On with the War

It was an extraordinary factory that Venezuela's President Raul Leoni went out to visit 20 miles from Caracas. Arriving at the site carved out of a hillside, he was shown around a one-story building and cautioned to follow his guides closely: the area was infested with booby traps. The place was a well-equipped munitions plant turning out everything from mortar shells to land mines for Castroite F.A.L.N. terror ists--thus proving once again Fidel Castro's determination to rip the hemisphere with Communist "wars of national liberation."

Acting on a tip, Leoni's secret police had closed in the night before, found bunks, medical supplies and a Russian flag in the building. A heavy, hydraulically operated concrete door led to a cavern in the hillside behind the house. There, in a vault-shaped room, was an impressive arsenal of weapons: a 20-mm. cannon, a 3.5-in. bazooka, stacks of rifles, pistols, homemade mortar tubes and hundreds of shells, grenades and shaped demolition charges. With lathes, presses and other tools--and a gasoline generator to power them--terrorists had been turning out enough arms to supply a small army.

The whole setup belonged to the Castroite F.A.L.N., which gets its training, its philosophy and much of its funds from Cuba. In the past five years, an estimated 500 Venezuelans have gone through Cuban terrorist schools and returned home to kill cops, rob banks, blow up pipelines and make sporadic attacks on backland towns. The guerrillas now have about 600 men under arms. So far they have failed to win much support from Venezuela's peasants, who form the backbone of President Leoni's reform-minded Ace ion Democrdtica party. Yet some 5,000 government troops have rarely been able to kill or capture more than one or two of the elusive guerrillas at a time, and their continuing presence unsettles the entire country.

Guerrillas All Around. More or less the same thing goes on in other Latin American countries. In Peru, 2,000 government troops have been chasing 1,300 guerrillas through the highlands for six months. In Colombia, Castro's man is Pedro Antonio Marin, 35, a bandit-turned-Communist who leads 100 guerrillas responsible for dozens of rural murders. In Guatemala, Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, 34, a onetime army lieutenant with U.S. training, leads a 150-man band that recently bushwhacked an army patrol, killing two soldiers.

The experience of the civil war in the Dominican Republic shows how much trouble a group of well-prepared Castroites can cause when given such an opportunity. At the OAS foreign ministers meeting in Rio next week, a prime topic will be what kind of armed response the hemisphere should organize to meet the threat of Castroites waiting to capitalize on weakened governments. The suggestions will range from a permanent multilateral peacekeeping OAS force to a more limited group of volunteer countries that would establish a strike force for emergencies. With continuing Castroite subversion in prospect, those emergencies seem sure to come. As a member of the Dominican Republic's Castroite 14th of June Movement puts it: "Any Latin American country that has a mountain can expect to have guerrillas."

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