Word: 243mez
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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...
...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...
...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...
...most tragic occurrence of the campaign windup involved the Liberal Party's ex-candidate himself. Echandia had been making a point of strolling about downtown Bogota unguarded, in silent contrast to Laureano Gómez' self-imposed seclusion in his son-in-law's tightly barred home. On the first day of the general strike he set out accompanied by his brothers, Vicente and Domingo, and 19 Liberal politicians...
...plaza; one other Liberal and a policeman were slightly wounded. Echandia's brother Vicente was rushed to the Clinica del Sagrado Corazon. There, two hours later, Dario Echandia saw his brother die. The funeral was held on the day that triumphant Conservatives were electing Laureano Gómez President. Nearly 25,000 Liberals marched in the cortege, and there were excited shouts of "Down with the dictatorship!" and "To the Palace!" But nobody went to the Palace; troops and tanks had closed off the streets four blocks away...