A Vote for Order

Amid setbacks elsewhere in Latin America, democracy won a signal victory in Colombia. For four years President Alberto Lleras Camargo, a journalist and educator turned statesman, has toiled doggedly for stability, and for enough moderation of age-old political hatreds to permit his nation to haul itself out of the 19th century into the 20th. Next month his term as President ends. Lleras, a Liberal, is seeing to it that his office will be turned over to a Conservative, a man whose party he opposes, but whose right to peaceful succession* he firmly upholds.

The very same day as the Argentine elections, Colombia's voters went to the polls in congressional elections that served as a prelude to the presidential balloting next month. Extreme factions of the Conservative and Liberal parties, which were opposed to presidential alternation and the fifty-fifty rule, elected only 97 of 282 Congressmen between them. Winning in the center, with about 60% of the total vote, were moderate Liberals and Conservatives, united by Lleras.

The results boded well for the two parties' joint presidential candidate. Conservative Guillermo Leon Valencia, 52, who promises to continue the orderly reforms of Liberal President Lleras, which are beginning to produce results under the Alliance for Progress.

*To end the political feuding that has killed 300,000 people since World War II, Lleras put through a constitutional amendment splitting every political body, from Congress to town councils, fifty-fifty between Liberals and Conservatives. The presidency alternates. The Liberals took the first four-year term, the Conservatives get the second, followed by a repeat for each.

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