A Native Returns

"Nuts to Gabriel Gonzalez" screamed the posters slapped overnight on the plaster walls of La Serena (pop. 22,000). In his home town, President Gonzalez looked and blinked in astonishment. What kind of a welcome was this for the man whom Santiago had tumultuously acclaimed only a few days earlier as the conqueror of the Antarctic (TIME, March 15)?

He got a quick answer: La Serena's Communists were out to get back at Gonzalez Videla for his anti-Communist campaign. They did not stop with posters. At nearby Ovalle, the Communist mayor refused to receive the President, and with his party comrades acted so churlishly that Gonzalez refused to tell afterward exactly what did occur.

Gonzalez had not visited La Serena since he began his anti-Commie purge last October. Apparently he had forgotten how strong the party was in his native Norte Chico, a farming region that has long supplied beef, peaches and papayas for the markets of Chile. For over a year, Norte Chico has been without rain. Fruit has been withered, stunted. Beside the shrinking water holes, skinny cattle mill, weak and hungry. Said Gonzalez as he flew over bone-dry La Serena: "The fields and valleys of my province seem desolate."

For a quick answer to the drought, Gonzalez was stumped. He could not make it rain, and new irrigation projects proposed by farm leaders would at best be a long time coming. But he knew what to do about the Commies who had been thriving on Norte Chico's hard times. Before flying back to Santiago after last week's visit, he fired Ovalle's mayor and Commie officeholders in neighboring cities and towns. Then he proclaimed the whole region an emergency area and put it under military control.

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