Struggle for Power

The "liberation era" of Carlos Castillo Armas, the rebel colonel who threw a pro-Communist regime out of power in 1954 only to die of an assassin's bullet last July, came crashing to an end in Guatemala last week. An election staged by Castillo's successors to keep the liberator's Nationalist Democratic Movement (M.D.N.) in office turned out to have been so patently rigged that not even the government tried to uphold it. Harnessing popular anger over the fraud, the opposition candidate, General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, 62, made a tumultuous bid to take power.

With some 500,000 Guatemalans voting, Ydigoras piled up a 3-to-1 margin over the government's candidate. Miguel Ortiz Passarelli, in the capital, where poll watchers were numerous. But he was swamped by the rural vote of laborers on government-owned plantations and Indians, who invariably back "el senor gobierno." Beaming Candidate Ortiz promptly tossed himself a champagne victory party.

"Rivers of Blood." Crying fraud, Ydigoras threatened that "rivers of blood would flow" if Ortiz were allowed to take office. That day thousands of people appeared before his headquarters shouting their rage. Said the general: "People of Guatemala! If they give it to the Italian [Italian-descended Ortiz], we shall march!" That evening a temporary coalition of Ydigoras' rightists and non-Communist leftists, needled by a few Reds, and all united only in opposition to the M.D.N., marched into Central Park in downtown , Guatemala City, brushed aside the police and set off the first riot.

The government replied by calling a 30-day state of siege, and charged Ydigoras with plotting in connivance with "Communist groups." Some 300 helmeted troops and cops, armed with Tommy guns and armored cars, deployed before the National Palace, but the raging mob formed again, and charged until driven off by tear gas and cracking rifles. A girl died of a bullet in the back of her head; downtown Guatemala City was littered with broken glass, tree limbs and burnt crates.

On the third day, as two men died in more fighting and a strike 'brought business to a halt, the army stepped in. First it asked the government to set aside the election. Then, after a nine-hour meeting of 240 top officers, it named a three-colonel junta to take over. The junta quickly promised new elections at the first opportunity.

Leftist Breakaway. Ydigoristas, who had started by protesting a rigged election, now wanted nothing less than total victory. They rattled the palace gates and screamed at the junta, "Resign!" But with the M.D.N. clearly defeated, the general's broad following was beginning to loose its ties. His leftist followers, breaking away, went to the palace and told the junta that they indeed wanted new elections, which they might well win. Ydigoras also made the pilgrimage to the junta, and with the U.S. air and military attaches sitting in at his request as "foreign observers," he stated his terms: an election recount that would void the Ortiz ballots.

The junta turned him down, and named Second Vice President Guillermo Flores Avendano to take over. Calling the last election "vitiated, because there was no full guarantee to the citizenry of the legitimate exercise of its rights," the junta promised a new "electoral event to normalize the political activities of the country."

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