Time to Finish The Communist Bridgehead

Castroite terrorists have long made targets of Americans in Venezuela. In the past year the Castroite F.A.L.N. has bombed U.S. oil pipelines, set fire to U.S.-owned warehouses and stores, once boldly invaded the U.S. military mission and then put the place to the torch. "If the military advisers do not go home," warned the F.A.L.N. in a letter to the U.S. embassy, "Americans in Venezuela are going to be attacked." Last week the F.A.L.N. added kidnaping to its list of anti-American capers.

For the Publicity. The victim was Colonel James K. Chenault, 46, deputy chief of the U.S. Army mission in Venezuela for the last two years. Leaving his home one morning, he was greeted by four armed hoodlums, ordered into a white 1962 Chevrolet and whisked away. Soon after, a woman called the U.S. embassy to announce: "We just want him for propaganda purposes. We will not harm him." But then, as Venezuelan police hauled in more leftists, the phone calls turned nasty. The F.A.L.N. offered Chenault as a hostage: the colonel in exchange for 70-odd leftists recently jailed by the government. "Unless our comrades are turned loose," said the voice on the telephone, "we will not be responsible for the safety of the North American."

Chenault's kidnaping was only one bang in a string of F.A.L.N. fireworks last week. On the eve of Dec. 1 elections to choose a successor for out going President Romulo Betancourt, terrorists shot it out with Caracas police, fired on pedestrians, bombed power stations. Gift-wrapped bombs were sent to four of Venezuela's seven presidential candidates (all the packages were intercepted); five youths and a girl hijacked an Avensa airliner and forced the pilot to fly to Trinidad, where authorities arrested the hijackers and later turned them over to Venezuela.

By the Numbers. But such nasty little showboating stunts to disrupt the elections were not the only things the Castroites had in mind. Last week Be tancourt offered proof that Communist Cuba was sending in heavy arms ship ments for full-scale guerrilla warfare. On display in Caracas was an arsenal of three tons of F.A.L.N. weapons: 31 submachine guns, five 60-mm. mortars, 20 bazookas, 28 packages of plastic explosives, 81 Belgian automatic rifles with 20,000 rounds of ammunition. Most of the serial numbers and other markings were ground off. But one rifle still had a number -- it turned out to be part of a lot sold to Cuba in 1959 by Belgium's Fabrique Nationale. Chemical tests on a submachine gun brought up the faint outlines of the Cuban armed forces coat of arms. On other weapons, where the markings were obliterated, the position of the scrapings gave Castro away.

Calling in ambassadors of the hemisphere nations, Venezuela's Foreign Minister accused Castro of "an act of aggression." He announced that Venezuela would demand an emergency OAS Council meeting, and President Betancourt proposed a concerted hemisphere campaign to oust Castro from Cuba. "Joint action will be necessary," he said, "to finish with this bridgehead of Communism in Latin America."

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