Jets over Caracas

The best air force in South America, a 200-plane wing including Canberras, Sabre jets and Vampires, rose in revolt last week against its commanding officer, Venezuela's Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, 43. Because the airmen quickly lost heart when other armed forces failed to join them, the revolution failed. But Major General Perez Jimenez, far from relaxing over an easy win, was left nervous and nettled.

As though he had to read of his success to believe it, the strongman ordered every newspaper in Venezuela to print frontpage editorials denouncing the uprising. Quick to refuse was the Rev. Jesus Hernandez Chapellin, editor of the Roman Catholic daily La Religion. Perez Jimenez jailed the priest, kept him jailed even after the government canceled its order to the press. At week's end, shorn of the belief that the armed forces were 100% behind him, and battling the Catholic Church, the pudgy dictator wore an unsettled look strangely reminiscent of Argentina's Juan Peron in 1955, when that strongman, to his later regret, angered airmen and churchmen simultaneously.

Grabbed Officers. The blowup was triggered on New Year's Eve in Caracas; Brigadier General Hugo Fuentes, the tall, gaunt commander of Venezuela's 20,000-man ground forces, was on his way to the President's reception when secret police arrested him. Grabbed at the same time was Colonel Jesus Maria Castro Leon, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff. An agent of the internal spy net, the Seguridad Nacional, posing as an air force officer, had tabbed Colonel Castro Leon as leader of the plotting airmen, and General Fuentes head army plotter. The arrests did not unduly alarm President Perez Jimenez. At the reception, strutting and cocky because he had efficiently re-elected himself in a one-candidate plebiscite a fortnight before (TIME, Dec. 30), he announced an amnesty for the 3,000 oppositionists jailed during what had passed for an election campaign. Already free--and given 17 days to get out of the country--was Christian Socialist Rafael Caldera, who would have been the Catholic Party's candidate for President had not the dictator jailed him four months ago. Jovially, the President went on to a midnight dinner.

At the two main air bases near Maracay, 50 miles west of the capital, news of the arrests electrified Major Luis Evencio Carrillo, paratroop battalion commander, and a dozen air force officers of equal or lesser rank. Mostly U.S.-trained and democratically minded, they had apparently planned to rebel much later. Instead, New Year's Eve turned into a night of feverish speedup. From their barracks the paratroopers and others smoothly took over the city of Maracay (pop. 80,000) and the air bases. Before 6:30 a.m., two Sabre jets whined off to Caracas. Over Radio Maracay, the rebels announced: "We have cornered the gangster who surrounded himself with thieves and murderers."

Crazy Cowboys. Over Caracas at sunup the jets made lazy passes as a sign for disaffected army garrisons in the capital to rise up. Instead, tanks clanked up Urdaneta Avenue to ring presidential Miraflores Palace; 40-mm. antiaircraft guns sprouted from the roofs of the palace and the Defense Ministry across the street. At 11 a.m. four Sabre jets, three Vampires and three elderly light bombers began to cut through holes in the clouds and buzz the city low across rooftops. "Those crazy cowboys!" remarked a watching Pan American pilot from his poolside deck chair at the Hotel Tamanaco, a mile or two away. In the afternoon, as a more urgently signaled plea for army help, the airmen strafed the palace and Seguridad headquarters, dropped four bombs (only one burst, killing no one). A Vampire, hit, trailed black smoke, landed at a nearby commercial airport.

That night the government sent two motorized battalions rolling down the superhighway to Maracay, warned rebels to surrender by 1:30 a.m. At the air bases, hopes flagged fast. At 1 o'clock Major Carrillo and 16 other young officers took off for refuge in Barranquilla, Colombia, 475 miles westward; as a defiant--and unnerving--last gesture, they used Perez Jimenez plush-job DC-4, with trusted Personal Pilot Martin Parade flying. Ironically, the attacking battalions paused part way at Los Teques and began going over to the uprising just as the airmen fled; when the army units were talked into surrender the next morning, the revolt was over.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of "enemies of the peace" were jailed. Tanks kept cars and pedestrians two blocks away from Miraflores Palace. All was quiet, but the talk in Caracas was of "the next try," under better organized military men, perhaps aided by the civilians, who kept their arms folded this time.

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