Exit the Colonel, Complaining

Arbenz is out. This week Guatemala, after four years of skidding toward the Soviet orbit and ten days of bombing and strafing by anti-Communist rebel invaders, found its President's Marxism and his Communist kibitzers too much. Top army officers forced him to quit, and took power with a junta of three colonels.

Arbenz flew off to exile in Buenos Aires.

The military assault that led to Colonel Arbenz' downfall was hardly a firecracker pop by modern standards. It consisted mainly of a miniature air war, waged by four obsolete rebel planes (see below).

They worked so effectively that the 2,000 tons of Communist infantry weapons that Arbenz imported last month were worthless--and he had no fighter planes of his own. As fear and tension grew in Guatemala, it became plain that the Communist jig was up.

By Sunday morning of this week there were plain signs of defection in the army and the cabinet. Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello called in U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy, sought to see what could be saved, offered to resign. Peurifoy's diplomatic answer was that he would certainly like to see the bloodshed end. He was barely back at his embassy when the phone rang again. It was Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, chief of the armed forces.

Would the Ambassador come to his house for an urgent conference? Farewell Address. Through deserted, shuttered streets went Peurifoy. Five top-ranking colonels were there, and they wanted to know whether the U.S. Ambassador would recognize a junta headed by Diaz, and help stop the fighting. What Peurifoy had to say, in the 2 3/4-hour talk, was not reported. But at the end Diaz and two other officers went to give Arbenz the word. The President, forced to bow for the first time in his stubborn life, burst into a rage, stormed and argued. Finally he acceded, and went on the radio for a bitter farewell in an unsteady voice breaking with emotion.

"I have made the momentous decision," he said, "to abandon the presidency. I leave power in the able hands of Colonel Diaz. I urge all revolutionary organizations to support him. I hope this decision will save the revolution."

Doctrinaire to the end, he charged that the United Fruit Co. of Boston (which lost 400,000 acres of land to Arbenz' agrarian reform program) had "tried to destroy our country" under the pretext of attacking Communism. He referred sorrowfully to the "overwhelming and tremendous means at the command of Guatemala's enemies." and signed off.

Diaz followed, crediting Arbenz with doing "what he thought was his duty," and promising to preserve the social reforms of his regime. Like Arbenz and Rebel Castillo Armas, Diaz is a professional officer; the three were schoolmates at Guatemala's military academy. He is 40, popular in the army and among the people, less provincial than the narrow, little-traveled Arbenz. Last year he publicly declared: "There will be no Communists in the officers' corps while I am in command." He supported Arbenz from duty and in the belief that Arbenz' land reform was good; there was nothing to prove that he saw Red influence over the President as a critical problem. But his first acts in power were to 1) form a three-man junta that included a vocal antiCommunist, 2) outlaw the Communist Party and 3) fire Colonel Rogelio Cruz Wer, head of Guatemala's notorious police and the Reds' only important sympathizer of high military rank.

Diplomatic Front. Arbenz' ouster complicated diplomatic efforts to deal with the civil war and--more widely--with Guatemala's drift toward becoming a Russian satellite in the U.S.'s backyard.

In the U.N. last week Russian and Guatemalan delegates had struggled to make any investigation of the war a Security Council matter--Russia doubtless relishing the potentialities for propaganda and mischief. But the U.S. point of view--that ending the war was a task for the Organization of American States--prevailed. The OAS promptly voted to hold a foreign ministers' meeting in Rio de Janeiro July 7. An investigating mission made ready to fly to Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Until the diplomatic machinery had time to work, any prospect of speedy peace was left squarely up to Diaz and Castillo Armas, with the U.S.'s Peurifoy to lend his good offices for a ceasefire.

Diaz and his fellow colonels, in hastening to take an anti-Communist stand, obviously hoped to take a lot of the fire out of the rebels' anti-Red crusade. Diaz announced that the "struggle against the mercenary invaders of Guatemala will not abate," and went on uncrating his new Iron-Curtain shooting irons. But Castillo Armas, after a slow start, had already toppled his major target, and now had momentum as well as his deadly planes.

His radio cried that Diaz was simply the "mask behind which the Communists are now operating." He warned of tougher air raids to come. If the peacemakers failed, the war could yet be bloody.

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