Poet President

In his first seven days as Peru's President, Jose Luis Bustamante Rivero* restored press freedom and full civil rights to his countrymen, freed Peru's political prisoners. He had also fired 300 of the old regime's strong-arm men, cancelled gambling licenses and taken a good long look at the expenditures of the national treasury.

In turning out the tight little oligarchy that had run the country for decades, Peruvians had swung left. But President Bustamante ("a short, careful step is better than a brilliant, audacious hop") was a moderate. Even Lima's El Comercio, organ of the powerful reactionary Miro Quesada family, hailed him as a "gentleman highly regarded by everybody and without enemies or opposition."

Bustamante reached political maturity as author of the manifesto which launched the 1930 revolution. Since 1934, he has served with distinction as Peruvian Minister to Uruguay and Bolivia.

Now that Peru has Bustamante as its President, the stage is set for change. Because Bustamante had stayed clear of partisan politics, he was able to fuse Haya de la Torre's radical Apra party, socialists and a handful of Communists and near-fascists into the victorious National Democratic Front. Now his problem is to hold them together while pushing through his social-reform program. The first test might well come this week when Congress (dominated by the Apristas) meets to act on Bustamante's program.

Peruvians, remembering that their new President is a spare-time poet, hoped that his political activity would show the same mixture of lyricism and practicality as his tribute to Peru's guano birds. They "leave a ... magic nitrogen fluid ... a concentrated essence of a longing for the sky, which . . . liberates the roots from the prison of the furrow, animates the stem, lifts the branches and raises flowers into the air--and makes the petal wings tremble like a little bird avid for space and freedom."

* Elected June 10, over General Eloy G. Ureta.

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