than 300.

In most Latin American nations, the military is rightist--forming an elite of its own, or serving as mercenaries ready to protect the ruling oligarchy. Venezuela is a more complex case. The country is deeply troubled despite the wealth that gushes from its U.S.-run oil wells and despite a reform-minded government run by President Romulo Betancourt, 54, a onetime far leftist who has turned to the democratic center. Some of Betancourt's angriest opposition comes from the Communists and far left that he long ago abandoned, and there are powerful leftist elements within the armed forces. His support comes from the country at large and from the bulk of the military, which prefers his mild welfare statism to Communist upheaval.

Marines & Guerrillas. Last week's rebellion, the second in a month, broke out in the marine corps. Given a little more luck, Betancourt might have put it down with a minimum of fighting. Striking before dawn, three malcontent pro-Castro officers imprisoned the naval base's commanders and started broadcasting a call to rebellion. Their appeal was ignored. Within hours loyal navy units had won back the base and arrested the rebel officers and their followers. But the rebels were in control just long enough to dispatch a force of 700 marines to occupy the city of Puerto Cabello, and to release 66 anti-Betancourt civilian guerrillas from the base prison. The guerrillas were each given two machine guns and went to join a group of rabidly pro-Castro students in town.

The first loyal National Guard units that tried to move into the city of Puerto Cabello were chopped to pieces by cleverly emplaced .50 cal. machine guns. The government grimly gathered reinforcements--a company of paratroopers, artillerymen with mortars and Jeep-mounted 106-mm. recoilless rifles, 20 French AMX light tanks, 3,000 regular army troops.

They, too, were ambushed. At a main intersection, the rebels let three tanks pass without firing a shot. As the fourth AMX rumbled past, the rebels opened up.

Ten of the twelve men crouching behind the tank were cut down. A Venezuelan navy chaplain stepped into the street and walked from body to body calling "Hijo, hijo" (Son, son) until he found one badly wounded soldier still alive. He tried to lift the wounded man, and a burst of machine-gun fire spattered at his feet. The wounded man started crawling out of the line of fire, and the rebels finished him off.

Point-Blank. As the government column inched through town, dozens of men were killed by rebels firing from windows and rooftops. Not until tanks blasted Puerto Cabello's hospital at point-blank range did its rebel defenders give up; students holed up in the high school fought on bitterly. In one classroom, Betancourt's troops found a huge portrait of Fidel Castro. They carried it outside, shredded it with their burp guns, and got on with the bloody, block-by-block fighting.

Some of the captured marines told a confused and hardly believable story: they had been hoodwinked by their officers and thought they were fighting for the government, not against it. Under no such illusions, the civilians were sullenly unrepentant. A youth of 16 stepped from his sniper's post and handed his automatic rifle to the soldiers. "Do what you want to me," he said. "I've already killed seven men." It took two more days to chase the last snipers into the hills around Puerto Cabello.

Betancourt went before a National Peasants' Congress to denounce the uprising as a joint operation of the Venezuelan Communist Party and the Castroite Movement of the Revolutionary Left. Was it tolerable, asked Betancourt, "that these parties, with representation in Congress, become implicated in conspiracies that lead to the shedding of Venezuelan blood?" Reinforcing Betancourt's charge was the capture of two Castro-Communist federal Deputies among the Puerto Cabello rebels.

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