The Lampposts of La Paz

An attempt on the life of Acting President Tomas Monje Gutierrez touched it off. Just before noon a demented young ex-officer named Luis Oblitas rushed into the Presidential Palace, clubbed the secretary, leveled his gun at the President and shouted, "I'm going to be President."

"Fire," said the President, unbuttoning his vest and spreading his arms. "I am here by the will of the people." The madman hesitated, and in that moment the police were upon him.

Outside, in the Plaza Murillo, where last July a mob lynched Dictator Villarroel, the news rapidly drew a crowd that swelled to 80,000. They seized Oblitas as police questioned him, propelled him across the square to a lamppost. There, while President Gutierrez shouted from his balcony, "My life is unimportant," they shot, then hanged Oblitas.

Howling and shouting, the mob boiled down La Paz' cobbled streets to the jail. There they broke in, seized Jorge Eguino and Jose Escobar, the Villarroel police chiefs held since July for trial. These were the men who had admitted directing the massacre of scores of oppositionist leaders at Oruro in November 1944. Both were dragged twelve blocks to the plaza's lampposts. Escobar was probably dead before he got there, but they hanged him anyway.

Of what happened thereafter a TIME correspondent cabled an eyewitness account: "Eguino at this very moment is making a statement in front of a lamppost while the mob is shouting, urging that he be hanged. . . . From about a hundred yards we watch helplessly what is happening. There is a priest beside Eguino. . . . Right now Eguino was killed with two shots and hanged. He drank a bottle of Coca-Cola just before he died." That night, while the bodies were still hanging, there was a sudden flash of lightning. All city lights went out for ten or 15 seconds. In the frightened crowd in the plaza a woman screamed: "The voice of God--it is God punishing us."

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