First Anniversary

Decked with flags and resounding with fireworks, Guatemala City observed a festive anniversary this week. One year ago Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, the exiled officer who organized a shoestring revolution and ousted the Red-run government of Guatemala, returned in triumph to his nation's capital, later announced that his regime would go "neither right nor left, but straight up."

Freshman Politician Castillo Armas has done his zigzagging best to keep the promise. After briefly outlawing labor unions, Castillo Armas re-established them, purged of their Communist leaders but with strikes out of the question for the present. He abolished the previous regime's famed land-reform decree, but he chased few peasants off their holdings, and is writing a new reform based on full ownership of land instead of government leases.

But it is an axiom of Central American politics that no regime stays popular very long. Professional people and university students are restless over Castillo Armas' continuing government-by-decree, dismayed by his government's apparent lack of political and technical know-how. The President himself complains that most of his economic advisers are "no-idea men." And until he can launch a program to encourage business and raise living standards, the threat of a "prolabor" Communist comeback will not disappear.

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