Dangerous Liberty

Leaping lustily to life after nearly a decade of censorship and browbeating, Venezuela's newspapers have more than doubled circulation since the fall of Dictator Perez Jimenez (TIME, Feb. 3). In their hunger for honest news, Venezuelans are even snapping up women's magazines and sporting sheets, also long-censored. Conspicuously absent from Caracas' newsstands : El Heraldo, a monopoly evening paper that was manipulated as a government mouthpiece by Minister of the Interior Vallenilla Lanz. Its plant was sacked at the height of the revolution, and in its place, only nine days after the revolution, Caraquenos last week got a new evening paper called El Mundo. Its fighting slogan : "I prefer dangerous liberty to peaceful slavery."

El Mundo's maxim is more than Monday-morning bravado. The new daily was propelled into orbit by slender, bushy-haired Miguel Angel Capriles, 42, Venezuela's biggest publisher, whose morning papers. La Esfera (The Sphere) and tabloid Ultimas Noticias (Latest News), earned a hazardous reputation as two of the few sheets that proved most staunch in defiance of Perez Jimenez. (The only daily that outdid Capriles' papers was Roman Catholic La Religion, which refused to run a single line on the dictator's "me-or-nobody" election victory.) Publisher Capriles got so deft at smuggling innuendoes past the censor that Security Police Boss Pedro Estrada once bawled at him: "We are going to blow up your building!"

While many Caracas publishers went along with the dictatorship, Capriles stretched his dangerous liberty to the point of mimeographing wire stories critical of the government and passing them to restive army officers. On New Year's Day, after the abortive air-force revolt at Maracay, submachine-gun-toting security police bundled Capriles off to jail, where he was later joined by his brother, Marco, Ultimas Noticias' circulation manager. Carlos, a third brother, fled to Colombia, while five top Capriles editors went into hiding or exile. By last week all were back at work in Caracas.

Whipping into a 14-hours-a-day routine at the Ultimas Noticias building, Publisher Capriles celebrated Venezuela's freedom with a flurry of now-it-can-be-told newspaper stories. At the same time, Miguel Capriles and most other publishers realize that they can best shore up a shaky democracy by avoiding excess in their new freedom. Wryly, Capriles admits: "For the time being we are exercising a sort of self-censorship."

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