Tailor-Made

Last Sunday, at dawn, revolt exploded in Peru's chief port city of Callao. It was the restless country's second uprising in less than three months. Last time (TIME, July 19) it had been the army; now it was the navy. Rebel sailors and officers seized five warships, locked up or shot their commanders, sent landing parties ashore under cover of a ragged bombardment. Shore-based sailors quickly took over the Naval Academy and the naval armory, moved on to occupy an army barracks and the ancient, star-shaped fortress, Real Felipe.

In a day and night of bloody fighting, loyal army troops in tanks and armored cars beat off the landing parties, finally reduced the rebel strongholds. The dead and wounded were carted off in truckloads. Harried by army bombers, the rebel warships set out to sea, finally returned and surrendered. Eight miles away in Lima, meanwhile, armed civilians had seized the telephone exchange, had tried to booby-trap it before being driven out.

President Jose Luis Bustamante, harassed by recurring political crises, promptly suspended all civil rights. The revolt, he declared, had been the work of his onetime friends and present enemies, the militantly leftist (but anti-Marxist) Apristas, whom he had already blamed for last fortnight's rash of strikes, and much of the country's political unrest.

Under the President's orders, government troops in Lima occupied APRA headquarters, seized the plant of its newspaper, La Tribuna, arrested several prominent Apristas (including the party's second in command, Senator Manuel Seoane). Burly Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, APRA's leader, had disappeared, perhaps into the political underground where he had already spent 16 years of his life. One did not need to be as politically shrewd as Haya to know that if Bustamante had been looking for a chance to outlaw APRA, this week's revolt presented a tailor-made opportunity.

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