GUATEMALA: Showdown

In that inebriated, early-morning hour when a celebration teeters between ex tinction and new adventure, carousing officers of Guatemala’s ragged Liberation Army rolled merrily through the doors of La Locha, a much-favored Guatemala City bordello. Once inside, they discovered that half a dozen young military cadets had engaged the attentions of La Locha’s choicest residents. Waving pistols and machine guns, the Liberators dragged the unhappy cadets into the corridors, forced them to strip and dance an incongruous cancan. When the cadets were finally freed, they dashed off to the Eseuela Politecnica (Guatemala’s West Point), aroused their fellow cadets and told them of the latest indignity visited upon the regular army by the makeshift militia with which Colonel Castillo Armas seized power from Guatemala’s pro-Communist government five weeks ago.

The slapstick comedy at La Locha was the fuse which exploded an attempt at counterrevolution in Guatemala last week.

Elements of the regular army, increasingly resentful of the Liberation Army, quickly seized on the mortification of the cadets as an excuse to rise against the Castillo Armas junta. Two days of swaying, shifting combat caused almost as much bloodshed (29 killed, 91 wounded) as the original revolution. But when it was over, President Castillo Armas seemed to emerge more decisively in command than ever.

Hospital Siege. Several hours after the affair at La Locha, 80 boiling-mad cadets raced through the capital’s outskirts to the half-completed Roosevelt Hospital, where a battalion of Liberators lay encamped, and attacked. From the army base beside nearby Aurora airfield, regular officers quickly saw the chance they had been waiting for, rushed reinforcements to the cadets.

All that day, army grudge-settlers had a fiesta. Castillo Armas, caught far off base at a friend’s finca near Antigua, made it back to the capital tardily—and then only by leaving his car and skulking through ravines around an army roadblock. By dusk the army had forced him and the junta to agree to disband all irregular forces. Then the cadets and regular army soldiers marched the battered survivors of the anti-Communist Army of Liberation like P.W.s right through the capital’s Sixth Avenue to a train that carried them back to their old headquarters near the Honduran border. That night official communiques saluted “the glorious gesture of the gentlemen cadets,” and it was plain that the army thought it was on top.

Base Surrender. But at that point the balance of power shifted again. A small group of high officers led by Colonel EIfego Monzón, the army’s spokesman in the junta, felt that the regulars had gone too far. Dashing from barracks to bar racks, Monzón next day won pledges of loyalty to the junta from all except officers commanding one military base near the airfield. Castillo Armas also had an even stronger ally. For the first time, public opinion spoke out, revealing unexpectedly heavy support for Castillo Armas. Outraged by the brutal treatment of the Liberation forces, huge crowds marched to the palace to shout: “Down with the army! Death to the treacherous cadets!” University students went on strike. Market women milled about the military academy, shaking their fists at the cadets.

That afternoon, sending Mustangs and Thunderbolts from its six-plane air force to strafe the holdouts, the junta forced the surrender of the rebellious base and arrested its top officers. The army fell obediently silent. The President ordered his irregulars rearmed. Then, as if finally confident that he, after all, is the man in charge, Castillo Armas restored constitutional liberties which his junta had suspended, and moved from the rented side-street house he had occupied since the June victory and installed himself in the presidential palace.