Scuffle in the Plaza

After six months of peaceful revolution, Peru had a touch of violence last week. When it was over, the "New Deal" for which Peru voted last June was more strongly entrenched than ever.

The scrimmage pitted the well-marshaled leftists of Apra (the People's Party, and Peru's largest) against Communists, fascists and students who tried to demonstrate in Lima's Plaza Universitaria against the Government's new press law. Outnumbering the hardy demonstrators by 20,000 to 200, the Apristas waved white handkerchiefs, drowned out the anti-Government orators by clapping in rhythmic unison (two short, one long). Then in perfectly formed ranks their columns closed in. They seized the opposition's banners, fought with fists and sticks. Guns popped. After the police finally cleared the Plaza, two were dead, more than a hundred wounded.

Avocado Politics. Apra was not part of the government it fought so ferociously to uphold. With more seats in Congress than any other party, it was content to hold power without office. Its famed Jefe (Chief) and hero, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre--now fattish and 50 and far from the wild-eyed incendiary that the U.S. took off a ship in Panama in the '20s and deported to Europe--sat in his offices at La Tribuna, nibbled an occasional avocado and formulated the party's policy.

In the six months since Apra had voted for Poet-President Jose Luis Bustamante and compromised its way to power, Peru's new-dealing Government had revamped its school system and hiked teacher pay by almost 80%, voted "victory bonuses" (employer-paid) to all workers. It had also embarked on the enterprise dearest to Haya's pro-Indian heart, irrigation that would restore to Indians the Andean waters their Inca ancestors had led through now-ruined aqueducts and tunnels. "The reactionaries irrigated the country in blood," Haya told them. "We will irrigate it with water."

The Crux. Absorbed in such social projects, the Government had a narrow escape in the press-law controversy. Though the new bill was only mildly restrictive (nothing like the law it replaced), reactionary papers like El Comercio and La Prensa and the pipsqueak smear-sheets that Latins call pasquines rebelled most at the requirement that they publish a statement of ownership, stirred up the fuss that ended in the Plaza scuffle.

But having flexed its muscles, Apra was no longer so apprehensive. This week, as President Bustamante studied the bill submitted by Congress, the streets were Apra's. The Party's show of strength had given the lie to the anti-Apra pasquin pundit who had said: "They [Apra] could have been the masters of Peru. They had the girl in the automobile and the lights were out. And then the girl left them. For the crux of the matter is not to have the instrument but to know how to use it."

Apra, it appeared, knew how.

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