Cops in Asylum

As Communism in Guatemala grew strong and tough, it inevitably produced a couple of police chiefs who could have come right out of an Arthur Koestler novel. To Colonels Rogelio Cruz Wer and Jaime Rosenberg fell the duty of directing the final, senseless reign of terror when the anti-Communist revolution last June was toppling their boss, President Jacobo Arbenz. Upon Arbenz' fall, Cruz Wer and Rosenberg escaped in a station wagon to Mexico, first of the regime's big shots to run for safety.

Last week in Mexico City, plainclothesmen in a black Buick glided up to Jaime Rosenberg as he walked along a street, and arrested him. Without success, they also sought Cruz Wer. Both were to be held for hearings to decide whether they should be extradited for trial in Guatemala, where the Supreme Military Tribunal has gathered more than 1,000 pages of testimony charging that Cruz Wer and Rosenberg were "archgenocides who cruelly ordered the massacres of innocent citizens."

Rosenberg, whose face twitches and whose hair has suddenly turned white in patches, although he is only 37, whined his innocence: "Whatever I did in Guatemala was done under the orders of the legally constituted regime." He did have cause for concern: the Mexican Foreign Office said at week's end that it did not consider him to be the usual political exile, immune to extradition. The same may go for Cruz Wer. But informed Mexicans and Guatemalans believe that Arbenz will qualify as "political" and get permanent asylum.

Don't count the Guatemalan Reds out yet, warned Ambassador John E. Peurifoy, U.S. envoy to Guatemala during Arbenz' last months and a negotiator of the post-revolution truce. "They ran like a bunch of rats," Peurifoy said, testifying in Washington last week before the House Subcommittee on Communist Aggression in Latin America, but that only scattered them to various Latin American countries where they "represent a great danger, and I hope those governments are alert to the situation."

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