Visit to the Old Country

Although Guatemala's Red-lining ex-President Jacobo Arbenz has never visited Switzerland, many a tie links him to that tight little European democracy. He is of Swiss descent on his father's side and still has relatives there. He chose Swiss banks to hold the plunder, reportedly $6,000,000, that came into his hands while he was President. And it was in Zurich that an Arbenz henchman last year negotiated the purchase of $10 million worth of Communist arms. If the President who almost delivered Guatemala to the Reds now wanted to visit Moscow headquarters to talk over the past and future, he could hardly find a more discreet door through the Iron Curtain than Switzerland. Last week, inevitably, Arbenz headed that way. In Mexico, where the former President has been living, there was speculation that when his official three-month "leave from exile" expired, Arbenz would be back primed with money and promises of Communist guns for a try at regaining power in Guatemala. The rumors were partly based on the fact that Arbenz has been conspiratorially busy; Mexico's government has repeatedly cautioned its numerous Guatemalan exiles to refrain from "political activity." Arbenz' arrogant refusal to do so has left a bad taste with many Mexicans; the leading daily Excelsior last week sourly cartooned him as a hen flying off and leaving a brood of chicks marked with the hammer and sickle. Stopping in Paris en route to Lausanne, he told reporters: "I am not renouncing politics. I will remain in politics all my life." But, mindful of the rumors, he cautiously added: "I have no political projects at the present."

One of the relatives Arbenz will doubtless see in Switzerland is his father's well-to-do brother Ernst Arbenz, and Ernst may talk to him like a Swiss uncle. A blind cheesemaker of Alstatten ("One doesn't have to be able to see to put the holes in cheese"), Ernst told reporters last week that he had written his nephew a letter of advice a few months before the President fell from power. "I told him he should shake off his Communist advisers," Ernst recalled. "But either he got annoyed or his Communist friends intercepted the letter, because neither I nor any other member of the family heard from him again." Reflected Uncle Ernst, who once lived in Guatemala: "I remember the boy well. One of the smartest. He could have done great honor to our name if he had only chosen his friends better."

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