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Point-Blank. As the government column inched through town, dozens of men were killed by rebels firing from windows and rooftops. Not until tanks blasted Puerto Cabello's hospital at point-blank range did its rebel defenders give up; students holed up in the high school fought on bitterly. In one classroom, Betancourt's troops found a huge portrait of Fidel Castro. They carried it outside, shredded it with their burp guns, and got on with the bloody, block-by-block fighting.
Some of the captured marines told a confused and hardly believable story: they had been hoodwinked by their officers and thought they were fighting for the government, not against it. Under no such illusions, the civilians were sullenly unrepentant. A youth of 16 stepped from his sniper's post and handed his automatic rifle to the soldiers. "Do what you want to me," he said. "I've already killed seven men." It took two more days to chase the last snipers into the hills around Puerto Cabello.
Betancourt went before a National Peasants' Congress to denounce the uprising as a joint operation of the Venezuelan Communist Party and the Castroite Movement of the Revolutionary Left. Was it tolerable, asked Betancourt, "that these parties, with representation in Congress, become implicated in conspiracies that lead to the shedding of Venezuelan blood?" Reinforcing Betancourt's charge was the capture of two Castro-Communist federal Deputies among the Puerto Cabello rebels.