A Coup, Not a Cuartelazo

When a rumor got around La Paz last week that the President was deep in a closed-door conference with the generals and colonels, pacenos knew that something was up. At 3 a.m., weary reporters saw President Mamerto Urriolagoitia and two military aides hustle out of the palace, get into a car and drive away. Then army officers Banded out a batch of press releases, including a message from Urriolagoitia: "Despite my constant efforts to conduct the political struggle into channels of peace and tranquillity . . . our country is again faced with a dilemma . . . Accordingly, I hereby deliver the high office of constitutional President . . . into the hands of the armed forces."

Only Too Glad. From the day he took over the burdens of government from ailing President Enrique Hertzog in May 1949, elegant Mamerto Urriolagoitia had had his hands so full of strikes, plots and uprisings that he could make little progress in dealing with Bolivia's economic ills. Desperate for a remedy, Bolivians went to the polls three weeks ago and all jut elected exiled Presidential Candidate Victor Paz Estenssoro, leader in absentia of the Movement of National Revolution. Despite the M.N.R.'s old record of Nazi-style violence, Paz Estenssoro won a clear plurality (45% of the total vote) over the runner-up government candidate, Gabriel Gosalvez. The government was indeed "faced with a dilemma": either let Paz Estenssoro have the presidency, or risk an M.N.R. revolt--a choice between violence and violence.

Left to himself, Urriolagoitia might have felt obliged to hand over power to the M.N.R. As it was, he was only too glad to bow out and let the army take over. Result: one of the quietest revolutions in Latin American history. Brigadier General Hugo Ballivian, 49, Chaco War hero, became head of a ten-man junta (three generals, seven colonels). Ex-President Urriolagoitia rode peacefully from the palace to the airport, boarded a plane for Arica, Chile. Not a shot was fired.

Only the Beginning. The barracks-bred coup is so common in Latin America that latinos have a word for it: cuartelazo (from cuartel, barrack). Declared the manifesto of Bolivia's new junta: "This is not a cuartelazo.''' According to the junta, "the anarchic tendencies of certain groups" necessitated the army's "temporary presence in power." Authority will be restored "as soon as possible, to him who, by the constitution, has the right to it."

The first day of the new regime was calm. But during the night, bonfires burned in the hills near the capital, ominously spelling out in the darkness the initials M.N.R. The following night, partisans attacked a police station; one policeman was killed, three wounded. That, pacenos feared, was only the beginning.

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