VENEZUELA: Election

From jungle clearings and Caracas villas, 2,000,000 Venezuelan voters trooped to the polls this week. Promised ever since a military junta overthrew the country's legitimately elected regime four years ago, the election was for a constitutional Congress which will design a new government and name a new President.

The pro-junta Independent Electoral Front (F.E.I.) was pitted against a pair of opposition parties, the Social Christian COPEI and the leftish Democratic Republican Union (U.R.D.). Bossed by owlish Colonel Marcos Perez Jimenez, the junta harassed the opposition, jailed its leaders, censored its press. COPEI and U.R.D. reluctantly entered the race in hope of getting a few seats.

Last week the opposition parties were seized with a sudden confidence that if the ballot were truly secret, as the government promised, they had a chance. Leftish U.R.D. called for a rally, and the crowd that came was the biggest in Caracas' history. The party's highly nationalistic platform, directed against foreign oil interests, demanded higher taxes on oil, nationalization of the sales of gasoline, and the construction of refineries in the country.

When the first 332,000 votes were counted, U.R.D. had a 2-to-1 edge over the government party, with COPEI trailing. Was a government defeat, entirely unexpected, in prospect? The junta, which had kept the Caracas papers from printing the early returns, suddenly clamped its censorship on all outgoing news cables.