Plots & Whispers

Turkey and Central America are unhappy lands despite their geographical advantages because they are in the hands of the Turks and the Central Americans.

--Napoleon III

If last week's turmoil was any indication, Central America was still an unhappy land.

Comic Opera. In Guatemala, the 1 1/2-year-old revolutionary government of Juan Jose Arevalo had fresh proof that implanting a democracy on inhospitable soil was far more complicated than toppling a dictator. Planters and merchants who resented middle-of-the-fence Arevalo's sops to labor had tried to buy up the army for a counterrevolution. The plot failed; 27 went to jail.

In Costa Rica, inflation and corruption had rumpled traditional democracy. Conflict with the coffee barons over social legislation had fanned the opposition. Result: just enough revolutionary gunplay (one dead, two wounded) to keep the troops in trim. If the 50,000-odd Nicaraguans now living in Costa Rica had joined last week's revolt, it would not have been comic opera.

Jungle Tyranny. The vagaries of U.S. policy, to whose tune the banana dictators dance, helped tyrants hang on. Last winter, when Spruille Braden's blasts against tyranny were loudest, Dictators Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and Tiburcio Carias Andino of Honduras behaved almost like gentlemen. Jail doors swung open, the press spoke up, elections were promised. Now rumor whispered that Bradenism was on the way out (vigorously denied in Washington last week) and the Strong Boys were strutting again.

Hondurans got the tipoff last month when Oppositionist Edmundo Pinto Mejia was arrested, then savagely beaten with the classic verga de toro (bull's pizzle). Newsmen hustling into Guatemala for safety last week reported a new "wave of terror"; Dictator Carias' jails were filling fast.

In Nicaragua, there was no sign yet that Somoza had lost his ability to out-trick the slow-witted opposition. He had ample reason to hang on. Even if the Government was broke, Somoza enterprises were booming. Public-works employes kept up the dictator's cattle ranches. The National Railway had just built him an ice plant. His latest haul: an $85,000 profit on surplus goods from the U.S. Navy's [former] Corinto base.

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