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Seemingly satisfied with his rise in the world, Pérez Jiménez dutifully put down a dozen or so minor uprisings against the A.D. government. His older brother Juan helped stage one such plot; Pérez Jiménez jailed him, gave him a dishonorable discharge, has never spoken to him since. But A.D.'s liberal trends increasingly alarmed Pérez Jiménez. Of universal suffrage, first practiced in Venezuela under A.D., he said privately: "It is inadmissible that my own vote and the vote of an illiterate farm hand should have the same value."
He waited through President Gallegos' first months in office, and waited while the U.S. approvingly hailed President Gallegos on a good-will tour to Bolivar, Mo. with President Harry Truman. But he soon concluded that A.D. meant to make the army no more than a well-subordinated police force. To Delgado Chalbaud and to the young Academy officers who had supported the revolution he preached a new stroke "to hit the target we missed in 1945." One morning in November 1948 Delgado Chalbaud, Pérez Jiménez and another officer (all by then lieutenant colonels) tossed out Gallegois in a bloodless coup.
Promotion. With Delgado Chalbaud as President and Pérez Jiménez as Minister of Defense, the colonels' junta jailed and exiled A.D. leaders, drove the party underground, suppressed a strike among the oil workers. The junta ruled with a kind of uneasy stability for two years, then ran into a tragic setback, never fully explained: moderate, St. Cyr-educated Delgado Chalbaud was kidnaped and killed by a fanatical retired general. Nothing more than circumstantial evidence—plus the obvious fact that he succeeded to power—has ever linked Pérez Jiménez in any plot with the assassin, who two days later was "killed while attempting to escape."—* Thereafter, Pérez Jiménez was boss, although with Andean patience he brought in a malleable civilian lawyer to fill the presidency for a while. "The colonel," as people began to call him, energetically launched new public works in step with the oil revenues that leaped upward with the war in Korea and the shutdown of the Iranian petroleum industry.
After liquidating several revolts inspired by the outlawed A.D., the strongman resolved to wipe out its underground leadership. For the job he chose an engaging, worldly and cold-blooded police expert named Pedro Estrada. As chief of the Seguridad National, Estrada built it up to a crack plainclothes force with eyes and ears in every cafe, hotel, office and oil camp. Estrada's henchmen jailed thousands, sometimes learned secrets from captured suspects by seating them naked for hours on blocks of ice, by other ingenious indignities or by old-fashioned beatings. When an A.D. chieftain or one of the party's hotheaded bomb-throwers was located, he was jailed or gunned down on the streets. Today, political prisoners are down to around 400, and though Estrada still listens vigilantly in his office with its eight telephones, A.D. makes scarcely a sound in Venezuela. Rómulo Betancourt, undiscouraged, dreams of the day when A.D. will take over again, but he is in his seventh year of exile (currently in Puerto Rico).