Egyptian origin of January 23 | Geronimo Perez Rascaniere

Pérez Jiménez and NATO

The overthrow of Marcos Pérez Jiménez is an episode of the clash between NATO and anti-NATO that existed at that time and perhaps still today.

It happens on three fronts at once, Egypt, Panama and Latin America. Well excited and supported by Dean Acheson, US ambassador in Cairo, President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal. In response, England and France, shareholders of the canal, invaded Egypt. And shortly after Israel joined, because of its enmity against everything Arab. Frightening defeat was that of the Egyptians.

The newspapers painted the Jewish David brandishing the sling, victorious, and the giant Nasser staggering with a wounded forehead. But the trio of winners was in for a surprise. Russian Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev acted and announced from Moscow that they had 72 hours to leave Egyptian territory. The British appealed to President Eisenhower for the North American obligations of solidarity outlined in the NATO charter and in others "Defense of the free world against communism."

What do Americans do? Do they threaten the Russian, like good strong uncles from the invaders? Nothing of that. They told the occupants of Egypt that they should leave as soon as possible from a territory where they should never set foot. The message was that very clumsy they had been serving Nikita Khrushchev the perfect pretext to appear as the savior hero of the Arabs. With humiliating retreat the English, French and Jews had to leave Egypt. With the tail between the legs. Yes. The reason for Eisenhower's anti-NATO behavior must have been fear of a wave that was running over the Middle East, a huge wave of popularity called Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Arab nation woke up with this name and this speech.

The NATO crisis over the Suez affair, Eisenhower's position, had been anti-British, but perhaps that did not mean that he was willing to increase the problems with England, marrying the dictators of Latin America. Was he rather planning to ease that tension?

Puncture the mammoths ass

The NATO crisis was growing. Considering themselves betrayed by the Americans, the English said "enough" and the organization was almost dissolved, the headquarters in London was a building with some desks and some secretaries, without any boss. Once the "little Venezuelan dictator" was notified of this, he feels that the time has come to make his big coup, which he calls "squaring the map." That's what he calls it, that's what he agreed with Carlos Delgado Chalbaud in the days when the Mallet-Prevost memorandum appeared, that's what he thought since his student days. The formation of NATO stopped them, but now you can, you understand. "Squaring the map" means recovering pieces lost by Venezuela in Guayana, Esequiba and Colombia. On the Colombian side, it is preparing to conquer the western bank of the Orinoco, and the Arauca station, which, tracing a straight line to the south, reaches the place where Peru, Brazil, and Colombia meet. It is a huge banderole that would give Venezuela access to the Amazon River. It also intends to conquer the peninsula of La Goajira, guaranteeing perfect control of Lake Maracaibo, without Colombian immediacy to oil and including the Cerrejón coal mines, which are considered the richest in the world. But the big thing will be in Guayana Esequiba. Preparing this, he sent cadets to study in the United States to become experts in handling certain types of combat aircraft, he bought the said planes, he bought flat-bottom boats to go up the Essequibo, five thousand FAL rifles, caliber 7 mm. Among his men for that, bosses, he has Carlos Celis Noguera and Martín García Villasmil. Celis Noguera is a great planner. Rómulo Fernández will be the big boss. He had three elements in his strategy: a) Oil; b) politics: no purchases from England, no oil sales to anyone who does business with England; c) military action, with blitzkrieg-type occupation of British Guiana.

All against England until it proceeded to accept the Mallet-Prevost memorandum, which gave possession of Guayana Essequiba to Venezuela. “In the long run, Pérez Jiménez said, Albion would understand that it was convenient for him to give in, because if he continued there he would end up handing over that territory to «the blacks» who make up the majority of Guyanese.”

Pérez plans to thoroughly develop the NATO crisis, until the Monroe Doctrine is disrupted and England is excluded from dominance in Latin America. He combines another move on the oil board. It is as follows:

Harry S. Truman had already promoted «Détente», a policy of increasing the presence of the United States in the Middle East. It was not enough to get the British out of that oil, we must also stop the Soviets. He demands that US oil companies settle in the Middle East, formally. They had to put money there. The destiny of the United States in the rest of the century forced the containment of the Soviet Union, above all because the communists—not as communists but as heirs of mother Russia, according to the millenarian explanation—had the destiny of spreading throughout the Middle East. East. That was their manifest destiny and it was up to the United States to stop that.

General Eisenhower maintained Détente in 1956, reinforced. He offers Standard Oil, Mobil, all the diplomatic and military support for them to settle there. The United States and its large companies are always seen as the same thing and that is true many times, but it was not true in 1957, when the American State was rising above private companies and the State imposed policies to companies.

But the corporations did not seem enthusiastic about Détente. They were frightened by Nasser's fat finger on the trigger of Arab nationalism. What does Perez Jimenez do? He offers the oil companies a stable paradise in Venezuela. In reality, he had been offering it before there was a crisis in the Egyptian canal, but now he gives concessions, he charges low taxes that the multinationals accept very happily. After signing the contracts in the hall presided over by the equestrian painting of Bolívar, Shell, Exxon and new companies such as Arco, Pantepec, etc., smiled, with their noses smeared with cheap black paste. And the general, full of money, set about building those great highways, dams, and workers' cities that were his obsession. Contrary to what a general vision of imperialism advises to believe, the North American State was not pleased; he couldn't be, because he needed the opposite in Caracas, he needed a little devil to prick the asses of the oil mammoths, forcing them to cross the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in droves to lie down on the Middle Eastern sands. It is possible that those mammoths that rebel against his instructions are part of the "military-industrial complex" that Dwight Eisenhower will denounce in his farewell message to the presidency —broadcast on television— calling it a force that governs the North American Union against the grain of what the president elected by the citizen majority. As of 1956, Pérez Jiménez is fine with the oil companies, but bad with the North American State.

Agua, Guayana Esequiba and the Communists of Pérez Jiménez

Perón had said that the 21st century would find Latin Americans united or it would find them very bad. If one looks carefully at the size of the basic industries that Pérez Jiménez creates —steel and petrochemical—, he feels that they have been designed to feed the entire subcontinent. And Leonardo Altuve Carrillo arrives in Brazil in October 1957, inspired by a transcendental mission. He comes to combine with President Juscelino Kubitschek the Brazilian part of the plan from which "chief Pérez" will emerge stabilized in the presidency of Venezuela for another decade. There is more to his commission: Latin America will remain united, a task of Bolivarian size and, according to him and those who commissioned it in Caracas, of Bolivarian intention.

Brazil was in conflict because the parent company of Standard Oil had ordered that oil not be supplied to Brazil, of which it was an enemy because of having founded that country to Petrobras. What was argued, of course, was not this but the Suez crisis, which caused a shortage of oil in the world. That anguish brought the Brazilian. At Altuve's initiative, Pérez Jiménez received Kubitschek in Caracas and ordered, after some negotiations, that he be sold all the oil he needed. Nunes, president of Petrobras, is coming to Venezuela, and he's on his honeymoon. Before Venezuela and Brazil lived back to back.

Altuve has a first contact, at the level of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry. He explains Pérez Jiménez's plan to Foreign Minister Macedo Suárez: in an airborne military operation, Venezuela will take Guayana on April 19, 1958. Pérez Jiménez and Kubistchek have to face a ruse because, as a result of the insertion of the phrase “extracontinental power », in the decision where the OAS was forced to act against Guatemala, with which England was also defined as a possible enemy, it chose to give independence to British Guiana. British Guiana does not exist, now there is the brand new Independent Republic of Guyana, for which what Venezuela and Brazil would be attacking would be an independent country. Regarding Pérez Jiménez, it will be said in the world that it is a typical act of a fascist military dictator, regarding Brazil, something. It will seem like an imperialist act, without noticing that it is a global network of "buffer states" that is being touched, already in the Nile, already in the Orinoco. Is the Republic of Guyana really independent? The results of this crisis and that of the Malvinas will speak of this with facts.

Macedo Suárez refers the Venezuelan diplomat to a brother of his, now president of Petrobras, so that they agree on a joint action because Brazil has even more claims in the Guiana region than Venezuela, since Dutch and French Guiana are territory stolen from the enormous country by those two European powers and used to plug it from the north.

"We will take the Guianas together."

The diplomat is illustrated by his intrigue and his lordship. Both are left over for Leonardo Altuve, who during the hearing for the presentation of credentials before Kubitschek, removes the wrapping paper from a gift that he has brought. He reveals an authentic 17th-century vase, beautifully blue, with hints of gold. It is occupied only by an orchid, fresh, alive. Altuve explains that it is a gift from President Pérez Jiménez for Mrs. Kubitschek. Flushed with emotion, Kubitschek invites Altuve to eat at his house, "for a modest receipt," he points out. This is an unusual honor, because the diplomatic style of Brazil is very pompous, Kubitschek's environment resembles the court of Philip II. The modest receipt was one hundred cutlery. Taking the extra coffee, the ambassador announces that the Venezuelan government has agreed to grant the president of the United States of Brazil his highest decoration. There are lovely smiles. Altuve, using an audacity that would end up marking his image as a diplomat, points out that the highest honor for Venezuela would be for the president to receive the decoration at the Venezuelan embassy. Kubitschek agrees and his wife is delighted.

The Venezuelan ambassador carries the Mallet-Prevost memorandum among his papers. He will be cited in international courts, in support of the Venezuelan-Brazilian action in British Guiana. He will do wonders at the UN. Venezuela and Brazil would enjoy the support of the Department of Defense or the Pentagon. This does not mean official US support: they would have against the State Department, in the power of Adolf Berle, a close friend of Rómulo Betancourt and the NATO line. In the plan of the American godfathers of Pérez Jiménez —Henry Holland, the most visible—, once Guayana is invaded by the Venezuelan and Brazilian armies, the United States will appear as a mediating force, avoiding violence, actually stabilizing the takeover within of the decolonization policy, deepening a little more the wound that is open in NATO.

There was another decoration in Leonardo Altuve Carrillo's briefcase, for Vice President João Goulart, a very popular socialist leader, Brazil's main leader, linked to Juan Domingo Perón by a relationship of disciple to teacher, who went beyond the fact that one was a fascist and the other close to communism. Goulart's movement was called "Travaillism." Altuve writes to "chief Perez" that first Kubitschek must be decorated — PJ agrees — and then the Travailista vice president will be "decorated." And then, a Venezuelan trade union delegation would travel to Brazil and be received by Goulart and supported by continental travaillismo.

Also on the Venezuelan side, the project has its communists. It is unusual that he collaborates with "the reds" who, like Altuve Carrillo, began his political career by introducing a load of Vatican money into Spain to finance the uprising of General Sanjurjo, back in 1934. And unusual of course that communists collaborate in a plan of a fascist government like that of Pérez Jiménez, against which the official Communist Party conspires, while Jesús Faría, one of its top leaders, is in prison. But it is so, and in Caracas, on the corner of Cruz Verde, a certain Bolshevik union has been opened that is coordinated by a Masonic-Rosicrucian-Communist committee whose head is the intellectual Miguel Acosta Saignes.

General Pérez Jiménez explained the following in the interview with the author of this article, already mentioned:

«—We had a nationalist communism. Juan Bautista Fuenmayor, for example, was a very worthy man and mine. Chicho Heredia and Nelson Luis Martínez as well. Of course, there was the communist wing of Gustavo Machado and Jesús Faría, who were in opposition. You had to be careful of those,” he said. And he added: —But we had friends, one of them General José Rafael Gabaldón, who could be president as of April 19, 1958, was approved for that, because I would dedicate myself to the military. A very remarkable man, General Gabaldón, a friend of Eleonora Roosevelt, Nikita Khrushchev and the future Pope John XXIII. His sons were also Alirio Ugarte Pelayo, who committed suicide, and Argimiro Gabaldón, who died as a guerrilla leader.

Already another son of General Gabaldón was in the Supreme Court of Justice of Pérez Jiménez, devoted to oil trials of high confidence of power, also having scope on international disputes commissioned by Pérez Jiménez. For his part, the diplomat Altuve Carrillo confided to the author of this article, faced with insistent questions:

«—When the United States dominates Saudi Arabia and installs rockets pointing at Russia, the Russian chiefs felt very attacked, they called the Venezuelan communists and ordered them to collaborate with Pérez Jiménez».

Somebody was in a hurry to get the new #bccoilovers on the dodge tonight. Ill take any help that i can get! At 7yo… https://t.co/auRVEwVmx8

— EJ25Turbo Thu Jun 25 01:26:56 +0000 2020

These statements are consistent with the fact that King Saud visited the United States in January 1957 and on his return it was announced that the United States would sell weapons and grant other supplementary aid to Saudi Arabia, in exchange for an extension of the authorization for the use of the base. Dhahran aerial. However, it collides with the previous decisions of the XX Congress of the Communist Party, in 1956, where, after Khrushchev's denunciations that led to anti-Stalinism, collaboration with the bourgeois democracies against dictatorships was pointed out as a line of conduct to follow, which It implied collaboration with Acción Democrática against Pérez Jiménez.

Anchovy

The Venezuela rebuilt by Pérez Jiménez is condensed, symbolically, in the two towers of El Silencio, located in the center of Caracas and which were in that decade of the fifties, the largest in Latin America. The center of this kind of sanctuary of perezjimenismo constructor, the covered square "Diego Ibarra", centered in turn by a mural by César Rengifo, a communist painter, dedicated to the myth of Hamalivaca, in which the paths of water are shown, evoked and cited , which existed and became active in Indian times. An equivalent symbolic function is the statue of María Lionza, by the sculptor Colina, which was placed in front of the Central University of Venezuela. Thick, made of rough cement, in daily and physical contact with the automobile inhabitants of Caracas, it is the indigenous and original version of the goddess, the Yara riding a tapir, the animal that advances through the jungle as well as through the water. The French or Spanish version of María Leonza, represented by Eugenia de Montijo on her throne, is being widely publicized by the police. And the names —Boquerón 1 and Boquerón 2— of the highway tunnels that connect Caracas with its port of La Guaira also speak of water, a work that highlights the pride of the regime, comparable, according to its propagandists, to the Panama Canal.

Boquerón was a Venezuelan name, there was a Boquerón station on the Caracas-La Guaira train from the 19th century, but it also spoke of water and war and the unity of Latin America, since Boquerón is a key point of union of rivers that had been disputed in Bolivia. and Paraguay in the Chaco War. Appointing Boquerón meant returning to the canal issue, since the aforementioned union of rivers constitutes access to an exit route from Bolivia to Brazil and the Atlantic Sea through the Plata estuary, an exit that became urgent and desperate when a decision by the court of La Haya condemned the country with the name of Bolívar to the loss of its outlet to the Pacific, an outlet that was natural to it and that it possessed when Antonio José de Sucre created it and even before. The plugging led Bolivia to a desperate attempt across the Atlantic, at the cost of Paraguay. He failed and had Boquerón for his most terrible battle. Boquerón meant, then, the plugging of the "heartland" of South America.

There is more: if we take a closer look, we discover that, of the many regions of Bolivia, the one that would benefit the most from said outlet to Paraguay, Brazil and the Atlantic is the one formed by Santa Cruz and Tarija, regions rich in gas and oil, two fuels that were also at the bottom of the Chaco War. In the prologues of that war, it was said that the Chaco was an immense underground oil lake that reached La Asunción, and this colored the interference or oil motivation of the war, since Bolivia allied itself with Rockefeller's Standard Oil while Paraguay made sure the support of Royal Dutch Shell. With the outcome of the war Bolivia, the loser, would accuse Standard Oil of treason, of having backed Paraguay or Argentina, godmother of the latter, of having also placed secret pipelines that took Bolivian oil to Argentine territory without paying Bolivia. In retaliation, the Bolivian State decreed the "eviction" of Standard Oil, which lasted about twenty years. At present it has been known that under Paraguay there is the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest underground water deposits in the world, larger than Paraguay From the neighborhood with a water route to the Atlantic, from the fuel wealth and from the aquifer, to the extent that it was known, derives that Santa Cruz and Tarija are secessionist zones, for which the name of Boquerón contained memories of terrible brooch. Since the days of Independence, secessionism and mystery have marked the Tarijeña region. Bolívar dealt with this mystery, as can be seen in the following letter that Marshal Antonio José de Sucre, president of the newly created Bolivia, addressed to his friend José Alvear, an Argentine politician:

September 9, 1826

“The tarijeños distrustful of the little protection they had had (from Argentina), and thinking that that protest was the ultimatum that linked them to Salta or to that republic, to which they have shown obstinate repugnance, they have made a revolution on the 26th of August proclaiming his reincorporation to Bolivia (...) I believe that those of the government of Buenos Aires complicate me in this event but although I do not give a damn about what they think, I am not in the same case with respect to you, who was in charge of manage this negotiation with the Liberator (...) around here it is said, with reference to letters from Buenos Aires, that you have sold to that government the secrets that the Liberator entrusted to you. I do not know if he has entrusted you with secrets that are worth anything, but considering you a gentleman, I have defended and maintained that you are incapable of low action.

Tarija was part of the mission that Leonardo Altuve Carrillo was carrying out in Brazil due to the confidence of Pérez Jiménez, and this will be expressed in a semi-secessionist uprising that took place in Santa Cruz in December 1957, with the support of Juan Domingo Perón, financing from Marcos Pérez Jiménez, and internal leadership. situ of Henry Finch Holland, fresh from his office as Under Secretary for Latin America at the Department of State8. This uprising failed and this may have something to do with the fall of the dictator, who was living his moment of triumph or disappearance.

The separatism of Tarija and Santa Cruz is present due to the existence of the government of Evo Morales. The United States and the other world powers will be interested in him. The conduct of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Chile on the case will influence, positively or negatively, Latin American unity. So far the water in the politics of Pérez Jiménez.

Secrets of an overthrow

Returning to the subject of the invasion of Guyana, the former president added:

«—In British Guiana there was a state of opinion very favorable to the intervention that we were preparing. Do you know how it was obtained? With movies. People stopped to applaud in Georgetown movie theaters when a news program was shown with the advances in Venezuela, the highways, the dams. It was everything they wanted and England didn't give them."

But not everything is as triumphant as Pérez Jiménez appears. Copies of the book Venezuela, Politics and Petroleum, by Rómulo Betancourt6, a clever denunciation of the Pérez-Jimenista regime, circulate clandestinely in Caracas. Homeland Security is doing raids, looking for him. Less mentioned but said in high circles is that General López Contreras has settled in New York, in an attitude of disapproval of the government. And Eugenio Mendoza, the richest man in the country, who was a great partner in the steel plans of the dictatorship, has also discreetly left Venezuela and in the restaurant of a luxurious New York hotel auctions the shares of these companies for a minimum percentage of its face value, saying with the unequivocal language of money that it values ​​the future of Pérez Jiménez and his plans at nothing.

The Week of the Homeland of 1957 arrives. Miguel Acosta Saignes and Mariano Picón Salas paraded before the presidential gallery. In it, next to Pérez Jiménez, was Alfredo Stroessner, German by birth, incoming dictator of Paraguay. It was July. Altuve Carrillo was still in Brazil. A delegate from Itamarati, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, visited him to ask him to give up decorating President Kubitschek at the Embassy. "This goes against the diplomatic uses and traditions of Brazil," explained the man, implying things that come from before Kubitschek and would continue when he had disappeared.

"There was warning and perhaps threat in the man's words," Altuve explained. Some six years earlier, an official from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry surnamed Fontoura had denounced dealings between Getulio Vargas—president and dictator, tremendously popular, nationalist, who still appears in jukebox songs and string literature—with General Perón. Secret dealings, so uncomfortable that his revelation led Getulio to suicide. Itamarati has been an effective and decisive British embassy in the management of Latin America, coming from the time when Brazil was a colony of Portugal, which is an English enclave on the Spanish peninsula. At that time, Itamarati had to save NATO. Altuve declined the peaceful offer, continuing his bombastic style. He would write about his Brazilian experiences in his book I was an ambassador for Pérez Jiménez. Years later he thought that high profile was reckless.

Then Pérez Jiménez decides to violate the constitutional commitment to hold elections in 1957. Henry Finch Holland, Undersecretary of State for Latin American affairs had traveled to Venezuela on behalf of Eisenhower to convince him to hold them. He was perfect for the role of mediator, because of his position, because he was very close to Eisenhower and, at the same time, an unrepentant linebacker for Pérez Jiménez. "Do them, General. Rigged, but elections”, asks the American, sitting on two stones of the works of the Guárico dam, whose inauguration was the pretext for the trip. Pérez Jiménez told Eisenhower yes, but he consulted the chief officers of the Force, who demanded the continuity of the government for five years. They would continue at the controls, they would continue the autopistas, the plans for Guiana and South America. But perhaps the body of Pérez Jiménez is not enough to carry out the big plans. He is fat, he had a hard time sitting on the stone against Holland. Whoever is born fat is, period, but whoever is skinny by constitution and gains weight is because he is making his adrenal glands work at an inhuman rate. It is a six-year process, after which the body is irreparably damaged. The dictator's six years began in 1950 and it is 1957. They decide to give the elections the form of a plebiscite. It was an idea of ​​the Minister of Interior Relations, Laureano Vallenilla. Many times General Gómez had made rigged elections with Vallenilla's father as minister, and "Laureanito" knew the matter well. The plebiscite was a farce, General Pérez Jiménez "triumphed" by a wide margin on a night characterized by the transportation of ballot boxes to be exchanged for others.

Sputnik

With the enthusiasm of someone who is launching his legitimacy, Pérez Jiménez continues and accelerates his plans for Guayana Esequiba. The Navy, equipped with modern destroyers, is activated under the command of two rear admirals, Wolfgang and Carlos Larrazábal, brothers and highly trusted by the dictator. Roads have been dug in Venezuelan Guayana, all leading to the border with Guyana, along which the tanks will advance. The officer designated as commander of the operation is General Franz Rísquez Iribarren, who had already directed a mission to the sources of the Orinoco and the Casiquiare channel in the times of Delgado Chalbaud. There was a rush, the New York Times published article after article against the dictator, sending a message that the Venezuelan military knew how to read. Eugenio Mendoza continued to liquidate his shares in the Iron and Steel Institute.

If the distance between the United States and England had increased, General Pérez Jiménez would have triumphed. The facts spoke in that sense; On the night of December 17, 1957, the broadcast of wrestling on television was interrupted by an urgent international news:

"A few minutes ago, the Soviet Union announced that it has placed an artificial satellite in the stratosphere that orbits the Earth every fifteen hours. The satellite is called Sputnik and it is the first in a series that the communist power will launch in the coming years for space exploration purposes.

Space exploration? Not only that. Whoever has the power to place a projectile in the stratosphere has the power to put it over New York City, over London or Paris. On December 18, more or less, the bottom half of the front page of La Esfera reported a diplomatic meeting between Europeans and North Americans taking place in Turkey. What did that have to do with Sputnik? Everything, the European countries were terrified with the Soviet rocket power and asked for this meeting to ask for help. Commentators wrote that it was the most important meeting since the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

On January 1, 1958, people are woken up by the ra-ta-ta-ta of the anti-aircraft machine guns and the planes curve in the air to approach the Miraflores palace to machine-gun. They are the aviators belonging to the "prestige" of Félix Román Moreno, one of the most important military chiefs of the regime, separated by Pérez when he perceived —even before the plebiscite and markedly after it— that he constituted a hope for the United States to an evolution that would remove Pérez Jiménez but also block the way for the Communist Party, which they knew was participating in the subversion, and Democratic Action, within which, although they had Rómulo Betancourt, there was a very strong leftist current, steely in the fight against the dictatorship, in which Domingo Alberto Rangel, Simón Sáez Mérida and the most brilliant youth of the party were militating. But there are also leftists and nationalists within the military youth who perform on January 1st. The main one is Hugo Trejo, a colonel with the blood of a popular caudillo as well as a voice of command, whom the Punto Fijo democracy will be responsible for silencing and will be vindicated and recognized as a friend and teacher by Hugo Chávez.

The problem of the presence of the Communist Party in the opposition remained, a very serious problem for being the country of oil. To palliate it, inventions arise from Miguel Moreno, who lived in exile in New York. La escritora Mercedes Senior10 narró la que sostuvieron López Contreras y Rómulo Betancourt en base a una entrevista con Moreno publicada por el autor de este libro.

Arreglos y pactos en Nueva York

Las gestiones de Miguel Moreno, en este año y en otros que se narrarán después, evocan las del protagonista del film «El mensajero», de Joseph Losey, es un rol que reaparece a través de las décadas, siempre tejiendo acuerdos de consecuencias históricas. A partir de su amistad con una hija de Rafael Caldera, Moreno supo que Caldera cumplía año de nacido durante enero e inventó una fiesta con torta y velitas. A su apartamento en Sutton Place asistieron Jóvito Villalba, Rómulo Betancourt y Rafael Caldera. Hubo fotógrafos prestos a convertir en gráficas el momento en que los dirigentes se dieran la mano a tres. Ellos sabían lo que se buscaba con la fotografía, enviar a Eisenhower el mensaje de que había alianza entre ellos y que en ésta no participaba el comunismo. La gráfica aparecería en la portada de la revista Elite, de Caracas, luego de caído Pérez Jiménez.

Según explicación dada por el general Pérez Jiménez al autor de estas líneas en Madrid, su derrocamiento se semiacordó en la reunión de Turquía. Lo de que Inglaterra no perdonaba ultraje se acabó, ella y Francia aparecieron humildísimas delante de Foster Dulles. Perdonaban el abandono que Eisenhower les hizo delante de Nasser, las marramuncias con Mossadeq, lo de Arabia Saudita y Vietnam, todo. Antes se habían negado a que Estados Unidos pusiera cohetería en Europa apuntando a Rusia, ahora la pedían. Lo único que solicitaron a cambio fue la salida de Pérez Jiménez, a quien consideraban intrigante, un nuevo Mossadeq. A Eisenhower tampoco le convenía en Venezuela aquel agasajador de las corporaciones, pero no cedió todavía, persistía el temor a la infiltración comunista en el movimiento. Pero al fin cedió. El 21 de enero de 1958 el bombillo se encendió fijamente.