VENEZUELA: The Long Wait

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General Valentin Garcia is a cherished legend to the inhabitants of the Venezuelan state of Sucre. He fought in six great battles of the war of liberation from Spain, and once saved the life of General Simon Bolivar, who thereupon dubbed Garcia "Valentin Valiente" (Valentin the Brave). When Garcia died in 1856, he was buried in the parish cemetery of the town of Cumana. But until last week, Valentin the Brave, much as he was honored in Sucre,* never won a similar reverence from the rest of Venezuela.

True, in 1909 a resolution of the federal Senate pronounced Garcia an "Illustrious Hero of the War of Independence" and decreed that his remains be transferred from the cemetery to the Pantheon of Heroes in Caracas, resting place of Bolivar and the rest of Venezuela's great. In preparation, the people of Cumana put the bones in a small, carved mahogany urn. But it took five years for officials in Caracas to dispatch the warship Miranda to Cumana to get the urn, and then the Miranda was diverted instead to another part of the country to quell a rebellion. Sucre's citizens hinted darkly that Caracas was in no hurry to put Garcia in the mausoleum beside Bolivar and other gran senor heroes because Garcia was a lowborn man of Guaikeri Indian stock. So his remains were left in the sacristy of Cumana's Altagracia Church.

When an earthquake nearly destroyed the church in 1928, the urn and its contents were found intact. Delfin Rojas, the church sexton, made it his special business to guard the urn while the church was rebuilt, and still preserves it carefully in a belltower storage room, among tattered and dusty saints and icons. Last week Interior Minister Luis Augusto Dubuc promised Sucre that General Garcia's remains this year will at last find their ultimate resting place in the Pantheon, as Venezuela marks the 150th anniversary of its independence.