Old Driver, New Road

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96 Pounds of Iron. In February 1928 Betancourt and his friends organized a week of student protest. An intense, curly-haired young man in black beret and spectacles, Betancourt delivered an impassioned anti-Gómez speech in a movie theater. Four days later he was thrown into a Gómez dungeon, clamped in 96 pounds of leg irons.

Freed after three weeks and still enthusiastically rebellious, the Boys of '28 launched outright revoluton in April. They seized Dictator Gómez' Miraflores Palace (Gómez was away), grabbed all the guns they could find. They charged up the street toward San Carlos Barracks, where a confederate was supposed to fling open the gates and let them in. But the chief of the military forces arrived before the rebels, barred the gates and organized a stout defense. For the first time in his life, Rebel Betancourt fired a rifle. It was an ancient German weapon with a brutal kick. When he is asked whether he killed anyone, he dodges. "Just say I was there," he growls. Well shielded, the barracks defenders drove off the attackers, the revolt flopped, and Betancourt fled into exile.

In Costa Rica in the early '30s, Betancourt met a lovely, brown-eyed kindergarten teacher named Carmen Valverde. At night they walked, talked politics, fell in love. "He was very fiery," Carmen recalls. But Betancourt spent his days in the university library in San José, reading so endlessly that the librarian finally reserved a regular seat for him. In English, French and Spanish he devoured the standard works of the intellectual left—but did not neglect studying oil trade magazines from the U.S. Suddenly Betancourt decided he was a Communist. Today, irritated at the endless necessity of telling why, he explains somewhat vaguely: "It was the era of radicalism. Sinclair Lewis. Dreiser. John Dos Passes. In Costa Rica we formed a group. We called it the Worker and Peasant Bloc." When Gómez died, in 1935, Betancourt headed home with Carmen as his wife and left Communism behind.

A Pickled Ear. Back in Venezuela he became a public battler against Gómez' strongman heir, General Eleazar López Contreras, toured the nation with thundering demands that López make way for a democratic election. Enraged, López Contreras in 1937 drove Betancourt and his followers underground, launched a hunt for him. Once government officials took an ear bitten from the head of a hapless gardener by a cop during a street fight, pickled it and displayed it as "Betancourt's ear"—as though they were capturing him piece by piece. Betancourt's daughter Virginia recalls that in those years, "Daddy was always in hiding, and we never had lunch at home." Then Betancourt again hit the exile circuit, to live, write and lecture in Chile and Argentina.

In 1941 López allowed him to return to witness the elaborately rigged election of another general, Isaias Medina Angarita. President Medina, determined to act democratic, surprisingly allowed Betancourt to launch Actión Democrâtica and develop it over the next four years into a major political force.