Power Politics

The President of Nicaragua last week challenged the President of Costa Rica to meet at the border and duel to the death with pistols. "If he hates me, then why not settle it this way?" grumbled Nicaragua's Anastasio ("Tacho'') Somoza, who claims to be the best shot in his tough, U.S. Marine-trained Gnardia National. "He's crazier than a goat in the midsummer sun," replied Costa Rica's Jose ("Pepe") Figueres. an M.I.T.-trained coffee planter.

Such hot talk, plus a warm little war and a cold-blooded assassination carried the six small nations of Central America into 1955 with characteristic gusto. In countless small but deadly revolutions, from the days of the smoothbore musket through the time of the machine-gunning fighter plane, they have earned their unhappy renown as a sort of American Balkans-plus-volcanoes. Last week the area was smoking in much the way it did during the filibuster-filled past:

P: Costa Rica (pop. 900,000) is a doughty little democracy that tries to get along without an army. But only seven years ago a bloody civil war killed 1,300 men, and last week citizen volunteers were signing up in schoolhouses to fight off the second serious invasion by exiles and adventurers since 1948 (see below).

P: Nicaragua (pop. 1,200,000) is the more or less contented plantation of Dictator Somoza, who owns perhaps one-tenth of the country's best farm land. Somoza escaped a Costa Rica-born assassination plot just in time to provide airbases for the planes that won the anti-Communist revolution in Guatemala last June. He stood accused last week of trying to do as much for rebel Costa Ricans.

P: Guatemala (pop. 3,100,000) has been buffeted, since last summer's successful revolution, by one attempted army revolt and an assortment of serious economic woes. At one time, President Carlos Castillo Armas was reported ready to help Somoza topple the Costa Rican regime, but he apparently changed his mind.

P: Honduras (pop. 1,600,000), where the invaders of Guatemala gathered last spring, is a banana republic with too few bananas (because of storms). It is pulling back, under a dictator, from the brink of a revolution that threatened when no candidate got a majority in a three-way election (TIME, Dec. 20). Thus distracted, Honduras let some of last week's invaders of Costa Rica gather there and move on to Nicaragua.

P: El Salvador (pop. 2,110,000), a stable little coffeegrower, is neutral in favor of Figueres in the current uproar.

P: Panama (pop. 880,000), after a couple of years of unprecedented stability under the lamented President Jose ("Chichi") Remon, is again providing notable political eruptions of its own (see below).

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