Venezuela: Breaking a Tradition In Favor of Democracy

Breaking a Tradition

In Favor of Democracy

Latin America's revolution-riddled history has made its leaders sensitive about the right of political asylum. Mindful that today's ins may be to morrow's outs, new rulers often let a predecessor flee abroad, and do not try to bring him back no matter how deserving of punishment he may be. In the U.S., for different reasons, the right of asylum has also been held in high regard. Until last week, no deposed chief of state who had taken refuge in the U.S. had ever been extradited to his homeland.

The Torture Chambers. Aware of both traditions, Venezuela's ex-Dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez felt pretty secure when he fled to the U.S. after his overthrow in 1958. Tubby P.J. had left a lot of grandiose new buildings (including one of the world's grandest officers' clubs) behind him in Venezuela, but he had also left a lot of scars. A military strongman who gained dictatorial control of his country in 1948, P.J. poured Venezuela's rich oil royalties into an array of public works that made Caracas the most impressively prosperous-looking national capital in Latin America. But behind the building-boom facade, he operated a corrupt police state, with lush graft for insiders and imprisonment and torture for opponents. In P.J.'s torture chambers, prisoners were slashed with razors, burned with cigarettes, forced to sit for hours on blocks of ice. Some prisoners were force-fed harsh laxatives, and then, in a chamber of horrors awash with blood, excrement and vomit, they were forced to walk naked around a razor-sharp wheel rim.

When he escaped to Florida after the 1958 revolution, P.J. used part of the fortune he piled up as President to buy himself and his wife a $225,000 mansion in Miami Beach and settled down for a nice palmy retirement. A year later, the unexpected occurred: the new Venezuelan government wanted him back to stand trial on charges of embezzling $13.5 million. The country's new President, Romulo Betancourt, a onetime Marxist who has since moved to the center and who had lived many years in exile, knew the benefits of benevolent asylum; but he was also convinced that if Venezuela was to move toward democracy, it had to break the cycle of graft-and-go leadership.

One Day to Go. Last December, a U.S. Court of Appeals finally ruled that Venezuela had grounds for extradition, and Perez Jiménez was clamped in Miami's Dade County jail. Early last week Secretary of State Dean Rusk signed the extradition order, and Venezuelan security men hurried to Miami to take P.J. home. But his talented lawyers still had a few delaying moves left in their briefcases.

When a final U.S. court decision declares an alien subject to extradition, the country that wants him has to remove him from the U.S. within two months, or else the ruling lapses and a whole new proceeding must begin. For P.J., the two-month clock began ticking in mid-June, when the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. Last week, with the deadline nearing, P.J.'s lawyers tried to delay his departure by taking advantage of his involvement in various unfinished lawsuits. Among P.J.'s down-to-the-deadline legal troubles was a paternity suit brought by one Ilona Marita Lorenz, 24. With only one day to go, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg ruled that there was no legal obstacle to P.J.'s extradition.