It was a little like a treasure hunt. At 6:30 p.m. one evening last week, the phone rang at Caracas' daily El Nacional. The caller's curious request: check the ashtray near the elevator on the second floor. At the same time, editors of La República were told to look in the trash can near the proofreaders' rest room. In both places were notes from the publicity-grabbing Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), a pro-Castro terrorist group that is trying to make things difficult for Venezuela's middle-reading President Rómulo Betancourt. The FALN's message: one of the government's ships is missing.
In a daring coup on the high seas. FALN agents had just hijacked the 3,127-ton government-owned freighter Anzoátegui only a few hours after it left the port of La Guaira bound for Houston and New Orleans. Betancourt might have expected something of the sort. Though the pro-Castro group is not powerful enough to overthrow Venezuela's President, it does its best to embarrass him—particularly since he is scheduled to make a state visit to the U.S. this week. In the campaign, FALN terrorists have been shooting up police cars, setting fire to U.S. businesses and threatening to kill U.S. citizens. But the Anzoátegui hijacking was its biggest stunt yet.
Then Silence. The ringleader was Wismar Medina Rojas. 28, second mate aboard the Anzoátegui. Smuggling eight FALN gunmen aboard the freighter, he surprised the rest of the 36-man crew. In a series of gloating radio messages, he identified himself and his henchmen, said that captain and crew were unharmed. Then silence from the Anzoátegui presumably on its way to Cuba and a propaganda triumph for Fidel Castro.
Betancourt's red-faced government sent Canberra jet bombers to search the Caribbean, called on the navies of all friendly nations to help find "the pirates.'' Venezuela itself has just six destroyers, of which four are slow and nearly obsolete. The only hope was the U.S. A day passed, then a second and a third, with only a false report of a sighting. Radio Havana weighed in with an offer of asylum for the hijackers; the vessel, said Castro gleefully, would be turned over to the U.N.
Where No One Expected. Feeling somewhat sheepish, considering the fact that it is supposed to watch everything that moves in the Caribbean, the U.S. quickly announced that the chances of the Anzoátegui reaching Castro's snug harbor "are remote." But where was the freighter? The Navy said that it had checked 400 ships without finding a trace.
At long last, a P2V Neptune flying from Puerto Rico found the Anzoátegui where no one expected it to be—180 miles off Surinam, sailing south down the coast of South America. Instead of Cuba, the hijackers were headed or Brazil, where another hijacker. Soldier of Fortune Henrique Galvão had taken Portugal's Santa Maria two years ago.
Now the question was how to stop the Anzoátegui. Navy planes flashed blinker signals ordering the vessel to head for Puerto Rico. No answer from the Anzoátegui, as it plowed steadily southward toward Brazil, where, in the words of a government official, "asylum is a Brazilian tradition.'' When the hijackers ignored the orders to change course, the planes swooped down to fire rockets nearby. The hijackers seemed to be in for a rough time.