The Hemisphere: EXILE’S SECOND CHANCE

VENEZUELAN politics have been Rómulo Betancourt’s life for the past 30 years, and for 21 of them he has been forced to live and work either outside the law or outside Venezuela. In his nine years of legal politicking, he built Acción Democrática, the strongest popular political party Venezuela has ever known, and served as the country’s provisional President for two years. In office he worked out the world’s first 50-50 government-company split of oil profits and oversaw the first truly free election in Venezuelan history. Last week, after the second free election, Betancourt was President again.

First Exile. The son of a poetry-writing wholesale grocer, Rómulo Betancourt was born February 22, 1908 in the village of Guatire, 25 miles from Caracas. In 1928, during his third year of law school, he took part in a series of demonstrations against Dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. The grim strongman put the fiery student in ball-and-chain, later hounded him into exile in Colombia.

Betancourt moved to Costa Rica, joined a Communist-front group, met a pretty young schoolteacher named Carmen Valverde. The romance with Carmen flourished, the one with the Reds did not. Before he left Costa Rica for home in 1936 he married Carmen, but dropped out of the front to plant himself in the anti-Communist left. Back in Venezuela he led a revolutionary underground political party until 1939, when he was thrown out of Venezuela again, this time to Chile.

In 1941 the political climate changed in Venezuela and Betancourt returned to organize A.D. Four years later he and his party joined with a group of young army officers to overthrow President Isaias Medina Angarita. In power as provisional President, Betancourt overzealously tried to cram decades of reform and development into two brief years, thereby built a wall of resentment. He presided over the election that put A.D.’s Rómulo Gallegos, a noted novelist, into the presidency in 1948. Reports that A.D. planned to de-emphasize army influence by arming an irregular band of stalwarts helped turn the military against it. In 1948 a coup by the resentful military sent Betancourt into exile once more.

End to Concessions. Wandering through Washington, Havana, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and Manhattan, Betancourt had ten years to think over where he had gone wrong. He conversed long and learnedly with men like himself, e.g., Puerto Rico’s Luis Muñoz Marín.

Nowadays, puffing his pipe and peering through thick-rimmed glasses, Betancourt is a picture of stability, calm, reason. But much of the old leftist is still there. He announced last week that although present oil concessions to foreign interests are safe, Venezuela will grant no more concessions. He promised to form a government company for further oil development. Moreover, 50-50 is on the way out: “I could not say that 50-50 should be converted to 75-25, but this matter should be the object of serious studies by technicians.” He will doubtless renew—with less disruptive speed—his own wars on slums, illiteracy, sickness, agricultural backwardness. In the U.N. and elsewhere, the U.S. can count Venezuela under Betancourt as a friend.