Fighter's End

President Carlos Castillo Armas and his wife were to dine alone one night last week in the block-long Presidential Palace in Guatemala City. Not even one of the wiry President's military aides was present as the couple strolled arm in arm down the long, wide hallway from their bedroom apartment to the dining room. Only the crack Presidential Guards stood duty in the series of archways that led to the courtyard gardens.

As the couple passed by, one sentry, a stocky half-Indian named Romeo Vasquez Sanchez, snapped his heels together at attention, slapped his rifle up to present arms. Then Soldier Vasquez Sanchez stepped back, flipped off one set of hall lights, and raised his 7-mm. Mauser to his shoulder. As the President half-turned, Vasquez Sanchez shot him through the heart. Doughty Castillo Armas, 42, who overthrew the only Communist-dominated government that the Western Hemisphere ever had, died at once.

The guard fired another round into the President's body, then fled toward the palace gate, fired one round at a screaming maid, another at a colonel of the guards (neither was hit). As his former comrades in arms rushed up from all sides, Vasquez Sanchez put the rifle muzzle to his throat and fired the last bullet of his five-round clip upward through his own skull.

The Legacy. Behind him, the little (5 ft. 7 in., 135 Ibs.) President left prosperity and surface stability, but no sound political philosophy, organization or heir apparent. In the three years since his rag-tag army and Nicaragua-based air force (six F-47s) forced out the Red-led regime of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Castillo was the country's undisputed ruler--shy and diffident in manner, often indecisive as an administrator, but capable on occasion of moving with stern severity.

The product of a poor family, the country's military academy, and the U.S. Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., he cracked down relentlessly on Communism, which he had learned to hate as a career officer. He had seen Communism spreading in Guatemala for ten years. For a plot to head off the rigged election of Arbenz in 1950, he faced a firing squad; luckily hit only in the left leg, he returned to prison, helped dig a 38-ft. tunnel under the walls, and escaped to begin the plot that took Guatemala. With the aid of ten separate police forces, he jailed or exiled the Arbenz cronies who had not already fled the country, cleaned up Red-led unions. But he also closed down opposition newspapers, which Arbenz had never done, and brutally smashed student demonstrations.

As Castillo steered the country sternly back from left to center, the U.S. sent $50 million to start a highway and building boom that has kept Guatemala prosperous. But graft, always present, kept pace with prosperity. The President alone dispensed $1,000,000 a year through the old and perfectly legal custom of confidenciales--a confidential fund that he could spend as he saw fit. With paternal pride, Castillo launched ambitious health-and-education programs, plastering the country with signs urging peasants to "Wash Your Hands Before Eating." To replace Arbenz' helter-skelter expropriation of rich plantations, he started a gradual system of land reform. But in the backlands, rightist planters scaled pay down 30% from the Arbenz rates.

Red Comeback. Immediately after Castillo Armas' assassination, the government announced that the guard who shot him down was a Communist. Since that would indicate an unpardonable and unexplainable lapse in the government's security measures, the announcement seemed rather to be a hyperbolic way of expressing the fear that Arbenz (now plotting in Uruguay) and his exiled henchmen might try to regain power in the confusion. It seemed more likely that the assassin was a fanatic from the same mold as the assassin who last September killed Nicaragua's Dictator Anastasio Somoza. But Castillo's friends moved quickly to head off any Red comeback. His wife, outwardly calm, ran straight from the murder scene to call Vice President Luis Arturo Gonzalez Lopez. At a dawn emergency session, Congress named affable Lawyer-Landowner Arturo Gonzalez Lopez provisional president to serve until elections are held within four months.

Reserves were called up, army troops swarmed the city, road blocks were erected and a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew declared. But Guatemala--for the time, at least --remained calm. At the National Palace, where the dead President lay in state, military-academy cadets stood guard while a three-block line of mourners filed past. President Eisenhower, who received Castillo Armas in the hospital in Denver and renewed the acquaintance while visiting Panama, called the death "a great loss to his own nation and to the entire free world. President Castillo Armas was a personal friend of mine." Ike announced that Major John Eisenhower will represent him at the funeral this week.

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