For Elections

"Full amnesty is hereby given to all citizens indicted, charged, convicted, detained, confined or exiled for political reasons, without any exceptions," said the single-sentence decree signed by President Victor Paz Estenssoro one day last week. At 2 o'clock the next morning, the iron gates of San Pedro jail in La Paz creaked open, and 300 political prisoners jostled their way out into the darkness, some carrying little violins and chess sets that they had carved with penknives during confinements of as long as three years. The most notable among the liberated men: Gustavo Stumpf, tall, blond leader of the right-wing Socialist Falange, and Guillermo Lora, bearded chief of the Trotskyite Revolutionary Workers Party.

The complete amnesty was a practical step toward holding general elections. As a two-way political maneuver it is supposed to 1) deprive the government's opponents of a major ground for crying fraud, and 2) encourage them to make a fair try at gaining power by the ballot rather than by plotting or violence. Stumpf accepted the measure in that spirit. "We are forgetting all that has happened between us and the government," he said. "From now on we shall fight the government party within the framework of the law."

Paz Estenssoro, taking power in a leftist revolution in 1952, nationalized the big tin mines and energetically pushed the state oil monopoly, formed in 1937 after an earlier government had forced out Standard Oil Co. of N.J. On the face of it, these moves made the chance of new foreign oil investment in Bolivia look dim indeed. Nonetheless, Paz Estenssoro made a hard-boiled decision that Bolivia needed foreign capital, and in 1955 enacted a liberal code for oil operators from abroad. Last week Pittsburgh's Gulf Oil Corp., first big operator to move in, signed a 40-year agreement to search for and produce petroleum in Bolivia.

Gulf's operation at Kuwait on the Persian Gulf makes it No. 2 (after Jersey Standard) among U.S. oil companies in world production. Company chiefs evidently concluded that the 1952 tin nationalization was a political necessity, and that Paz Estenssoro is now able to get on realistically with the development of the country. The exploration area granted to Gulf is--ironically enough--part of Jersey Standard's old concession.

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