Twenty-Eighth Try

For a few days last week, revolution seemed just a hand's breadth away in Guatemala. Three citizens had already been killed in presidential campaign street fighting. University students, merchants and professional men, blaming the police for the deaths, had launched a general strike. Thus, once again, enemies of the government gathered in downtown Sixth Avenue to demand the resignation of left-wing President Juan Jose Arevalo. At the same time, 3,000 Arevalista workers, backers of government Presidential Candidate Jacopo Arbenz, staged a counter-demonstration in the Parque Barrios.

Police moved in to smash the Sixth Avenue meeting. On cue, cops all over town began shooting into the air. Methodically they reloaded, kept on firing. From rooftops civilians joined in, shooting at anti-government demonstrators as they scampered to cover.*

After 15 minutes of sustained small-arms fire, the army moved. An M-3 tank and a half-track rumbled into Sixth Avenue. At the Parque Barrios, soldiers unlimbered a .50-cal. machine gun, and scattered the workers. As the streets filled with soldiers, the cops fled. The shooting stopped. Two more citizens had been killed, about 50 wounded.

At the National Palace, 32-year-old Major Carlos Paz Tejada, army chief, strode into a cabinet meeting, told President Arevalo that the army had been forced to take over to keep order.

Paz Tejada clamped on a strict curfew and censorship, began confiscating all arms held by civilians. He also called in the strikers and got their agreement to go back. Happy conservatives rejoiced that a new order had been established, with Paz Tejada as the strong man. Now, they thought, the Communists whom Arevalo had been harboring in some government posts would be sacked, and candidates opposing Jacopo Arbenz would get a fair deal in this year's election.

The rejoicing was premature. By week's end, at least 40 opposition leaders had landed in jail, and General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, the leading conservative presidential candidate, found it expedient to go into hiding. "With civilians disarmed," said Paz Tejada smoothly, "the army will be in a very good position to guarantee free elections." Nothing had really changed. Paz Tejada, who owed his present job to ex-Defense Minister Arbenz, had delivered the army's support to its old boss when he most needed it. And Juan Jose Arevalo was still president, having survived the 28th attempt against his regime in his five years in office.

* One rifle slug ripped through a U.S. embassy fifth-floor window, missing two men by inches and slamming into a picture. Colonel Charles Deerwester, U.S. Air Attache, coolly stretched a string from the hole in the picture to the hole in the window, took a sight along the line. The string pointed straight to a seventh-floor window of police headquarters, a block and a half away. "Damned good marksman," said Deerwester.

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