15th President

PERU

45th President

Early one morning last week at Callao a woman tried to keep her husband from leaving home with a stick of dynamite in his pocket. During their scuffle the dynamite went off, blew up both of them. . . . Ten were killed, 13 wounded at Paijan in street fighting. . . . Strikes broke out on the sugar plantations around Trujillo. . . . On the outskirts of Lima, police arrested 30 men breaking into a private shooting club, not to practice but to steal weapons. . . . All this was considered as natural an adjunct as the gold braid and oratory with which seven-fingered President Luis M. Sanchez Cerro was inaugurated last week at Lima's Government Palace to be the 45th President of Peru.

To riot and civil disturbance, to gunfire and cobblestone-pitching. President Sanchez Cerro is no stranger. Week before President Sanchez Cerro took the oath of office a General Pedro Pablo Martinez blustered into town after a flying trip from Santiago, Chile. He said that a long time ago President Sanchez Cerro had insulted him. He had come for satisfaction. Acquaintances of the principals persuaded the truculent warrior to observe the statute of duelling limitations, forget his grievance. He was packed off to Chile on the next boat.

What rioting occurred last week was but a haba in the sopa to what took place when President Sanchez Cerro, then a Lieutenant-Colonel, overturned the eleven-year dictatorship of Augusto Bernardino Leguia in August 1930. After that he served as provisional president until the same soldiers and sailors with whom he had effected the coup forced him into exile after six months. Last October the military Junta permitted a national election. Luis Sanchez Cerro won by a majority of 19,745 votes.

With the populace crowding the streets as far as a block away from the Palace to hiss the retiring Junta, cheer their new executive, and in the absence of hostile Aprista Representatives, President Sanchez Cerro told his Congress what he hoped to accomplish in his five-year term--if he lasts that long. With a dig at imprisoned onetime President Leguia. he cried: "Our national faith has been committed to treaties which diminished our territory Our treasury has been exhausted and is suffering from the weight of a tremendous indebtedness contracted under the hardest terms. The safety of the State has been endangered by the development of dangerous political, economic and social ideas. . . . The public interest has been subordinated to private interest. . . . "I promise that I have decided to defend the social order and the stability of national institutions regardless of the origin or magnitude of any threatening danger!"

U. S. recognition of the Sanchez Cerro Government was patent in the appearance at the inaugural of Ambassador Fred Morris Dearing, who brought the best wishes of Herbert Hoover. What U. S. bankers would have liked to hear in President Sanchez Cerro's address, however was constructive mention of $88,000,000 worth of defaulted Peruvian bonds now gathering dust in many a U. S. vault. A movement by the Investment Bankers Association to bring this matter strongly to Peruvian attention was post-poned last week, pending the shaking down of the new Government.

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