Blood & Corruption

Guatemala City shook with violence last week. Store windows were smashed. Battle-dressed soldiers patrolled streets littered with burned, overturned cars. Twenty people were dead, and 500 others had been wounded in a week of rioting against autocratic President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, 66. It was the worst crisis in Ydigoras' four years in office.

Crying Castro. The trouble started when students launched a one-hour strike against the announced returns of last December's congressional election, in which Ydigoras handily improved his majority. As is his habit, Ydigoras called the whole shooting match a "Castro-Communist" plot. No doubt the Communists would like to overthrow the man who let Guatemala be used as a base for last year's Cuban invasion. But the Reds are by no means the only ones fed up with Ydigoras. Because of organized graft that flourishes like a fungus, the majority of Guatemala's business and professional community has long been bitterly disgusted. Corruption chokes the inflow of capital to a trickle. Anyone wanting to invest in Guatemala faces a maze of red tape that, in many cases, can be cut only by a mordida, or bribe.

An American concern, the Breaux Bridge Oil Refining Co., recently learned what an Alliance for Progress amounts to in Guatemala. Organized by a Houston group with the backing of Shell interests, Breaux Bridge received a concession in 1958 to set up a $5,000,000 refinery--Central America's first--on Guatemala's Caribbean coast. Not long after construction began, Ydigoras personally issued an order that, in effect, forbade all Guatemalan consulates abroad to approve any shipping documents for Breaux. Breaux appealed to the Supreme Court, a tribunal capable of independence, and won an injunction. When the company began laying pipeline to the docks of Puerto Barrios three miles away, the President showed up at the construction site, delivered a threat against the company, and relented only when Breaux agreed to lay its pipeline to a new port he is promoting three miles in the opposite direction.

Chance to Escape. Breaux officials were offered a way out of their troubles. Last May, company representatives claim, one of Ydigoras' relatives dropped into Breaux Bridge's Houston offices and asked for $1,000,000. "Otherwise," he is quoted as saying, "Breaux Bridge will never be able to operate." The firm refused. Last December port authorities announced they had a presidential order to stop pipeline construction. Company officials say they were offered another chance to escape trouble. This time the emissary was a high official in the government. His price, according to Breaux officers: $350,000, "or your troubles will continue." Again the company men said no. Buttressed by another Supreme Court injunction, Breaux Bridge drove ahead.

Now, says a Breaux official, "our plant is finished, our pipeline is laid. We intend to begin importing crude--knowing full well that it probably will be stopped at the port."

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