Culture Raid

As a midafternoon crowd of 1,000 Venezuelans browsed among the Picassos and Van Goghs in a Louvre road show entitled "100 Years of French Painting," a pair of automobiles and a panel truck rolled up to Caracas' Museum of Fine Arts. Out jumped eight men and two women armed with pistols and submachine guns. The four National Guardsmen on duty were marched inside at gunpoint; museum officials were herded into a room; telephones were ripped out. In one of the exhibition halls, the gang snatched three of the Louvre's pictures from the wall. A pistol-toting woman shouted: "Do not be afraid! We are from National Liberation!" With that she nervously jerked the trigger, drilling a bystander through the leg. In another hall, a pair of less talkative men held the crowd at bay while they snatched two more of the Louvre's paintings.

A hotheaded band of far leftists out to overturn the moderate government of President Romulo Betancourt, the National Liberation Armed Forces long ago proved themselves more adept at headline-grabbing sabotage than actual combat. In the five days leading up to last week's art raid, squads of terrorists--presumably National Liberationists--burned out a branch of the U.S. Rubber Co. in the city of Maracaibo, bombed a Shell Oil Co. power substation near oil-rich Lake Maracaibo, and hurled three Molotov cocktails at the Caracas home of a member of the special Council of War that has tried 100 terrorists for guerrilla activity.

The art heist, as Communist Party Boss Gustavo Machado later explained, "was a political propaganda operation that had repercussions not only nationally but internationally." National Liberation promised to give back the paintings after they had served their "political purposes." but it did not say when that would be. At week's end, police captured a Communist Party leader identified as one of the art thieves and began questioning him.

He apparently talked. Learning that the paintings were to be moved from one hideout to another, the cops intercepted a car in the Alta Florida section of Caracas and shot it out with the bandits. Three men. all Communists, were arrested. The paintings were recovered intact: Paul Cezanne's The Bathers, a Pablo Picasso still life, Vincent Van Gogh's Flowers in a Brass Vase, Georges Braque's Still Life with Pears and a Paul Gauguin still life. French embassy officials in Caracas put the value of the masterpieces at something over $600,000.

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