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VENEZUELA: What Coup?

2 minute read
TIME

Soldiers were slightly more in evidence than usual on Caracas streets last week. There was an irksome 7 p.m. curfew, and at night Caraqueños heard isolated shots from snipers vainly trying to scare up a little counter-revolutionary enthusiasm. Except for these signs, and the new faces in Miraflores Palace, Venezuelans might almost have asked themselves, ‘What coup?”

Traffic swirled around the Plaza Bolivar; Christmas shopping was off only slightly. The Venezuelan idol, Luis Sánchez (“El Diamante Negro”), dispatched his quota of bulls in the Nuevo Circo bull ring, the horses made their customary circuits of the Hipódromo race track, and I’ve Always Loved You played to full houses at the Lido Theater.

Clerks and businessmen applauded the new cabinet and swapped the latest rumors (Leader X of the deposed Acción Democrática party had been caught with a million bolivars sewn into the lining of his coat; Leader Y had absconded with two million bolivars). Caraqueños generally were agreed that it included some capable men.

The new ministers pledged themselves to continue the policies of their predecessors—only more “moderately.” Union leaders (almost all now released from jail) and other Acción members declared that they would form an open opposition to the Junta as soon as constitutional guarantees were restored. Said a spokesman for Junta President Carlos Delgado Chalbaud: “Democratic elections will take place. But right now the new government is busy trying … to put everything on an efficient administrative basis, and above all to establish an atmosphere of tolerance before the elections.” As the first step toward those elections, the Junta dissolved the national Congress and all 20 state legislatures.

Ex-President Romulo Gallegos, who flew off to exile in Cuba, blamed last fortnight’s coup on 1) “powerful forces of Venezuelan capital lacking in social awareness”; 2) foreign oil interests; 3) the “scant attention the U.S. is paying toward Latin America”; 4) an unnamed foreign government. Said he: “There has occurred in Venezuela one more action like those which our democracy [throughout the Americas] has been suffering. Who is the director of this machine of oppression set on the march in our continent? What is the meaning of the notorious presence of a military attaché of a foreign embassy in one of the Caracas military barracks while the insurrection was going on?”

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