The New Strategy

She tripped prettily off Viasa Flight 737 with her fiance, and was walking toward immigration at the Caracas terminal when sharp-eyed Venezuelan plainclothesmen decided she was too round to be real. When they searched Josefa Ventosa Jimenez, 22, they found that the fetching passenger from Rome was wearing a specially made girdle stuffed with 1,200 crisp $100 bills. Her companion, Alessandro Beltramini, 53, a Milan physician and longtime Communist, was also well padded: his vest yielded $150,000.

Though Caracas police in recent months have maintained a sharp lookout for couriers who they believe are funneling Soviet funds through Italy's Communist Party to Venezuela's terrorist Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), the doctor and his girl were the first suspects to be nabbed hot off a plane from Rome. Also arrested in Caracas last week, after intelligence reports of a conspiracy to overthrow the regime of President Raul Leoni, were 43 persons, including 13 members of the presidential guard.

Wars of Liberation. Throughout Latin America, well-trained and financed Communist movements are mounting sharply intensified campaigns of terrorism, espionage and subversion. Their strategy, aimed at fomenting guerrilla-style "wars of national liberation," was adopted at a top-level meeting in Havana last winter at which the Soviet leadership yielded to pressure from Castroites to abandon its via pacifica policy of nonviolent penetration in Latin America. Moscow agreed to assist and finance Fidel Castro's program to "export the revolution." Havana's General Directorate of Intelligence, which has already trained more than 5,000 Latin Americans in combat and propaganda techniques, has stepped up its activities. U.S. Under Secretary of State Thomas Mann says: "It's going to be nip and tuck with the Communists in Latin America for a while."

The Reds' two prime targets are oil-rich Venezuela and adjoining Colombia. Thwarted in Venezuela when they invaded the cities to try and prevent presidential elections in 1963, FALN terrorists have returned to the remote hill country, where they are engaged in Castro-style campaigns to murder local authorities and win over the peasantry. In Colombia's northeast, where they have back-to-back liaison with Venezuelan terrorists across the border, Communist bands have been shooting, looting, and haranguing the terrified populace to join in a people's revolt. In the southwest, Colombia's notorious Bandit-turned-Castroite Pedro Antonio Marin, 34, alias Sure Shot, leads some 160 guerrillas, who killed 17 people--including two nuns--in a recent raid; and is the main suspect in the kidnaping of a leading industrialist, whose body was found last week in the mountains.

U.S. Diploma. Guatemala has been in a state of siege since February, when terrorists ambushed an army convoy, killing 15 soldiers. The guerrillas, some 300 strong, are led by Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, 34, a former army lieutenant who holds a diploma from the U.S. Army counterinsurgency school in Panama. There have also been reports of smaller-scale guerrilla activity in Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Honduras.

The House Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs noted last week that the U.S. and its Latin American allies have not begun to counter the Reds' new threat. Its report echoed a key witness's warning: "We are up against full-time Communist professionals, and to a large extent we have part-time amateurs combatting Communism."

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