Plots & Rumors

As jittery President Jacobo Arbenz saw it, every sign spelled plot. Volunteers reportedly were signing up in a "liberation army" gathering across the Honduran border under exiled Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. A retired air force colonel, pretending to check the engine of a sports plane, zoomed mysteriously off to El Salvador, landing in a meadow en route to pick up a friend. Independent newspapers were reporting the hemisphere's growing sentiment against Arbenz' Communist-coddling with a factual thoroughness that the Reds regarded as downright traitorous. One midnight last week, with pressure building up, Arbenz assembled his Cabinet, which decreed a 30-day state of emergency suspending all civil liberties.

Since the major constitutional guarantee, habeas corpus, had been no more than a poor joke for weeks in police-ridden Guatemala, the decree's biggest effect was on the opposition press. Cables were censored, chiefly for news of arrests and escapes into asylum; local papers--except the brashly Communist Tribuna Popular--were splashed with white space where items had been killed.

Revolution? The end of uncensored news reports at once heightened the tension. Popular movie houses were deserted, business went to pot. Most shops and stores languished; groceries and gasoline stations, on the other hand, were mobbed by citizens who momentarily expected a revolution and wanted to stock up. But the week's only reliably reported violence was the slaughter, by machete-swinging villagers, of three rural cops; other police in turn Tommy-gunned three peasants to death.

From the lack of legitimate news grew a crop of eye-popping rumors. The "entire air force," said one, had taken off to join Castillo Armas in Honduras. The army's chief of staff was dead or, alternatively, arrested. Wildest of all: 8,000 soldiers, led by Russian officers who had arrived in submarines, were dug in on the coast to fight off the U.S. Marines.

Civil War? The rumors' preoccupation with military affairs reflected a fear that anti-Communist army officers will eventually desert Arbenz and that he in turn will try to form armed militia units among the Communist-controlled unions of laborers and farmers, thereby bringing on a bloody civil war. Tribuna Popular published photographs of strapping farmhands over captions that said they would "take up arms if necessary to defend the fatherland against Yankee monopolists and interventionists." The threatening implication was clear: in a showdown, the pro-Communist regime will depend for survival on guns in the irresponsible hands of its most loyal supporters.

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