War on Subversion

The Latin American country that the Communists have tried hardest to subvert is oil-rich Venezuela. With weapons and funds smuggled in from Cuba, the Castroite Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion National (FALN) in the early 1960s terrorized both Caracas and the countryside, murdering policemen, blowing up pipelines, and bombing department stores. Two years ago, the rebels began to lose their momentum and holed up in the hills. Last month a bombing here, a machine-gunning there seemed to signal a return to the old pattern. Last week came a climax of sorts: in separate ambushes, FALN gunmen assassinated a member of the highest military court and wounded the army chief of staff.

The Reds apparently assumed that President Raul Leoni would respond mildly. After all, other recent terrorist incidents had led him to send out a few additional street patrols, and not much else. But this time, Leoni's army demanded action. Going on nationwide television, the President abruptly placed the country under a form of martial law, announced that he was putting the full force of the military into a war on subversion. Said he: "My government is determined to eliminate the treacherous conspiracy of those who are trying to carry out their adventurers' plans with Fidel Castro and his protectors."

Diminishing Numbers. Next morning Leoni sent hundreds of combat-equipped national police troopers storming into the previously inviolate campus of Caracas' Central University, which has long served as a haven for Red activists. A cacophony of student jeers, punctuated by sniper shots, greeted the police, but they quickly seized all key university buildings and began a search for arms and Reds, while a battalion of regular army troops threw a cordon around the campus. It was a rich haul: some 800 suspects, including the 15 leaders of the Communist youth organization and a number of wanted criminals, all of whom were jailed; a huge cache of machine guns, automatic rifles and hand grenades was uncovered.

At the same time, Leoni ordered the army's elite anti-guerrilla units to sweep the countryside. At the town of San Jose de Guaribe, 90 miles southeast of Caracas, an army patrol flushed a FALN force and killed a rebel leader known as Comandante Behuma, who only recently has returned from terrorist training in Cuba.

The new violence in Caracas was clearly a FALN effort to offset its loss of prestige in rural areas, where the peasants have grown increasingly unsympathetic. FALN may also have hoped to attract new recruits to its ranks. From a strength of 500 full-time terrorists only three years ago, the organization can now count on fewer than 250 full-time gunslingers. By the time Leoni's drastic new cleanup campaign is over, the ranks will be thinner still.

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