New Broom

In its tight little valley high in the Andes, the 400-year-old capital city of Quito (pop. 174,000) was astir with a new kind of bustle. Its Conservative mayor, tall, thin Jacinto Jijen y Caamano, 57, was making things hum. He had talked President Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra into borrowing $4,000,000 in Washington to build the city's first aqueduct since Inca times. Said Mayor Jijen (pronounced "he-hone"): "This summer, for the first time, Quito will have water."

That was not all. Last week, Quitenos bounced over their cobbled streets in comfortable buses of the newly inaugurated municipal bus system. Gone are the jitneys which bus-line owners rashly garaged last year to compel higher fares.

Mayor Jijen also dedicated the first two of 800 projected houses in a new workers' village for Indians, to replace windowless adobe huts. Among other projects are new markets, to replace ancient fly-infested stands, a new slaughterhouse, and a new municipal power plant, on order from the U.S. Says Mayor Jijen: "I suppose that's enough to begin with."

Family Tradition. The man with the new broom is no political hack. He is a scholar who has written five volumes on Ecuador's pre-Inca history, promises nine more. His 40,000-volume library, complete with a museum, is one of the best on Ecuador's early history.

He is also one of Ecuador's richest men, owns an immense Quito mansion, vast tracts of land that his family has held since colonial times, a big textile factory at Los Chillos, not far from Quito. At Los Chillos, he explains, "great-grandsons of the people who first worked for our family there" receive pieces of land to cultivate, along with some pay, in return for factory labor. On ceremonial occasions, the workers, who must go to Mass and Communion regularly, kiss Jijen's hand and even his arm up to the shoulder.

Pious Mayor Jijen feels that for years Ecuador was ruined by Liberal politicians bent on weakening the church, secularizing the schools, legalizing divorce. Then, one day in 1924, "I suddenly realized that the evil was not in our neighbor's house but our own." He entered politics. Since then he has bossed Ecuador's Conservatives. "The country needs order," he says, "with a certain directed liberty."

In 1945, Jijen was elected Quito's mayor. If, after 54 years, Ecuador should go Conservative in 1948, chances are good that parchment-skinned Mayor Jijen will be Ecuador's President.

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