Sullen Bargain

Sapped and rattled by the knowledge that his whole air force and units of the army had rebelled against him in Venezuela's frustrated New Year's revolt, Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez last week bargained sullenly for the right to go on occupying the presidency. His top generals surrounded Miraflores Palace with tanks and troops (presumably for the President's protection) and argued forcefully that the prestige of all the armed forces hung on making concessions to the anti-dictatorial feelings of the rebels and their covert sympathizers. Almost from the beginning, the military men demanded the heads of Laureano Vallenilla Lanz and Pedro Estrada.

Blundering Theorist. For five years Minister of Interior Vallenilla Lanz, 45, had been Perez Jimenez' chief flatterer, political soothsayer and official philosopher. Suave, well educated (at Paris' Sorbonne) and bookish, Minister Vallenilla mixed ideas from Mussolini, Thorstein Veblen and the U.S. fad of technocracy into a theory justifying dictatorship as the happiest state for Venezuelans. In working out what he called a "New National Ideal," Francophile, anticlerical Vallenilla Lanz led the dictator into many a blunder. One was December's unpalatable yes-or-no plebiscite for a second five-year term. Another was a conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, capped after the revolt by the jailing of five priests.

Pedro Estrada, 48, had headed the strongman's secret police, the Seguridad National, for five years. Rising from a gumshoe job under an earlier dictator, Estrada perfected the arts of spying, bribing, the third degree and rebellion spotting, and thus made himself an invaluable prop for Perez Jimenez. Caraquefios said that he "sleeps with his eyes open." Widely feared and hated among his own fellow citizens. Estrada ingratiated himself in slangy English with foreigners, especially U.S. citizens. "We have no political prisoners," Estrada liked to explain, "just people caught in terroristic activities."

Tension Relaxed. The pressure to oust Vallenilla and Estrada reached a peak one midnight last week with a resignation of the entire Cabinet. For 14 hours the officers at Miraflores haggled over new ministerial choices. Then Perez Jimenez, worn, jittery and angry, called in reporters. From the head of a huge table, he presented the new Cabinet, including eight high officers and five holdovers. They were, he said glumly, designated "in accord with the feelings of the national armed forces." With the new Cabinet came a new Seguridad chief. Significantly, he was a colonel, which in effect gave the army control of Seguridad. Almost at once, 300 youths surged into downtown Plaza Silencio, staged a window-smashing demonstration for liberty for political prisoners. But even before the demonstration the new Seguridad chief freed the five jailed priests.

Vallenilla Lanz fled by plane to Paris, Estrada to the Dominican Republic. The country's tension dropped sharply, but Venezuelans openly wondered whether Perez Jimenez could last until his inauguration day, April 19.

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