Terror at Home

Guatemalans were looking nervously over their shoulders last week, as the pro-Communist government of President Jacobo Arbenz began to crack down on its opponents. A dozen prominent citizens made sudden dashes for asylum in foreign embassies; hundreds went into hiding. The country's leading aviator climbed into his Cessna and fled to El Salvador. The chief of the anti-Communist Workers Committee, newly named to the post after the body of the former chief was found floating in Lake Atitlan, disappeared. Plain-clothes police bustled around the capital, searching houses, running down fugitives, laying ambushes at embassy entrances, swooping suddenly for arrests. Back in Washington, after a nine-day survey .of the situation, California's Republican Representative Patrick Hillings reported bluntly that "there is no question that the leaders of Guatemala are taking orders from Soviet Russia."

In midweek the Guatemalan government announced that it had captured documents and secret codes, and Interior Minister Augusto Charnaud MacDonald portentously declared: "A plot--one of the best-organized conspiracies in the history of the country--has been unearthed. Those arrested were the vanguard of forces based on foreign soil." The plot, whether real or fancied, was convenient, and it roused the regime's supporters to demands for action. The Communist chief of the peasants' union called on his followers to be ready to join a rural militia to shoot antiCommunists. And Communist Congressman Cesar Montenegro Paniagua proclaimed that Guatemala would never need concentration camps. If the opposition should rise, he explained, "we will cut off the heads of all anti-Communists."

This week, in diplomatic circles, there was talk that the Latin American nations would meet under the banner of the Organization of American States in Montevideo late this month, to talk about "collective action" against Guatemala.

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