General Unrest

Cabinet ministers come and go in the government of President Guillermo Leon Valencia, 55, and Colombians generally pay little attention. Last week one minister who had been loyally with Valencia for 21 years was out of a job, and the country was agog.

He was Army General Alberto Ruiz Novoa, 48, Colombia's war minister and its most compelling public figure (TIME, Dec. 11). Commander of Colombia's small force in the Korean War, he established a reputation as a reformer in uniform after Valencia brought him into the Cabinet in 1962. At the time, the country was plagued by poverty-fed badlands banditry that had been going on unabated for more than a decade. Ruiz Novoa initiated a program of civic action by the army to help peasants improve their lot. He also reorganized Colombia's army into what is today South America's most effective anti-guerrilla force, managed to reduce the bandits to the status of a mere nuisance.

Blunt Talk. All this made him powerfully popular--and increasingly talkative. In his blunt way, he began to criticize the government in unmilitary speeches. Agrarian reform was moving too slowly, he said. There was no national purpose. Pressure groups of the aristocracy were hindering progress. The country badly needed "an immediate social-economic revolution."

Lately, rumors have been going around Bogota that Ruiz Novoa was planning a coup--though he vehemently denied it. The opportunity was supposed to be a general strike called by the unions to protest a broad new sales tax. But the strike, attempted two weeks ago, fizzled completely, and Valencia used the occasion to fire his contentious war minister, charging that Ruiz Novoa's policies were splitting the armed forces. Into his place went General Gabriel Rebeiz Pizarro, 49, second man in the military hierarchy and the one who made the charges against his boss to Valencia.

Now to the People? Few Colombians believe that they have heard the last from the ousted general. After he was cashiered, a group of officers pleaded with him to lead a coup against the government. Ruiz Novoa turned them down with a lecture on democracy. Colombia's Social Christian Democrats have offered to make him their candidate in the 1966 presidential elections, and other anti-government parties are talking of a Ruiz Novoa coalition. He has not yet chosen his political affiliation, but that is only a formality he seems certain to fulfill. Wrote the general in a letter to a friend last week: "The people have asked me not to abandon the fight."

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