Latin America: Castro’s Targets

The large, high-ceiling conference hall of Caracas’ Palacio Blanco was crowded last week with newsmen and television crews. The government had hurriedly called a very unusual press conference. On display were two members of Fidel Castro’s Cuban army: Manuel Gil Castellanos, 25, and Pedro Cabrera Torres, 29. Blinking in the glare of klieg lights, the Cubans were escorted into the room, one after the other, were briefly questioned by government information officers, and were then led away to a military prison.

The two were part of a twelve-man landing squad—four Cuban military and eight Venezuelans—that had completed terrorist training in Cuba and been sent to link up with the 200 or 300 guerrillas holed up in the Venezuelan Andes. Early last week the squad slid by night over the side of a Cuban sailing bark off the Venezuelan coast near Machurucuto, 70 miles east of Caracas, and started toward shore in two rafts. In the surf, one raft capsized, drowning one of the Cubans. Finding a deserted raft the next day, Venezuelan fishermen alerted the army, which hunted down the invaders before they could escape into the mountains. In a sharp fire fight, the Cuban commander of the contingent was killed, and two men were captured —the first uniformed Cuban army men that the Venezuelans have ever nabbed.

The Venezuelan episode was a blatant example of the way Fidel Castro is attempting to export his revolution to other Latin American countries. Though he so far has met with little real success, there has been in recent weeks a notice able increase in Castro-inspired terrorism throughout the hemisphere:

> In Bolivia, a band of 100 or so Castroite guerrillas is active. The government got the first hint of their existence a few weeks ago when an army patrol ran into an artfully concealed ambush in a mountainous area 350 miles southeast of La Paz, lost seven men. A subsequent army sweep turned up a recently deserted training area complete with field hospital, bakery, and other clues of the Cuban presence. Bolivia’s President Rene Barrientos ordered a Ranger battalion to make pursuit; so far, the army has killed ten guerrillas and captured ten, including a 26-year-old Frenchman named Jules Regis Debray, who studied guerrilla warfare under Castro and organized the Bolivian band. Last week, armed with a pistol, rifle and grenades, Barrientos himself joined the guerrilla hunters.

>In Colombia some 300 Castroite guerrillas in two main bands roam the countryside. In recent weeks they hijacked a train, killed 15 army troopers in an ambush in mountainous Huila province and shot to death six more in an attack on an army convoy near Chaparral, 115 miles southwest of Bogota.

> In Guatemala the situation has, by contrast, remained fairly quiet—though at least 250 Castroite terrorists still roam the country’s interior. Their attacks are, however, a far cry from the kidnapings and bomb-throwings that nearly panicked the country last year. One reason: the guerrillas have lacked a leader since Luis Turcios Lima died at 24 in an auto accident last October. New President Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro has combined an army drive to hunt down guerrillas with a civic-action program that aims to lure peasants from the rebel cause by making life a little less unpleasant in the harsh backlands.

> In the Dominican Republic, the hemisphere’s most explosive spot, there were bothersome new signs of unrest. Red China is claiming that Mao-think is inspiring the Dominican masses to revolt. More realistically, President Joaquin Balaguer puts the blame on Castro. After a number of shootings and bombings in Santo Domingo, Balaguer last week ordered army and naval units into the city to hold down violence, went on the radio to warn that hundreds of Communists are trying to foment a revolution to overthrow his ten-month-old regime and to topple the country into another civil war.