The Continental Revolution

...One Accion Democratiea congressman from the area commented: "When their leader dies this way, how will the others act...

...The guerrillas pay for what they take and respect his women, while the Army .and the DIGEPOL often do neither...

...What is important is the number of collaborators in the villages and farms beside the roads...

...The few prisoners we have released mostly are students whose parents assured us that they will study at universities abroad...

...Probably more significant than the size of guerrilla operations at this stage is the care with which they have been organized...

...Either course would heighten the danger of a military coup, for which the FALN has been maneuvering in order to produce a polarization in Venezuelan politics...

...All signs now indicate that violence will increase convulsively as new insurgencies go unrecognized and uncontrolled, and efforts to establish constitutional democracy are repeatedly aborted...

...The number of guerrillas in the hills is not important now...

...On the following day, though, the Army rushed a company of reinforcements into the area...

...The significance of these operations cannot be judged either by their present strength or by current battle reports, which for the most part list only attacks on six-man police posts, assassinations of peasants accused of betraying the guerrillas, and assaults on military checkpoints on highways approaching the mountains...

...In terms of both popular and organizational strength, the Communists are thus considerably less powerful than they were following the 1958 overthrow of Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez-the period in which they enjoyed legality, infiltration and influence...

...URD and Uslar have promised so much during the election campaign on this that we have to let them blow off steam...

...In few Latin American nations, moreover, does there exist so dramatic a contrast between capital and countryside as between the opulence of Caracas and the abysmal condition of the Venezuelan peasantry...

...Early in 1959, groups of university students and professors appeared in Curimagua on "field trips" to map the zone...

...Democrtuica party...

...They are led by local boys who know the...

...The beacon for this pattern of revolutionary activity is Cuba, which after overtures last year toward better relations with the U.S., has begun to formulate what appears to be a new hard line...

...The following incident provides a graphic illustration of its ineffectiveness...

...Both Uslar and URD have long records of collaboration with the Communists...

...When revolutionary operations constantly strike the reactionary military vanguard, it is probable that the military will insist on certain political controls for 'pacification' and finally will decide on a coup d'etat...

...It is a nation of chronic instability-exacerbated 'by an illegitimate birth rate of around 50 percent, a steady migration of peasants to the cities, furious political RAUL LEONI hatreds and a military establishment which has let only one elected government in Venezuelan history, the Betancourt regime, finish its constitutional term...

...Former Senator Pompeyo Marques, leading ideologue of the vcp's dominant proChinese wing, writes his weekly column from his jail cell...

...quiet gestation of more guerrilla activity...

...It will take time to organize this front, but when it exists it will represent a severe blow, if not a definitive one, against imperialism...

...They call their robberies "revolutionary confiscations' and give away the money as "advances on revolutionary agricultural credit' which the FALN says it will bring them in a future agrarian reform...

...tivities in the cities and an absurd and impotent rebellion in certain rural zones...

...The difficulties facing those assigned the task of suppressing the guerrillas were explained to me by Rafael Antonio Garcia, the young police chief of Santa Cruz de Bucaral...

...in other words, a civil government cannot sustain itself in a Spartan Venezuela...

...Using the principal waterways of the region as their points of contact, the guerrillas in the mountains are able to coordinate their operations with those of their urban counterparts, the Unidades Tacticas de Combate (UTC), who function in a great many municipalities...

...The amnesty campaign is being spearheaded through pressure on President Leoni by two old enemies who have joined Accion Democratica in a government coalitionthe Union Republicana Democratica (URD) and a new party led by writer-politician Arturo Uslar Pietri...

...Their once effective infiltration of the press, the teaching profession and the armed forces has been somewhat reduced...

...This is always a big problem, as the guerrillas usually have money to pay for theirs...

...The FALN memorandum, "Our Errors," describes some of its internal difficulties as "Exhibitionism, which constantly leads us to show off . before friends, comrades and strangers, the tasks we are undertaking, the secrets we know...

...For all their lobbying, terrorism and guerrilla warfareand the prestige accrued from opposing the dictatorships of Perez Jimenez and Juan Vincente Gomez (1908-l935)-the Venezuelan Communists have yet to produce a leader comparable in stature to a Castro or a Togliatti...

...Clearly, then, the governments not only of Venezuela but of other Latin American countries need to realize that they are involved-and have been for years-in an extended political-military conflict...

...In November and December we arrested 63 peasants as agents...

...The violence of the Betancourt years cost the Communists dearly...

...Only last month, 30 guerrillas captured the police headquarters and telegraph office in the Falcon state town of Aracua...

...After the tumultuous years (1959-64) of Rightist and Leftist insurrection against the Betancourt regime, the people of Venezuela are tired of violence, and yearn for stability...

...The peasant then just stops giving information...

...he returned to his Falcon village of Curimagua a declared Communist...

...The peasants voted for us by force of habit, but they are giving up hope and are cooperating more and more with the Communists...

...It was not until late 1961 that the first open guerrilla activity began there...

...When the guerrillas were relatively unknown a peasant could coexist with them, getting good prices for his corn and hens, though most of those cooperating did so for fear of being killed...

...In the Peruvian Andes, more than 250,000 Indian peasants have been organized into Communist- led federations to invade haciendas and seize land...

...Last October four peasants were kidnapped and murdered by guerrillas near the village of Guaramacal in the Andean state of Trujillo...

...When the Army came to these mountains, things became rough for the peasants," said one farmer in Santa Cruz de Bucaral...

...When the Army arrived the peasants had two governments to deal with...

...Thus, a recent memorandum of the vcr Politburo outlines a "defensive situation" to last "at least six months," with a plan consisting of the following operations: Accelerated programs for training guerrillas abroad to take advantage of "unlimited" facilities offered...

...and renewed efforts at infiltration of the armed forces...

...it appears under the pseudonym "Carlos Valencia" in the Communist paper Que...

...When we go out to hunt the guerrillas we only have old Mauser rifles, no medicines and no money to buy food," he said...

...The government further confuses the problem by pretending at times that it doesn't exist...

...Comprising more or less what had been the old Inca empire, this region forms a single geo-political unit whose more than 10 million Indian inhabitants have scarcely been touched by Western culture...

...Neighbors recall that in late 1950 "Polito" returned from a visit to Caracas with two youths who spent the next two months exploring the surrounding mountains...

...They seized a supply of weapons and ammunition, took over the town for three hours, and fled before any troops arrived...

...About 30 families abandoned their parcelas in Tapatapa in the next few days...

...The losses in crops are incalculable...

...Yet, far from being destroyed, guerrilla warfare has spread to wider and wider areas of the country during the past year...

...But it turned out that the pictures accompanying what were purported to be on-the-scene interviews were from another area of the country...

...large fields are abandoned with the corn unharvested...

...In response to this Internationale of repression, we foresee the organization of a Continentia...

...We have taught some of them to acquire military knowledge The majority of young Latin Americans now being schooled in Cuba in the tactics of rural and urban guerrilla warfare are, in fact, Venezuelans and Colombians, and the insurgent movements in both countries remain in frequent contact across an unguarded border which traditionally has been an open door for heavy smuggling in arms, cattle and consumer goods...

...On the lonely burro trail Romero was intercepted by guerrillas, who had been waiting for him...

...Many of their top leaders are jailed...

...The guerrillas use money stolen from stores and factories and banks in the cities," the congressman continued...

...The Secretary-General of the peasant sindicato at Tapatapa, Rodolfo Romero, was also the local leader of the government's Accion...

...The Betancourt regime contributed major extensions of education and health facilities...

...It is likely that there will be a coup in Colombia soon and this could produce a strong reaction here...

...When will it be too late in Venezuela...

...they are subject to aristocratic exploitation and repression, deep communal allegiances, and extreme scarcity of land among the mass of subsistence farmers...

...But their popular strength will rise rapidly if the Leoni government should lose the initiative in the political struggle, either through failure to deliver on its promises of social advance or by flagging in its determination to resist insurrection...

...It has corn, cattle, abundant fresh water and many mountains and caves...

...Some 300,000 eligible peasant families are still waiting to receive land under an agrarian reform program which has been ineptly and sometimes corruptly implemented...

...For months now 600 troops have been engaged in anti-guerrilla operations in Trujillo, begun in response to the Guaramacal killings, yet there are no official reports on their activities...

...Venezuela as a whole relies greatly on INNAC for news of the interior, though the organization is said to be heavily infiltrated by Communists...

...We must arrest people to find out where the guerrillas are, since they have many agents in the countryside...

...Without further ceremony or improvement, the Instituto Agrario Nacional added Tapatapa to the list of agrarian reform sites in which nearly 80,000 peasant families are said to have been "resettled" in the pas six years...

...As an area of potential revolutionary activity, then, the Andean highlands of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador look fertile indeed...

...It is against this background of rising guerrilla warfare along Maoist lines throughout Latin America that the activities of the Venezuelan insurgents must be seen...

...To top all this, people go around making false accusations to the Army and police about their neighbors to settle old grudges...

...To date 33 political prisoners have been freed In the 1958 elections the vcr won 160,000 votes (six per cent of the total), which makes plausible a recent military estimate that there are 2,000 rural guerrillas and 3,000 urban UTe members available to the FALN, including those trained but not yet used...

...as well...

...Hipolito Acosta, guerrilla leader in an area where his father is one of the chief landowners, went to Rome to study law in the early '50s...

...Our letters asking for supplies go unanswered...

...One high-ranking Accion Democratica leader confirmed this analysis when he told me recently: "The real possibility of military overthrow of this government is from the Right rather than the Left...

...They buy food from peasants at two or three times the regular price...

...For example, a girlie magazine called Venezuela Grafica, owned by the Right-wing Capriles chain, recently published a long picture story eulogizing the guerrillas...

...The magazine was suspended for printing the story, and both Left and Right accused the government of resorting to dictatorial methods...

...Yet there are still appalling shortages of rural electrical and water supply installations, schools and medical facilities...

...The new clandestine tactical manual "FALN Will Conquer" spells out one of the gravest political problems of anti-guerrilla warfare in Latin America: "The uncontrolled increase in the armed forces would break the equilibrium of forces guaranteeing the stability of the government...

...Three years ago, the government bought a large hacienda at Tapatapa and called a meeting to tell the squatters that they could continue living on their porcelas...

...Only when they are established in the countryside do they finally attack to draw the Army into the zone, trying to make the peasants feel the government cannot protect them and that there is greater security in siding with the guerrillas...

...Communist journalists who remain infiltrated in the press, together with their still powerful, reactionary bosses, are alike in wanting to discredit the Accion Democratica government...

...The real importance of the Venezuela insurgency can only be measured against the increasingly aggressive tactics being adopted by the Communists in other key Latin American countries...

...Embassy this question, and he merely said there already are appropriate institutions handling these problems.' The situation of the peasants, caught in the crossfire of guerrilla and government forces, has now become extremely grave...

...They often jail a peasant for a week or 10 days when he comes to give information, so that his whole neighborhood knows he has informed when he gets back home...

...There are, moreover, strong personal and ideological differences among the extremist leaders...

...The roads wind through the rugged mountains and forests of Falcon state to connect caserios of mudsplattered adobe dwellings like Tuy and Tapatapa and Macuquita, which do not appear on the map...

...For some years now imperialism has been preparing an organized repression against the peoples of Latin America...

...Peonage and primitive farming methods continue unchanged, landlords collect rent in the form of labor, and the per capita ratio to cultivated land is virtually the same as that which existed in old China...

...They spend their first six months in the mountains carefully exploring the land and acclimatizing themselves to the cold and rain,' one congressman from Trujillo state told me...

...Neighbors claimed that Romero "tried to make himself big" by falsely accusing his enemies of collaborating with the guerrillas then being sought by the Direccion General de Policia (DIGEPOL, the state security police) and the Army...

...In addition to its curious policy of silence, the government has shown itself to be particularly lacking in resourcefulness when responding to the guerrilla incursions, even where its own programs are at stake...

...Like the peasants of pre-revolutionary China, they speak vernacular tongues (Quechua and Aymara) divorced from the official language...

...With that end in view, there is now a chain of overt or incipient guerrilla activity from the first Continental outcropping of the Andean mountain system near Cabure, about 30 miles from the Caribbean coast, all the way south to the Colombian frontier...

...Colombian guerrillas have been operating for months now in the eastern mountain range along the Venezuelan frontier, and are said to have enlisted the bandits of the area in their service...

...leaders who favored cooperation with the regime of President Fernando Belaunde Terry, whom the Communist organization in the Peruvian sierra helped elect, were expelled...

...The fact is, not only in the states of Trujillo and Falcon but elsewhere in key areas of the country, the Venezuelan government is now in a virtual state of war against guerrilla insurgents who are following a prescribed course of violence and economic disruption...

...The following day the Minister of Defense, General Ramon Florencio Gomez, said the guerrilla activities were "insignificant...

...Many peasants are abandoning their farms, leaving behind their animals and immovable possessions...

...In the past the progress of Communist insurrection in Venezueia has been slowed by its own indiscriminate terrorism as well as the determined opposition of a freely elected government...

...After months of secrecy they slowly start approaching the peasants, buying provisions at high prices and sometimes handing out medicines...

...Most of the scattered rural populationliving in isolated shacks which cannot be protected from bands of armed men-suffers from anemia, malnutrition and parasite infections which stunt growth (many male peasants are under five feet in height...

...Thus, the outcome of this political struggle has implications for the U.S...

...Many are university students from the cities and need this preparation...

...Similarly, in the Northeast region of Brazil, which contains the most widely publicized peasant leagues in Latin America, a Maoist insurgency has split the Communist party in two...

...Yet the jails, as so often is the case when they house political prisoners, have become schools of revolutionary theory and tactics...

...The area is ideal for guerrillas...

...The apparent aim of the guerrillas is to divide Venezuela militarily during an uprising...

...I asked the political officer of the U.S...

...land far better than the army...

...In Trujillo and Falcon, two states where the Army has had to be dispatched for anti-guerrilla operations, the peasants are gripped by fear of reprisals from both the guerrillas and the Army, and in all the cities and towns I have visited during a month in Venezuela the guerrillas have loomed unmistakably as the prime topic of conversation...

...Designed to force large numbers of regular Army units into anti-guerrilla and security operations throughout the country and thus weaken the government's ability to deal with urban rioting, terrorism and barracks revolts, this strategy has already yielded the Communists a sizable dividend in political and social havoc...

...We are being careful, and no Communist leaders will be released for a good while...

...When is the Alliance for Progress coming to these mountains to meet its enemy...

...They read an execution decree accusing Romero of betraying the cause of national liberation, then shot him as the whole community watched...

...We are giving away nothing on the political prisoners...

...Shipments of Communist arms have been entering Peru across the altiplano frontier with Bolivia, and in 1964 the Peruvian Communist party was purged to give control to its pro-Chinese faction...

...Che" Guevara's recent journey to Africa and Asia produced many statements supporting the Chinese attempt to divide the world into white and colored camps, and in Algiers he specifically mentioned the organization of a "Continental front against imperialism" in Latin America to oppose the "Intemationale of repression" being formed by the U.S...

...The DIGEPOL is very badly trained...

...Meanwhile, the guerrilla movement has itself given a new impetus to the Venezuelan Communists, who had lately been losing ground...

...Even in Venezuela itself, however, exact information about both guerrilla and anti-guerrilla operations is not easy to come by...

...In 1964 the Leftist forces, even while expanding their guerrilla operations, were able to create a political climate propitious to amnesty for their jailed leaders...

...When he arrived at the camp, another farm expropriated for the agrarian reform, the soldiers said they could not go to Tapatapa without permission from the command post 100 miles away...

...We have much enthusiasm for the freedom fighters in Venezuela...

...In any event, when Romero was informed that Douglas Bravo and his guerrilla followers were in the neighborhood, he set out for the Army post in Santa Cruz to inform the commander...

...front against imperialism...

...Last November 14, Venezuela's Fuerzas Armadas de Liberaci6n Nacional (FALN) opened its international headquarters in Havana with ceremonies attended by the Russian, Chinese and North Vietnamese ambassadors...

...They say they want to liberate the country from Yankee imperialism and its agents, the leaders of Accion Democratica...

...ERNESTO "CHE" GUEVARA, INTERVIEWED IN THE ALGERIAN MAGAZINE Revolution Atricaine, DECEMBER 26, 1964 SANTA CRUZ DE BUCARAL For to years now the successive Accion Democratica governments of Presidents Romulo Betancourt and Raul Leoni have been announcing the imminent annihilation of all guerrilla activity in Venezuela...

...In Cuba and Peru, just as in Venezuela, the Peking line of violent insurrection predominates, and in Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil it appears to be gaining strength rapidly...

...This pattern of guerrilla insurgency is a clear reflection of the proliferating Communist literature of violencea literature deeply indebted to the writings of Mao Tse-tung-and points to the adoption, in Venezuela, of the strategy of the "Long War," akin to the conflicts effectively waged in China, Algeria and Vietnam...

...In a New York interview a month later, Guevara declared: "The road to the liberation of peoples, which will be the road to Socialism, will go through bullets in almost all countries...

...offers of a truce to the government by the vcr and the Marxist-Leninist Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR...

...And at the moment the Communists show no capacity to seize powe abruptly...

...a campaign for amnesty for jailed insurrectionists...

...After the bodies were exhumed and identified, investigating officials reported the murders to Caracas, but the news remained a secret...

...In November there was a public execution carried out by the guerrillas in Tapatapa, about 20 miles from the village of Santa Cruz de Bucaral...

...Castro himself, faced with increasing economic hardship and the possibility of curtailment of Soviet aid, used the occasion of his sixth anniversary in power, in January, to warn that Cuban Communists needed no meddling advice from other Communist parties-presumably a reference to the restraining hand of Moscow-and voiced faith in the ability of his people to subsist without foreign aid But Cuba's role involves more than rhetoric...

...Ever since the failure of the FALN to stop the 1963 election, internal memoranda of the Venezuelan Communist party (vcr-) have been full of reproaches and laments concerning the sad state of party organization...

...In February, the Caracas press reported the crash of an army helicopter in the Falcon state guerrilla zone, but denied that the helicopter had been brought down by ground fire...

...As a result, news of the anti-government operations strays from secrecy to exaggeration to confusion...

...The trip takes two hours by jeep or six hours by burroand the chilling winter rains often tum the dirt roads into swamps so that only burros can get through...

...to 4 P.M., they did not come, and he started back...

...One of the chief advantages in guerrilla operations is that the central government almost never recognizes their importance until it is too late...

...Deviations of a military character [take place] when we substitute personalleadership for collective leadership, when we seek to demonstrate that we are right by raising our voice or by constantly insisting on our positions as 'chiefs.' " Still, the FALN record for 1964 has not been barren of success, and its prospects have been considerably brightened by the activities of the guerrillas...

...The result of a Rightist military takeover would almost certainly be a gruesome re-enactment of the Spanish Civil War throughout the region of the Andean highlands...

...In his televised New Year's message, Leoni referred to the guerrillas as "some tens [decenas] of delirious non-conformists" engaged in "criminal terrorist acNORMAN GALL, a previous contributor, recently completed a Latin American tour as a special correspondent for the Washington Post...

...Through bribery and terror the guerrillas are steadily winning our peasants...

...Their support in the universities, though still strong, has ebbed significantly...

...We must often confiscate our meals from peasants...

...The first guerrilla units in Falcon and Lara states began functioning near the only two hamlets in western Venezuela where the Communists won a clear majority in the 1958 elections...

...Romero waited for the orders from 10 A.M...

...The source of a good deal of exaggerated reportage on guerrilla activities is INNAC, a news service owned by the Right-wing newspaper El Universal, whose owner was the Communist-backed candidate for the presidency of the Venezuela Press Association last year...

...They marched him back to Tapatapa with his hands tied behind his back, hung him from a tree by his armpits and threw broken bottles at his face to make him bleed...

...During the Christmas rush of pressure for amnesty, the jailhouse corridors were crowded by the comings and goings of leading URD and Uslarista politicians...