PRESIDENT CASTRO.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3062, 5 December 1908, Page 4

PRESIDENT CASTRO.

President Castro, of Venezuela, is reported to be about to visit Europe for the sake of his health. To such an extent has Castro achieved celebrity or notoriety that he has been described variously as the "International Pest" and the "International Nuisance." A bitter character sketch of which he is the subject and of which George W. Crickfield is the author, the opinions expressed in it being said to be based on personal observation, appears in "Everybody's Magazine." It gives curious glimpses of the President's methods. A piquant extract reads: "'Thousands of the i very best of citizens of Venezuela have been imprisoned, tortured, and terrorised by the present Venezuelan despot The motives are various. Frequently Castro, or someone of his coterie, wants a man's property. The victim may have failed to join the band of maudlin man-worship-pers who fawn iapon the vainglorious dictator with extravagant and disgusting sycophancy, and this is construed iinto hostiJity. Or the victim may have spoken in reprobation of some of the unnumbered outrages ■committed by the military adherents of 'Castro. Boat hundreds of the best citizens of Venezuela have been imprisoned for no known cause at all. At one time it was stated that more than 1,50® 'of these unfortunateswere incarcerated in various dungeons throughout the country.."" The description given of the state of the prisons is appalling. Elsewhere we read that Ciorina Castro was 'originally a cattleman, whose business consisted in getting up revolutions in some section on the bordar line be tween Venezuela and Colombia, ®nd then running other people's cattle into the adjoining country, where he would sell them. The outrages on British vessels and the events generally which, inspired by Castro, led up to the blockade of 1903 aire a matter of history., To-day the President is said to he a millionaire —the only one in Venezuela. His ascendancy since He overthrew the constituted authority and seized the reins of power is ascribed to the weapon he wields in his licentious army, a savage aggregation made up of unlettered peons, a mixed bread in which there is a predomination of Indian and negro blood. Coming 1 from the Andean Province that was his home with scarcely the rudiments of an education, Castro is said to have never yet been out of Venezuela, save on one trip to Curacoa, a little Dutch island off the Venezuelan coast. Under such circumstances, it is conceivable that the President's trip to Europe may considerably enlarge his mental equipment, and it may even tend to diminish the vast proportions of his own estimate of himself. j